Luuk Bouwman
Kim Cascone
Pierre Deruisseau
Renée Green
Azza El-Hassan
Tara Herbst & Nicolas Siepen
Emily Jacir
Els Opsomer
random_inc.
[rocher]~[sillon]
Star 2000
Ultra-red
Florian Schneider
Jeroen Van Der Stock
Stephen Vitiello
   
Luuk Bouwman  
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Luuk Bouwman graduated from the St. Joost Academy, (Breda, the Netherlands) in 2000, having specialized in audio-visual arts. His graduation projects were the "Criminorama of Darker Oss - 4000 years of senseless violence" - a miniature crime museum, and 'Huge Harry and the Institute of Artificial Art' - a documentary that suggested that from now on, art production should be automated. He also worked as a program maker for Waskracht!, a TV program of the Dutch broadcaster VPRO.
tropisms.org started as his personal videolog, an extended version of the conventional weblog that integrates streaming video-files with a time-based travel diary. In the last year, he traveled through South-America for 6 months with a camera and laptop.
Tropisms 2, that is currently being developed, will be the collective videolog of an international group of young filmmakers.

http://www.tropisms.org
   
Kim Cascone  
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Kim Cascone has a long history involving electronic music: he received his formal training in electronic music at the Berklee College of Music in the early 1970's, and in 1976 continued his studies with Dana McCurdy at the New School in New York City. In the 1980's, after moving to San Francisco and gaining experience as an audio technician, Cascone worked with David Lynch as Assistant Music Editor on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart. Cascone left the film industry in 1991 to concentrate on Silent Records, a label that he founded in 1986, transforming it into the U.S.'s premier electronic music label. At the height of Silent's success, he sold the company in early 1996 to pursue a career as a sound designer and went to work for Thomas Dolby's company Headspace as a sound designer and composer. After a two year stint at Headspace he began working for Staccato Systems as the Director of Content where he oversaw the design of new sounds for games using algorithmic synthesis. Since 1980, Kim has released more than 15 albums of electronic music and has worked/performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Tony Conrad, Scanner, Ikue Mori, and Pauline Oliveros among others.
Cascone was one of of the co-founders of the microsound list (http://www.microsound.org) and has written for Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Artbyte Magazine and Parachute Journal.

http://www.anechoicmedia.com

   
Pierre Deruisseau  
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Pierre Deruisseau is a soundscape artist, promotor of a cycle of new music concerts ("assiette", at Ferme du biéreau) and a psychologist working presently with refugees victims of political violence. His 'Madeleine'-like sound pieces evoke the mechanisms of memory and the way the unconscious reworks sounds stemming from different moments and places in time. Composing usually with audio clips from movies, field recordings, voices and samples, he now will present a new piece entirely constructed from sounds out of documentaries on violent struggles and conflicts in modern history. Through filtering, processing and sampled loops, his arrangements aim at the construction of an inner soundscape rather than at the reproduction of location sounds from the audio track . The composition questions the link between violence and softness, and the possible closeness of those two extremes.

http://www.fermedubiereau.be.tf
   
Renée Green  
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Renée Green has lived and worked in New York and Vienna. She is now based in Santa Barabara. All her projects relate to what she calls "cultural translation," that is, how we negotiate cultural differences based on time, distance, and visual perception. Green addresses these issues through the international mass media of art, film, and music, looking especially at the structures of projection, identification, imagining, and fictional narrative.
When one speaks today of "global culture", this is usually taken to mean a media commercial context steering transnational corporations in a constant movement of expansion. It rarely comes into view that beneath this "corporative" level, a network of "unofficial" contacts and meetings is constantly being woven. The electronic music of the last ten years, as diverse as it may be, represents an epitome of these kinds of parallel and often counter moments of globalization. During a series of visits to Barcelona during 1999, Green began work on 'WaveLinks', a multiform work in progress.
"Wavelinks" tells of these opposite movements based on concrete starting and final material: electronically generated sound and its diverse - cultural, social, political - resonance levels.
The multimedium aspect of this project allows her to raise critical questions about many types of perception. She asks, for example, how does sound circulate amid other forms of circulation? How is aural attention managed, and how is this process disrupted? What are the limits of aural perception, and how we are affected by sound outside of us and in our heads and bodies? Finally, how are our physical, emotional, and intellectual relations to sound and images constituted?
The video 'Sonic Activism' is part of Wavelinks and gathers interviews with Diedrich Diedrichsen, Greg Tate, Ultra-red, a.o.

