Our proposal is to increase awareness of the importance of our local and global soundscapes and our role in their experience and design. As listeners, we are also responsible for the shape and beauty of our own soundscape. Therefore, we must open our ears.
Through workshops, performances, concerts, soundwalks and sound installations we intend to transform Viseu into an acoustically conscious city. For this time, it will be a special place of intersection between art, science and life.
Raquel Castro| 15h | Opening of the Listening Room and Ears to the City sound installations |
| … | Listening RoomMonday to Friday: 13h – 24hSaturday and Sunday 10h – 24h |
Ears to the City
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Soundwalks
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Interactive experience in situ
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Site-specific sound project
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| 10h |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 15h |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 21h30 |
Performance
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| 10h |
Ear cleaning workshop
This session will only occur if all vacancies are filled on the 12th. |
| 18h |
Concert
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| 10h30 |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 10h30 |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 19h | Welcome drink to the Invisible Places 2014 participants |
| 21h30 |
Documentary |
| 9h | Symposium Invisible Places 2014: Opening Session |
| 10h30 |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 18h00 |
Listening Performance
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| 18h30 |
Concert |
| 18h |
Masterclass
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| 21h |
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| 10h |
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| 11h |
Ear cleaning workshop
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| 15h |
Showcase
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| 16h30 |
Performance
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| 17h20 |
Screening
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| 18h30 |
Concert
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The Listening Room showcases a program of piers selected from the open call of Invisible Places / Sounding Cities. during nine days it will present more than 50 audio and audiovisual works, in a continuous program, in a space designed to provide a unique listening experience.
Local Sala Incubadora, Rua do Comércio 112
Schedule July 11 – July 20
MESAS is an urban intervention that promotes the relationship with everyday sound through indispensible pieces of furniture for the domestic, the professional and the playful in our lives – the table.Different uses and contexts determine the many variations in form; from dinning, to coffee tables, kitchen, garden, meeting, bar, side or game tables. This project, by artists Pedro Rebelo and Ricardo Jacinto was conceived for Rua Direita in Viseu and consists of a sequence of tables suspended throughout the street, whichreveal experiences and memories through sound.
The materiality, context and utility of each table articulate sonorities that include the manipulation of objects on their tops or the conversations happening around them, as well their impact on the soundscapes of the places in which they are situated.
The project makes audible these particular experiences through a set of sound installations associated with places such as the jeweller’s, the school, or the tailor’s.
LocalRua Direita
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
The Work Quartet brings together four major audio-visual projects by the artist Mikhail Karikis filmed in locations that range from an English coal mine, to a shell-fishery in a remote volcanic island in the North Pacific, to an impersonal office in London City and an imposing geothermal power station in Valle del Diavolo in Tuscany. Each film engages with a different community that is connected to a site of production or former manufacturing, and explores the role sound plays in creating a sense of collectivity and a professional identity while at the same time resonating each community’s socio-political, cultural and psychological circumstances generated by the effects of post-industrialization, automation, unemployment and censorship at the workplace. Created in collaboration with three generations of communities, Karikis’s Work Quartet asserts people’s connection with the site of work and their search for dignity through a profession, while evoking different possible, desired or imagined futures.
LocalMuseu do Tesouro da Sé
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
Starting from the sound archive of the streets Arco and Arrabalde, as well as the main square and surrounding area of Pavia River in the city of Viseu, Luís Antero creates a sound installation composed by field recordings made in these areas of the city. In his recordings, he searched for the sound dynamics of everyday life, the perpetual motion of sounds, but also the sounds of memory connected to these locations through the oral testimony of those who work here, or simply dwell. This sound installation reflects the social and urban identity of these ancient streets.
LocalCasa Sena, Rua do Arco
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
"Respiro" (Breath) is developed from the mapping of networks of urban relations, of residues and reverberative effects. Its modular structure recalls the apparent urban self-similarity, that conceals an accumulation of individual micro-variations articulated in a circuit of confrontations, dialogues and tensions from where a complex and dynamic composition emerges.
