Forma productions January – March 2008. Click For Infos.
After an exciting and successful year of international programme activity during 2007, we’re delighted to announce details of our forthcoming projects for Spring 2008.
Please find a press release attached with full details of all productions listed below.
We are producing two major projects to be presented at AV Festival 08, in North East England. These include new commissions from award winning sound artist Chris Watson and British artist Marcus Coates, offering unusual and powerful encounters with broadcast material.
Ryoji Ikeda presents a first solo exhibition in Japan at YCAM in March 08, featuring a major new installation as well as existing work from his datamatics series.
Now online is Kevin Carter’s Landscape/Portrait project, an interactive website challenging official statistical data and stereotypes of UK communities and their inhabitants. The site now hosts over 200 video self–portraits and invites audiences in the UK to search for a postcode stereotype, post comments and create their own video self–portrait.
We also look forward to announcing in the New Year further details of our international programme for Summer and Autumn 2008. Projects include solo exhibitions of Australian artist Lynette Wallworth’s work in Europe and the US, major presentations of Ikeda’s installation works in Europe, the launch of a new collaborative film project by Gina Czarnecki, as well as further touring of the Fennesz/Charles Atlas concert piece and Ikeda’s datamatics [ver.2.0] to major venues and festivals across the globe.
Forthcoming
A series of publicly sited audio works bring unexpected listening experiences to Middlesbrough town centre
as part of AV Festival 08, UK
Chris Watson recreates the sonic environment of the South American rainforest in a major new work
for AV Festival 08, UK
Ryoji Ikeda presents his premiere solo exhibition in Japan at Yamaguchi Center for Arts, JP
Screenings of award–winning film Nascent by Gina Czarnecki at Sydney Opera House, part of the Dance Film programme for the Sydney Festival, AU
New tour dates
Ryoji Ikeda exhibits his audiovisual installation data.tron
at Guangdong Museum of Art, CN
Now online
Kevin Carter’s website Landscape/Portrait now holds over 200 video self–portraits, challenging official stereotypes
of UK communities and their inhabitants
Now showing
Mike Stubbs’ film Cultural Quarter in group show
at South Hill Park, Bracknell, UK
NOW HEAR THIS
28 Feb – 8 Mar Various public spaces, Middlesbrough, UK
Forma is working with AV Festival 08 to commission a series of site-specific audio works to be presented in public spaces across Middlesbrough as part of this year’s festival, which explores the theme of broadcast.
Encompassing a series of new commissions, Now Hear This features audio works by artists selected for their various interests in the complex relationships between sound, space and location.
Featuring work by British artists Marcus Coates and Zoe Irvine, projects will adopt diverse modes of broadcast and public address, offering a range of unusual listening experiences and unexpected sonic interventions into our everyday urban environment.
Curated and produced by Forma
Commissioned by AV Festival 08
CHRIS WATSON – WHISPERING IN THE LEAVES
29 Feb – 9 Mar Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, UK
6 Mar Live performance
Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, UK
As part of AV Festival 08, sound recordist and artist Chris Watson will produce a major new work that recreates the sonic environment of the South American Rainforest, within the enclosed botanical environment of Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.
Watson is renowned for both his early pioneering experimental music practice as founding member of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio, and his award–winning sound recording work with David Attenborough on several BBC TV Wildlife series, including the Life of Mammals and the Life of Birds.
For AV Festival 08, Watson creates a new sound installation derived from his on–location recordings in Central and South America of the extraordinary dawn and dusk choruses of these tropical rainforests. Diffused in surround sound through the tropical foliage of the enclosed botanical environment of the Winter Gardens, which is home to over 2,000 flowers and plants, his work demonstrates the remarkable potential for broadcast material to transport us to faraway, often inaccessible and magical environments.
Live performance, Thursday 6 March, 20:30
Chris Watson will perform a live sound mix in which audio recording of a three or four–hour period across late afternoon, sunset and into the night will be compressed into around twenty minutes, taking audiences on an intense auditory narrative into the unknown and foreboding territory of the rainforest at night.
Produced by Forma
Commissioned by AV Festival 08 and Forma
RYOJI IKEDA – DATAMATICS [SOLO EXHIBITION]
1 Mar – 25 May Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, JP
For his first solo exhibition in Japan, renowned electronic composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda presents new and existing works from his datamatics series.
In the artist’s work, music, time and space are shaped by mathematical methods as Ikeda explores sound and vision as sensation, pulling apart their physical properties to reveal their complex relationships with human perception.
The datamatics series is a long-term programme of moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that take data as their theme and material, exploring the ways in which abstracted views of reality – data – are used to encode, understand and control the world.
This solo exhibition presents the recent works data.film [nº1-a] and data.tron, alongside a major new installation commissioned by YCAM, entitled test pattern [nº1]. The exhibition opens with a live performance of Ikeda’s critically acclaimed concert piece datamatics [ver.2.0].
GINA CZARNECKI – NASCENT
5 – 26 Jan Dance Screen Programme
Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, AU
Nascent is a visual and visceral journey through and about being.
In creating the piece, British artist Gina Czarnecki worked with raw footage of improvised and choreographed performance by Australian Dance Theatre dancers, applying compositional techniques in the postproduction stage to create a stunning hybrid of visual art, experimental media, technology and dance. Fennesz provides a powerful soundtrack. His digital processing of analogue source sound echoes Czarnecki’s treatment of the image.
As part of Sydney Festival 2008, Nascent is screened in the Dance Screen programme at the Sydney Opera House, alongside a series of artists’ collaborations with Australian choreographers, dancers and filmmakers.
Produced by Forma and Australian Dance Theatre
Commissioned by Forma and Adelaide Film Festival
RYOJI IKEDA – DATA.TRON [PROTOTYPE]
25 Dec – 20 Jan Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, CN
Ryoji Ikeda exhibits his recent audiovisual installation data.tron for the group show Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan.
Ikeda presents with mathematical precision a vast sea of data–derived imagery. Both the scale and intensity of data.tron invite total immersion in this work.
Co–produced by Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains
and Forma
KEVIN CARTER – LANDSCAPE PORTRAIT
Ongoing online project
Launched in October 2007, as part of Dott 07, Landscape/Portrait is an ongoing online project, created by artist Kevin Carter, which challenges official statistics in order to create a new and unique portrait of UK communities.
Initially presented in North East England to create an alternative portrait of this region, the website now holds over 200 video portraits, has attracted over 10,000 visitors, and invites anyone with a UK postcode to search for their stereotype and create their own video self-portrait.
Landscape/Portrait is a collaboration between artist Kevin Carter, Media 19 and University of Teesside.
Produced by Forma
Commissioned by Dott 07
MIKE STUBBS – CUTURAL QUARTER
30 Nov – 20 Jan Surveillance | Digital Media Centre
South Park Hill Arts Centre, Bracknell, UK
Cultural Quarter presents the relationships of observation in the city to its citizens, whilst begging ethical questions about surveillance, the gaze and human behaviour.
Casting a precise and pertinent eye on a daily urban reality in an unspecified British suburb, the short film blends social realism and political awareness with an acute emotional sensibility.
Produced by Forma