http://freeagentmedia.net
   
Azza El-Hassan  
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Palestinian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan (1971-) grew up in Lebanon and Jordan and moved to Ramallah in 1996. Her family was forced to flee Palestine in 1948. In 1996 the director returned to the West Bank town of Ramallah on a tourist visa and has stayed ever since. She holds an MA from Goldsmith College (London) in Television Documentary Film. Her films include 'The Place', 'Sinbad is a She', 'Title Deed from Moses', 'Arab Women Speak Out'.
'News Time' (2001) tells a personal narrative of the impact of the current intifadah (uprising) on neighbourhood life in Ramallah. Besides Azza herself, the film features her landlord and his wife, Abu Khalil and Umm Khalil, and four neighbourhood kids - Nidal, Kifah, Shadi and Fadi. Whilst commemorating the grim anniversary of the second intifadah, 'News Time' tries to negotiate and voice a much needed subject position for the Palestinian people. Azza's most recent film, '3 cm. Less' investigates further on the phenomenon of the 'invisible hunger'. Due to micronutritional shortage UN-statistics show that Palestinian children are three centimeters shorter than the preceding generation.
   
Tara Herbst & Nicolas Siepen  
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Tara Herbst and Nicolas Siepen are part of b_books, a berlin based bookshop, publishing house, film-production and workspace funded in 1986. Under the Titel "ruin(s) of representation" they are working together on different Films. Actually, they are working on the projects: "EMPIRE, beyond boom an crash" and "assembly international (montage)". As part of a collective they also producing a theoretical soap called "ping pong d'amour".
'Moi je suis au mois de mai' (Berlin 2000/2001), the film that will be presented during [sonic]square #7 is an experimental group-project. The film is dealing with the question of the immanent relations of the historical patterns of representation and the actual possibilities for social and artistic open source production in terms of revolutionary movements and ideas coming from MAI 68.
In this sense "MOI (AUSSI) JE SUIS AU MOIS DE MAI" was an invitation to everyone: to shoot (his or her) images for a collective film about the collective - being part of it and yet not dissimulating the necessary failure of every Utopia due to generalised solitude in the ruin(s) of representation.


http://www.txt.de/b_books/
   
Emily Jacir  
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Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist living in New York and Palestine. Jacirs visual art has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibition in the US, Slovenia, Denmark, Canada, Italy, Germany, Austria and France. She has a Masters degree in Fine Arts, and in 1998, she participated in the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program. Jacir is the curator of the '2002 Palestine International Video Festival, a new video festival taking place in Palestine. Its first edition showcased an international collection of contemporary video art, installations, and documentaries from over 28 different countries. During the festival, the works were installed in various independent galleries and cultural centers, be screened on local television stations and theaters, and be made permanently available in a public archive at Birzeit University. The festival is an attempt to breach the cultural and intellectual isolation of the Palestinian people brought about by the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.


   
Els Opsomer  
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Els Opsomer is an an artist, graphic designer, former artist-in-residence at Rijksacademie Amsterdam [1996-1998] and laureate of the Jeune Peinture Belge [E. Langui Award, 1997]. She lives and works in Brussels.
Her artwork includes:
- 'shades of survival/around me', >Zugewinngemeinschaft< 2002 - 5 Werkleitz Biennale, Germany
- Rescue kit for # Brussels, Mobile, Parcours d'artistes, 2002 - Brussels
- (they say this is the) place, KFZ, 2002 - Antwerpen, Belgium
- messages for my friends O3: SLIGHTLY OUT OF BALANCE _ over and over again [2000, Brussel, in: L'invitation à la ville/ Uitnodiging aan de stad, bruxelles/brussel 2000]
- never enough/longing-2000 [2000, Brussel, in: Brussels by Light, KBC Galerie]
- as ever/moving [1999, Graz, in: [art.image], 4 Biennial on Media and Architecture Graz]
- bad mood repair kit III - try to change grey into orange [1999, Oostende, Galerie R53]
- Escape Velocity [with Christine Desmedt, Germaine Kruip and Vincent Malstaf, 1998]
- desire/at last [1997, Brussels, E. Langui Award, in: Jeune Peinture Belge, Paleis voor Schone Kunsten]