LocalTemporary exhibition room of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
The installation tries to give back life to the small yard of the cloister of Grão Vasco Museum. The sounds will be put out by small speakers that will play back power impulses to delay and reverb within the space. The sounds will interact with the spatial acoustics in the almost square-shaped space and will evoke a meditating atmosphere through the slow alteration of the pattern.
LocalSmall cloister of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
Parallel circles offers a parallel audio reality in real time that responds to the listener’s movements through the city. This interactive composition of forms and sounds works in harmony with the listener’s surroundings and the structure of each site. This project reimagines the city, enriching it with a creative, audible, sensory experience – a city that thrives on mobile satellite technology!
The project involves the placement of geometric shapes in open spaces such as parks, woods, and parking lots – spaces that are significant to the area. These shapes are generated using a programme we have developed and may be accessed through an iPhone application that is available free from the App Store. They will be generated by a series of geolocated points to form circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, straight lines, and a combination of these shapes that will blend in with the aesthetic organization of the area in which they are situated, reflecting its geometry, dialoguing with it, or offering a new formal proposition that contrasts with the existing one.
This project addresses environmental questions around ambient sound, atmosphere, tone, and the act of listening to city sounds in general. It has a certain utopic element, allowing the listener to reconfigure the city with a new audio reality, modifying his or her movements to create the sound texture of his or her journey. Defying urban geometry and producing a new order of sound, these geometric shapes offer a new way to experience the city!
LocalStreets of Viseu
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20
For more information, please contact the artists at etienne.legast@audiotopie.com and yannick.gueguen@audiotopie.com
Download the application at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audiotopie/id585745065?ls=1&mt=8
Field Frequency Flux is site specific radio art composition, transmitted on local FM radio frequency- Radio VFM94.6FMwith live in-situ micro local FM interventions. Performance experience is based on walking and in the same time in-situ listening to FM radio broadcast and surroundings sounds.
Field Frequency Flux presents a park as a space where to withdraw from the city’s hustle and bustle, overfilled with information, communication and other stimuli that pull us away from listening. In the park, one enters the silence and emptiness of a night. It is equipped with a radio receiver that translates and catches remote electromagnetic sound contents. During the walk, the intercepted messages merge with the sounds of the sleeping nature outside the urban area, which brings an individual toward an organic, earthly sound that contains a syntax very different from everyday language. In this intersection space, full of distant electromagnetic contents and atmospheric sounds of nature, a space for fantasy and for working with memories emerges, which brings about an original and intense experience.
Field Frequency Flux is based on everyday activity of walking and everyday sounds, which we often ignore because of an increased noise pollution and our daily routines. Through these unpretentious actions, a spectator is transformed into a ‘composer’ and ‘visual artist’ who reads and composes sound and space images.
LocalParque Aquilino Ribeiro and Radio VFM94.6FM, on entry point to be defined.
HorárioJuly 19, 9h00.
http://www.cona.si and http://www.radiocona.si
For reservations please contact the artists at brane@cona.si
Participants are invited to bring portable radios oroptional mobile phone with FM app and headphones.
Special thanks to Radio VFM.
A device.
The sound_WALK_studio is a real-time sound composition device for two walkers, a city, an iphone and a microphone.
While walking through an unknown territory with a participant (both with headphones plugged into the iphone), the artist listens, samples, loops and edits the surrounding sounds, creating during the walk a unique composition.
A game of influences.
The purpose of the proposition is to create a disruption of one’s sense of self and place by submerging the participant into multiple layers of sounds extracted in real-time from the surrounding elements – fragmentation and repetition – where there is much more going on that what appears to be. The device therefore aims at uncovering and activating hidden worlds, questioning how perceptions and discreet mythologies – low intensity interactions – are affecting and recombining the way the city is experienced.
The device modifies the sense of place and time. Where am I, when am I? are questions rooted in a practice involving, through the recombination and alteration of immediate sounds, a renewal of the attention to a familiar environment suddenly gone strange.
A local point of infinity.
By applying a pressure on a boarder – a contact point – where the relationship with the environment is active, what happens to this relationship? What kind of narratives and images are produced by the transformation of this relationship?
