Performative Encounter

Bodyworking the soundworld – collective strategies for immersive sonic experience (SEVERAL LOCATIONS, 2021-2022)

| Eduardo Abrantes

Bodyworking the soundworld is a collective exploration of the extended embodiment of our presences in acoustic space. It is about the play of resonance, the dynamics of call and response, the mutual engagement through movement, micro and macro-rhythms and utterance patterns. It is negotiated through improvisation in real-time, so that although I provide a few performative guidelines, the goal is a flat structure towards immersion and shared ownership. It is meant as an evolving and generative (echo)system.

As a sound artist I usually work with technological interfaces, as simple as a recorder and a microphone, or as complex as editing, processing, streaming, coding, and spatial design. Yet, what propels my practice is the constantly evolving sonic experience of bodily navigating the soundworld, and this requires no tech at all. It is grounded on aurally-driven proprioception and extended collective kinaesthesia – on bodies in motion, on listening to spaces and to each other, on a performative playful of way of interacting with and through sound.

This piece has been deployed as a performative-workshop in different locations, usually in an academic setting, like a an international conference or a seminar, often in the field of ecological humanities, where it is meant to propose a contrast to the more strict knowledge performance approaches accepted at these environments.

At the 15th NOFOD (Nordic Forum for Dance Research) Conference: Moving, relating, commanding. Choreographies for bodies, identities and ecologies. The Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen, July 2022.
At the Nordic Summer University (NSU) gathering in Oslo, August 2022.

LARVÆ DOME / METABOLIC ENCOUNTERS (COPENHAGEN, 2020-2022)

| Eduardo Abrantes

Larvæ Dome is an interactive installation based on the sonification of the life cycles and living processes of waxworms, while they digest inorganic materials. It is part of The Living Room experiment (2020-ongoing) hosted at the Medicinsk Museion in Copenhagen. In the Living Room, museum objects – from samples to surgical instruments – are allowed to decay and be transformed in contact with organic agents such as pink oyster mushrooms and waxworms. It is an experiment on the notions of care and the role of the museum, as well as on the dynamics of transformation and the acceptance of the erosive phases of life cycles.

As a sound artist collaborating in the collective experimental environment which is the Living Room, sonification is the approach I am mostly interested in deploying in order to explore the relational aspect of the processes of decay taking place. In one of the ecosystems/boxes being prepared, wax worms will be the agent of decomposition, given their ability to also digest matter usually thought to be non-edible, such as certain plastics. The worms and a few selected museum objects will become a dynamic metabolic system inside of the box, which will be monitored by a sensor array sensitive to environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, electrical conductivity, sound level, and vibration. From this data a 4-channel surround soundscape is produced in realtime, immersing the visitor in a sonic environment which provides a way to experience and encounter a meeting between human and other-than-human agency.

Larvæ Dome as participative performance-lecture

In November 2022, the Larvæ Dome piece was manifested as a performance-lecture at the Medicinsk Museion, where visitors where guided through a sonic encounter with the waxworms while bodily interacting with the sounds being produced in realtime.

FROM EAR TO HAND – MAKING SOUND-WORLDS (Several locations, Faroe Islands, 2019)

| Eduardo Abrantes

From Ear to Hand is a workshop that explores children’s natural story-telling instincts, curiosity and the knowledge of their surrounding landscape to create sound narratives using everyday objects. They will be invited to do so using so-called foley techniques, where everyday materials are explored for their sonic properties: gloves can become flapping wings, finger-tapping a heavy rainfall, or a balloon a squeaky door hinge.

The focus of the workshop is to engage with the children’s knowledge and awareness of the sounds present in their everyday lives, while being open to imagined places and spaces.

The workshop took place in 4 different schools, one week per school, with children 5-10 years old. The final outcome of the different sound exploration exercises were different soundtracks created and performed by the children, for short clips from two of Japanese filmmaker Miyazaki’s animation classics. Examples below:

This project was made in the context of the Listaleypurin artistic residency and exchange program, and with generous support from local partners.

THE ANIMAL EMPIRE – YOU ARE NOT INVITED (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2019)

| Eduardo Abrantes

“Animal Empire” is an ongoing performance research project by Danish artists, dancers and choreographers Linh Le and Peter Vadim, in which they investigate the social and political context and consequences of the use of animal metaphors (mostly negative ones such as “pest”) in order to portray specific minority groups in contemporary societies.

Having being invited as moderator to the performance series taking place at Bådteatret, I also composed a podcast manifestation of the project, including an original soundscape and samples of the discussions taking place between the invited guests and the audience, after each performance.