http://www.moving-art-studio.com/texts/radio_2.shtml
http://www.moving-art-studio.com/friends/index.html
http://www.moving-art-studio.com/september/radio/QRA.html
www.mondophrenetic.com
   
random_inc.  
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random_inc. is Sebastian Meissner´s name for his "Jerusalem"-project. Meissner is a well-known figure in the Force Inc./ Mille Plateaux universe, having previously released the glitch-fest Selected Random Works (under the name Random Industries) for Ritornell, and having released several other disks on the many Force Inc. labels as member of the techno unit, Autopoieses (together with Ekkehard Ehlers). "Jerusalem: Tales outside the framework of orthodoxy" was an experiment with music of jewish and arabic origin and at the same time was a record about the divided city of Jerusalem. Sebastian Meissner thus entered a highly politicized terrain and as one of the very few artists in the field of electronica demonstrated that it is possible to address to recent political issues with electronic music. With "Walking in Jerusalem", Meissner shifted the focus from spatial and cultural division to the indepentednt charecters of the single quarters of the city. Out of the dual City emerged a number of small Jerusalems. Several other artists working in the field of experimental electronica, like Ultra Red, Dub Taylor or Electric Birds contributed to the project with their own interpretations of the source material. Sebastian Meissner in 2002 took part at the "Frequenzen [Hz]" soundart exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a.M.
Apart from his concert, random_inc will also present his installation' Walking in Jerusalem: Pirate Radio Stations' featuring Ran Slavin & Eran Sachs.

http://www.mille-plateaux.net/mp/artists/random_inc/random_inc.html

   
[rocher]~[sillon]  
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[rocher]~[sillon]
Geographer and architect Philippe Delvosalle considers himself as a middle-man for emotions. First, he was film curator at the Brussels Cinémathèque. Now, he is supervising the video and dvd collection of independent documentaries for the Médiathèque de la Communauté française de Belgique. He is radio maker, concert promotor and webzine editor for all mutinous and mutant music.


www.brdf.net
   
Star 2000  
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‘A crazy country is a good place to experiment’, says Raed Andoni, and he started his very own film production company. Star 2000 has its headquarters in Ramallah, administrative and cultural centre of the Palestinian West Bank. Since Andoni himself lives in Bethlehem – a 20 km. ride from his office – things can get complicated from time to time. To go home he has to disguise the company car as a TV-car with seemingly diplomatic licence plates in order to pass the checkpoints. Whenever there is a curfew, more often than not, he stays in Ramallah and shares the office as a hotel with the other employees.
These everyday teasings of the Israeli forces are shown in Star 2000 documentaries like ’Challenge’. Unspectacular events that complicate live and work in Palestine and that are never shown here. Or like in ‘Number zero’, the film Saed Andoni, Raed’s brother, made on his return from film school in London, when he got stuck during the curfew in his favourite barbershop in Bethlehem.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/578/cu1.htm
http://www.imarabe.org/temp/films/biennale6/selection/films/gp-cinepales/doc/numero-zero.html

   
Ultra-red  
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Founded in 1994, Ultra-red are audio activists producing radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations and public actions, or public space occupations (PS/o). The group's work radicalizes the conventions of electro-acoustic and ambient music to explore acoustic space as enunciative of social relations. With a fluid membership determined by collaborations between electronic musicians and grass-roots political groups, Ultra-red has developed projects around a variety of urban ambiences including needle exchange (Soundtrax, 1996), public sex (Second Nature, 1999), public housing (Structural Adjustments, 2000), issues around globalization (Value System, work in progress) and labor. Ultra-red have released CDs and albums on Therre Thaemlitz´s Comatonse Recordings in Oakland, California and Mille Plateaux in Frankfurt, Germany.