Now I am standing in a place, I know this place, or at least I think I know this place. But where is this place standing? What kind of long lasting connections have been established here? When I stand in this place where else might I be? What is it that lingers on from past and future interactions, events, memories? Eveything keeps moving and changing, everything has already changed, leaving faint traces of things to be. What residual part of these fragmented elements can we feel around us? From where do we stand? How do we aknowledge the interweaved network of forms that influence us? How do we take the quantum leap into other realms of existence? And where am I really standing right now if I can’t recognize my presence to the world? If I am standing upside down?
LocalStreets of Viseu
HorárioJuly 11 – July 20
For reservations please contact the artist at francois.sardi@gmail.com
Good Vibrations is a mobile listening kit that allows users to tap into of the least audible sounds of a city. With the use of three different types of microphone: a contact mic, a hydrophone and a probe mic, the user can tune in to subtle acoustic vibrations in the environment and explore the city's cracks and surfaces. A field guide for urban listening directs users to acoustic “points of interest.”
The mobile listening kits are custom-designed, featuring hand-made audio amplifier circuits inside hand-made digitally fabricated boxes. The microphones are also each hand-made. In addition to the mobile listening kits, an iPhone app was created to allow users to record their sounds with the kit and upload them to a remote server. These sounds are saved and displayed on a map for an interactive listening experience.
LocalStreets of Viseu
HorárioJuly 11 – July 20
For reservations please contact the artist at jdiedrick@gmail.com
What does it really means to be present in a place? Being Here / Estaraqui is a site-specific sound project created in the very particular space of Tipografía Minerva da Beira en Viseu. Many days of recordings and actions in the traditional printing works will lead to the creation of a singular and collective listening situation deeply embedded in the material, human, sound, spatial and affective experience of place. This project explores the ambiguous relation between fiction and reality (is reality a question of time? a question of space?), drawing a porous line on the border between what is and what could be.
LocalTipografia Minerva
ScheduleJuly 11 – July 20; Listening performance: July 18 – 18h
Workshop of initiation into field recording, providing participants with the theoretical and practical foundations of this universe. Development of the recording technique, from 4 different and complementary stages: Learning, Playing, Recording and Editing.
LocalLibrary of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 12 – 10h and 15h; July 13 – 10h*
Audience> 12 years old
* this session will only occur if all vacancies are filled on the 12th.
102 Years Out of Synch is a new audio-visual performance by Mikhail Karikis exploring the striking connections between the invention of sustainable energy production, the first Italian feature film, and the sonic imaginary of Hell. The work takes place at the Italian geothermal site of Larderello at Vale del Diavolo in Tuscany, where the first and still one of the largest electricity power plants in the world is based. Local legend claims that in the 14th Century Dante visited the site and drew inspiration from its arresting geology for his famous epic poem Inferno. Countless visual representations of Hell were inspired by the Inferno and unknowingly referenced the site of Larderello, including the homonymous first Italian feature film made in 1911 by Giuseppe de Liguoro. Both in the paintings of Hell and the first Italian feature however, the rich sonorities of Vale del Diabolo remained mute.
In his performance, Mikhail Karikis retraces Dante’s steps in an attempt to hear what the poet might have heard. The artist visits the site to record its volatile geothermal sounds and the rumbling industrial noises that mark the contemporary local soundscape. Combining newly filmed footage and fragments of the 1911 silent film, environmental sound recordings, narration and extended vocals, the performance 102 Years Out of Synch mines the strata of legend, industrial archaeology, subterranean resonance and the aural imaginary of Hell.
LocalGrand Cloister of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 12, 21h30
From the sound archive of the Ruas do Arco e Arrabalde and incursions by the weekly market and by Largo Major Leite Monteiro, in Viseu, Luís Antero will create a single and unique concert at Jardim da Ribeira, where the audience may lie down and enjoy the green space. The public will thus have the opportunity to comfortably watch a concert late afternoon, completely filled with the sights and sounds of these ancient arteries of the city, where it will also be used instruments as braguesa and electric guitar. It is an invitation to travel through the sounds that mark everyday life in this part of town. Laying down with open ears and with the eyes closed.
