by Doron Sadja

‘Losing Site Of Time’ is a sound and light installation that explores the speed of sound using the expansive hallway at Catalyst. With a speaker and high powered LED light placed at each end of the hallway, a loud burst of synchronized sound and light flashes periodically at each end. While light travels at a mind bending 299,792,458 meters per second, sound is quite slow - at roughly 343 meters per second. This discrepancy is imperceptible at short distances, but with the extreme length of the hallway at Catalyst, sound and light become desynchronized. Beyond demonstrating the slowness of sound, the work investigates the effect that architectural material and space have on sound. While the light passes down the hallway unfiltered, the sound becomes blurred and transformed - absorbing the architectural imprint as it reverberates down the hallway. The resulting composition is a collaboration between sound, space, light, and time.

/// About the artist

Doron Sadja is an artist, instrument designer, and educator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Although each of Sadja’s works are striking in their singular and focused approach, his output is diverse: spanning everything from 250 speaker multichannel compositions to kinetic sculptures, experimental noise making instruments, string orchestra works, and large scale immersive sound and light environments inspired by auditory and visual phenomena.

by Olívia Mamberti and Maya Rain

Oneiro-Hiraeth (Welsh); dreaming of a home that never was.

An audio-visual experience exploring the dichotomy between Utopia Vs Dystopia. The installation follows an immersive storyline, featuring Olívia's stunning vocals and Maya's sheer range of music production and sound design experience, while being perfectly complemented with colourful and dynamic visual experiences.

Oneiro-Hiraeth is the winner of this year's Interface competition, where students from Catalyst Berlin are paired with students from Spirit Studios in Manchester, UK, to produce a unique creative project entirely remotely.

/// About the artists

Olívia Mamberti is a 20 year old Berlin based singer-songwriter, film composer and video maker from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her works can be characterised by the experimental blend of audio and visuals. She came to study Music Production and Sound Engineering at Catalyst Institute in 2019.

Maya Rain (she/they) is a 21 year old vocalist, composer and sound designer. She began in music production, producing bedroom pop-style tracks, and has now expanded into scoring short films and exploring vocal manipulation. Her style is reminiscent of artists such as Radiohead and Submotion Orchestra, blending electronic and orchestral instruments seamlessly, often playing with multiple layers, building a plethora of harmonies, melodies and sound fx to create expansive atmospheres.

by Giovanni De Benedetto & Stefano Menion Ferrari

In an ever more digitalized and technological world, the emotional features that differentiate human beings to algorithms can shift the current paradigm from the dystopia we are living in to the utopia we hope for in our future. During the last 12 years, De Benedetto has created what he calls the Augmented Klecksography Paintings (AKPs), developing a creative process that involves action-painting, photography and digital post-production. PREMATURE is the project that includes all the AKPs produced with this process, where the artworks speak directly to the subconscious of the beholders. The installation will be a video collection of the PREMATURE NFTs*, where the original static images take motion to become alive, and the textures are even more augmented. Stefano Menion Ferrari will provide an original soundtrack to ease the visitors to dive into the magma of this alien symmetric world. 

*Some NFTs are already minted, while others will be created for Signals Festival and minted in the Blockchain in the days of the festival.

/// About the artists

Giovanni De Benedetto is a Klecksography artist who combines action-painting, photography, and digital post-production at once, creating what he calls the Augmented Klecksography Paintings (AKPs). Starting from 2012, he took part in several solo and collective exhibitions with his project PREMATURE, exhibiting in cities like Venice, Paris, Miami Beach, and Berlin. His PREMATURE project has gained several publications in magazines and blogs like Art Market Magazine, Al-Tiba9, and Contemporary Art Curators to name a few. De Benedetto is represented by Art-Preview.

Stefano Menion Ferrari is a guitarist, producer and composer. His music brings together visionary electronics with glitch, ambient and post-rock influences. Ferrari has recently collaborated and composed music for and with several artists, including Tómas Saraceno (Arachnophilia Project - 2021 New Year Eve), Claudio PRC (The Abyss Within Us duo), Sahar Homami (IMMINENCE live performance).

by Gabriela Prochazka

Sensory test is a video installation loop. Get your hearing and visual perception calibrated and tested. Please note: side effects of the show could include anxiety and vertigo. Hope you will feel good though!

/// About the artist

Gabriela Prochazka is a multimedia artist with a focus on light art. Her work had been exhibited at galleries, theatres, during AV performances in clubs, venues and new media art festivals. She is an avid member of Prague's Lunchmeat studio & Lunchmeat Festival.

by Felipe Vareschi & Giorgio Cattaneo

‘The Sensory Totem’ is an interactive multimedia installation that pushes audiences to communicate with the invisible network of electric fields generated by the technology that surrounds us. The installation relies entirely on your participation and thus will develop a unique form every time you interact with it. Bring your own electronic device, and create meaningful connections with the invisible space between you and your electronics!

/// About the artists

Felipe Vareschi is an experimental electronic musician and performer currently based in Berlin. Their music explores the relationship between people and objects, with a particular focus on the interactions between individuals, technology and nature. 

Giorgio Cattaneo is a composer and sound designer with a strong focus on electronic psychedelic music also appearing under the aliases Oneirosaurus and Jackie Changa. Giorgio harnesses the immediacy and impermanence of sound to connect audiences and to create novel experiences made possible by technology-mediated sound production.

by Gina Lo

Sonic Sauna is a spatial sound installation that guides a sound experience by depriving one sense (sight) while heightening some of the others (smell, hearing). Inspired by the artist's time spent in the wilderness on an island in Southern Cambodia, the theme of this space explores the triangle system of the relationship between the environment - ambience - human. Using a blend of field recordings, natural ambience, modular synth and vocals, the composition is a sonic improvisation focusing on the timbre, space, and patterns appearance, experimenting with the distorted reality of time in relation to nature and modern life.

/// About the artist

Gina Lo is a Berlin-based experimental sound artist and performer. In the current research of her projects, she explores the perceptual triangle relationship between environment - ambience - human through her music and sound installation. Her music is made of electroacoustic improvisation with a blend of field recording, modular synth, microphones and abstract vocals. Through noisy and hypnotic soundscapes, she takes her listeners to places that lie beyond ordinary human experiences.

by Benjamin Bacon

‘Tanz im Auge’ is an installation centered on the nature of human movement and the way it's perceived by technology. In this case, the still figure of a mannequin is gazed upon by a computer vision tracking system. The system can detect and trace the humanoid skeleton, but it does not expect the figure to remain lifelessly still. Through this process, the noise and errors of the computer vision display a twitching/dancing skeleton on the screen while the mannequin figure it's viewing remains still. 

/// About the artist

Benjamin Bacon is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. Currently he serves as the programme lead of the first year of the Catalyst Institute's Electronic Music programme. He is also a PhD researcher as a member of the Technische Universität's Autiokommunikation Group. He has performed and presented his work across North America and Europe at various institutions including CIRMMT, IRCAM, and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.