http://www.comatonse.com/ultrared/
   
Florian Schneider  
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Florian Schneider is working as author, net activist, film maker and movie producer. He is a member of n.s.i.a.m.p., which is a small group of activists, artists, filmmakers, fotographers from Germany and abroad. They have organised [cross the border] at the Hybrid WorkSpace of the Documenta X in Kassel. Their central political struggle is to support migrants and refugees, documented or undocumented, in their fights for the right to live, where they like and how they like. Over the last years Schneider is concentrating on the question, how communicational leadership and dominant positions can be attacked and undermined by a practical criticism of borders and networks. He is co-organisor of the 'No One is Illegal' and the 'Cross the Border' campaigns as well as of the 'Was Tun?' project, an digital information platform for contemporary aktivism and transnational networks of protest. His recent video documentary 'A World to Invent' explores the ideas of four philosophers (a.o. Antonio Negri and Michael Hart) on antiglobalism.
http://www.wastun.org/
   
Jeroen Van Der Stock  
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Jeroen Van der Stock likes cultures others than his own as well as
low-budget image-making. He always works with footage from abroad that he
shot himself during travel. He strictly uses natural light, direct sound and
non-professional actors. 'I don't like XL-scale nor wasting', he says', 'A
forest is as suited for a film-spot as a desert for a penguin.' The works he
presents at [sonic]square#7 come out of his four years of film studies at
the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel. These five separate works (3 screenings,
1 video installation and 1 photo print) will be installed in one space.

'Get Up and Visit the Promised Land' (1999, S8, 15 min.).
A subjective-abstract film diary/essay on a trip through Israel. The cast
includes Elijah the Prophet, an American-Jewish sniper, a Japanes tourist
and a Turkish woman.

'People's Daily', (2001, video, 59 min.)
Scenes out of daily life in three different locations: India, Japan and the
Middle-East. A contemplation of both the simplicity and complexity of
everyday existence.

'L'Observateur 31.08.2001' (2002, 4 tv-monitors and a newspaper clip)
Filmed observations of a solo musician, a quartet of percussionists, a
tv-crew and two football teams, all in Burkina Fasso, combined with a clip
from the local 'L'Observateur' newspaper from the same day. On the personal
experience of cool communication in West-Africa.

'Untitled' (2002, S8 loop)
A ritual between a man and a woman that involves a handicap, a fishing line,
bait, lipstick and a cooked octopus.

'Untitled' (2002, photo print)
A portrait also inspired by the sexual meanings of the octopus in 18th
century Japan.

   
Stephen Vitiello  
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Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. Since 1988 he has collaborated with musicians, visual artists and choreographers, including Dara Birnbaum, Tetsu Inoue, John Jasperse, Joan Jeanrenaud, Rebecca Moore, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Scanner, Yasunao Tone, Frances-Marie Uitti.
Recent exhibitions include "BitStreams," at the Whitney Museum of American Art, "Greater New York" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, and a solo exhibition at the Texas Gallery, Houston, TX. Additional exhibition participation includes Postmasters Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon. In 1999, Vitiello held a 6-month WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. The residency resulted in a site-specific sound installation. This project was awarded a "Radio/Sound Art Fellowship" from the Jerome Foundation.
New media productions include work for the internet, Sound Archive 7.01-7.31.01 for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with The Walker Art Center and ZKM and Tetrasomia, for the Dia Center for the Arts. In July, 2000, Dia Center for the Arts published the CD-ROM Fantastic Prayers, a collaborative work with artist Tony Oursler and writer Constance DeJong.
Past performances include Engine 27, NYC with Frances-Marie Uitti, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris with Yasunao Tone, and participation in per/Son, a concert series of solo and collaborative pieces also featuring Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, Frances Marie-Uitti and Andres Bosshard. The event was organized by the Kunsthochschule Fur Medientechnologie, Koln, and broadcast by WDR radio's Studio Akustische Kunst program.
In addition to music based work, Vitiello directed the videos Nam June Paik: SeOUL NyMAx Performance, 1997 - Dress Rehearsal and The Last Ten Minutes and Nam June Paik: Two Piano Concerts 1994/1995. He also produced the audio CD, Nam June Paik: Works 1958-1979 (Sub Rosa).
As a Media Curator, he curated the Sound Art component to the Whitney Museum's exhibition The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000 and Young and Restless a video program for the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
   
  [sonic]square is a co-production by SQUARE vzw, Kaaitheater and the City of Brussels.