LocalPavia river bank
ScheduleJuly 13, 18h
The workshop will consist of a variety of exercises in interior and exterior spaces. Promotes interactive engagement among participants in order to increase the capacity of listening, learning how humans use the acoustics to sense the environment they inhabit and the importance of preserving the acoustic space.
LocalAlmeida Moreira Museum
ScheduleJuly 16, 17, 18 – 10h30
Audience7 – 12 years old
LocalGrão Vasco Hotel
ScheduleJuly 17, 19h
AudienceInvisible Places 2014 participants
LocalListening Room
ScheduleJuly 17, 21h30
Francisco López’s sound performances are something beyond a “normal” music concert. An intense and rich sonic immersive experience in the dark, with a surround multi-channel sound system and blindfolds provided for the audience. Virtual worlds of sound created out of a myriad of original sources collected all over the world -from rainforests and deserts to factories and buildings from multiple locations in the five continents- and mutated and evolved during years of studio work through the master compositional skills of López's universe.
The space is reconfigured with a multi-channel surround system around the audience, which is placed in seats arranged in concentric circles facing the outside array of speakers. The performer operates from the center of the space (not on stage), in order to be able to control live the sound as is heard by the audience.
LocalBig cloister of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 18, 18h30
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures on the stage of sound art and experimental music. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of more than 30 years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on profound listening to the world. He has performed hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings and sound installations in 70 countries all over the world, including the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), etc. His extensive catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with more than 100 international artists) has been published by more than 300 recording companies all over the world and he has received the honorific mention of the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) on four occasions.
LocalTemporary exhibition room of Grão Vasco Museum
ScheduleJuly 19 – 18h
“Radio Terramoto” is a radio transmission soundwalk research and art project based on the idea of listening to sound from a past historical event, in this case the Great Lisbon Earthquake on All Saints Day, 1755. This is an audience immersive event in which the original procession made up of the creators and audience followed a path from the Convento do Carmo down to the river in Lisbon, Portugal. For the Invisible Places: Sounding Cities Symposium, we will transpose the original sound from the Lisboa path to follow a similar path in Viseu (an area hardly effected by the earthquake and its following distasters), from the Sé to the Rio Pavia. Thus we bring in a transposition of not just time, but of geography as well.
The sound design is based on research on the earthquake, using documents of both first-hand experiences and the first seismic and “earthquake” proof architecture that came after what may be the largest earthquake recorded in history, which destroyed a quarter of the city, from 10,000 to 100,000 lived, and beget consequential tsunamis and fires. The creators walk with the audience bearing a transmitter, the audience carry radios and cell phones tuned into the specific frequency of the transmission.
The original “Radio Terramoto” soundwalk in Lisbon included hand-held sculptural octahedra created using a geometric framing system designed by Jake Dotson, assembled as a singular form approximating a Pombaline cage, the first modern earthquake resistant architecture. The radio transmitter, and other key electrical devices were suspended in these 1 foot3 (30 cm3) octahetra made of brightly colored sticks of wood held together with friction and tension. The large cage broke apart into the individual octahedra to aid in the transportation of equipment and in providing a visual wayfinding aide for the participants.
The project and research looks into the question, what can listening to the past reveal about the now, both in artistic practice and scientific research? The sound weaves between the present and the past, and it is from this experience that we are interested in researching. The project and research looks into the question, what can listening to the past reveal about the now, both in artistic practice and scientific research?
LocalIn front of the Viseu Sé
ScheduleJuly 20 – 09h45
Participants will meet in front of the Viseu Sé at 9:45. They are encouraged to bring radios or cellphones with a radio application to tune in.
For any questions, please contact mailecolbert@gmail.com
Following the line of thought of Murray Schafer, the proposal in "Silences that Sound" is to open children’s ears to the experimentation with variations of timbre, amplitude, melody, texture and rhythm of the various silences that surround us and are not muted. Improvisation and creativity are unavoidable practices in this experiment.
Local
ScheduleJuly 20, 11h
Audience3 – 6 years old
Adriana Sa is transdisciplinary artist, performer musician/composer. Designing and building the instruments is part of her creative process. Using digital and analogue, and often architecturally-scaled instruments with sensor technologies, Adriana has explored music as connected to light, movement, architecture, weather and social context. Currently, she explores how a moving image can be a reactive stage scene without distracting attention from the music. Aided by John Klima, she has been developing audio-visual 3D software which operates based on an acoustic zither input.
Adriana's work fluidly expanded her early education in music (Mendelsohn Hochshule fuer Musik. Leipzig, GDR), visual arts (Atelier Livre, António Arroio School, Fine Arts University, Lisbon, PT) and hypermedia design (Teacher Formation Course in Graphic Design for Hypermedia Systems, CNS, Lisbon). Between 1995 and 2009, she worked full-time on her artistic projects, with grants, supports and commissions. Then she was assistant professor in multimedia design at ESAD (Caldas da Rainha). Currently she is a PhD candidate in Arts and Computing at Goldsmiths (EAVI-Embodied Audio-Visual Interaction Group, Computing Department, University of London).
Adriana performed and exhibited in venues such as Calouste Gulbenkian, Culturgest,Serralves, Teatro Maria Matos (Pt), Experimental Intermedia Foundation, PS1/ MoMa (US), Caixa Forum, Arteleku (Sp), Institute of Contemporary Arts (UK), Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Jp); as well as in non-conventional contexts, such as a codfish-drying factory (Pt), a textile mill (UK) or a chapel (Pt). She has been invited to festivals such as LEM (Sp), Ultrasound (UK), Atlantic Waves (UK), Luzboa Biannual (Pt), xxxxx (UK), Sonorities (Ir), NIME – New Interfaces for Musical Expression (US) or Version Beta (Sw). Her artistic work has been funded by institutions such as Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Pt), Cultural Ministry (Pt), Serralves (Pt), Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Jp), Kirkless Media Center Huddersfield (UK), T-U-B-E (Gr), European CoDaCo Fund (EU), FLAD – Portuguese-American Foundation (US/Pt), Kampnagel (Gr) and Instituto Camões (Pt) among others. Her academic research is funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.
Adriana also tutored workshops (e.g. at AA – Architechtural Association (UK), FEUP – Engineering Faculty/Porto University or Coimbra University (Pt)), gave talks in conferences, and published several texts. Her scientific research has been published in Leonardo, Leonardo Transactions, Live Interfaces proceedings, XCOAX proceedings and NIME proceedings.
LocalListening Room
ScheduleJuly 20, 15h
Musician Sílvio Rosado and visualist Tiago Pereira create an audiovisual performance with recordings of musical practices and sound environments of a specific place. The project first builds a living archive of a local musical/sound identity that can be consulted and functions as memory. In the second phase, this archive/memory is deconstructed in a format that allows the community to look and listen to itself, to dance to its memories or to follow a story of images and sounds.
LocalListening Room
ScheduleJuly 20, 15h30
Keep an ear to the ground is an expanded performance that presents a set of strategies to experience place and sound through mapping/tagging, listening, recording and reminiscing. It aims to establish a shared reading of place and everyday life through recording and listening. The recordings, paired with visual interventions in the city, take place before the symposium, leading to a dialogue-presentation that extends the individual experiences of sound/place to a shared context
LocalListening Room
ScheduleJuly 20, 16h30
LocalListening Room
ScheduleShowcase: July 20, 15h00. Screening: July 20, 17h20.
Duration30 minutes.
The Springboard is a do-it-yourself instrument made from readily available materials: An amplified soundboard makes the vibrations of coil springs and a variety of other small and nonprecious objects audible. Thanks to a simple piezo contact microphone, the Springboard's humble constitution belies the richness of its sounds, a signature of the author’s activities in live and recorded works across many art disciplines. When played with cello bows and homemade friction mallets, Eric Leonardson produces extraordinary sounds that belie the humble origin of these materials.
LocalMisericórdia Church
ScheduleJuly 20, 18h30