Photo credit: Sebastian Neerup Mandel

STRUER TRACKS: REALITY-BASED MULTI-CHANNEL PERFORMANCE (Struer, Denmark, 2019)

| Eduardo Abrantes

Collective and co-created multi-channel performance, together with sound artists: Espen Sommer Eide, Yngvild Færøy, Siri Austeen, Alexander Rishaug, Halla Steinunn Stefánsdottir and Rune Søchting.

A final edit is in progress, below you can hear my individual participation in the piece.

From Struer Tracks Festival 2019: “The performance was the culmination of 5 days workshop at Sound Art Lab in Struer where the 7 artists based in Nordic countries worked experimentally with sound recordings in the landscapes around Struer. The material generated at site visits was be the basis of a collective improvised performance using 10 speakers and filling a full room, where listeners may move freely during the performance.

The focus of the workshop was the investigation of changes in the physical landscape due to development of new forms of energy. Using sound recordings in different ways and mixing documentary and anthropological approaches, the group explores the potentials of the sound recording to create new understandings of the real and to open up new connections between fiction and fact.

The workshop was realised in collaboration between BEK Bergen Center for Electronic Art and Struer Tracks Urban Sound Art Festival. It was supported by Nordic Culture Point and Dansh Arts Foundation.”

EARSCAPE TAKEOVER (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2019)

| Eduardo Abrantes

Often triggered by listening to particular sounds via headphones, ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) is the name given to an experience of usually pleasurable tingling sensation on the skin, typically beginning on the scalp and moving down the back of the neck and upper spine. It is usually though of as an aural massage, particularly beneficial to issues affecting the nervous system, such as anxiety, irritability, sleep disorders, and stress.

Earscape Takeover is an acousmatic composition inspired by ASMR inducing sound techniques, but using unconventional sources, rhythms, manipulated vocals, and ambiances. It has been created specifically to be experienced via the close stereo field allowed by headphones.

As a companion piece to artist Anna Samsøe’s latest presentation of her Sound Is Matter documentary series, Earscape Takeover shares some of its themes, aesthetics, and approaches – such as the artistic reinterpretation of scientific research concerning the nature of sound; the use of collage methods, sampling, and archival material; the fascination with the video-essay genre, and its use of creative editing; and a subtle tongue-in-cheek humour concerning the different reading depths of a work, together with a haunting self-awareness that playfully flaunts its naiveté.

As a listening experiment aiming for an embodied effect, Earscape Takeover aims to activate proprioceptive awareness (the body’s sense of itself while embedded in its environment), and to engage the nervous system in a relaxing way (even amidst the soft chaos of public space), while nurturing the lively curiosity of the auditory imagination.

HETEROPHONICS (Vilnius, Lithuania, 2019)

| Eduardo Abrantes

Heterophonics was a lecture-performance and sound installation for two FM radios and short-distance radio emitters presented at the Departures, Deviations and Elsewheres Artistic Research Symposium, at the European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania, in March 2019.

Heterophonics – radio as an intersection of displacement and site-specificity

As a young child, even before having my own room in my parent’s home, I was struck by how the experience of listening to radio was radically defined by in-between-ness, and activated by an intense and slightly disorienting curiosity towards otherness, all while powerfully intersecting displacement and site-specificity. Moreover, a battery-operated FM/AM pocket radio with a wire antenna (the kind I had), if paired with headphones, can provide a magical blanket of privacy in relation to one’s immediate surroundings, while providing access to farther worlds of sonic imagination.

Of course, at the time these were not the words I had available to formulate my experience. What I was was fascinated by how voices and music from the beyond could come and reach my ears, as I lay under the (no-longer metaphorical) blankets in early nightfall, just before drifting into sleep. And without wires! The world was much less wireless back then.

Most fascinating for me, was the foreign radio coming from beyond the borders. Even beyond the exoticism of unfamiliar vocal geographies, the very act of tuning manually – meaning, traversing the static noise between station frequencies – provides access to a transitive soundscape of glitched/cacophonic heterotopia, stimulated by a phenomenology of expectation.

Heterophonics is a lecture-performance on the multiple and often incongruous overlapping of imaginary geographies that listening to radio provides. It also deals with how the located body – the listener, wherever she is to be found – is a fully active participant in this heterotopian space, and some notes on the phenomenology and politics of inhabiting it. In sum, this lecture explores traditional radio as a portable heterotopian grid/access point, as well as its nuanced variations in our present age of constant (dis)connectivity.

DUST: ENCOUNTERING THE HYPEROBJECT (Malmö, Sweden, 2017)

| Eduardo Abrantes
 
 
DUST – Pilot Episode: Encountering the Hyperobject
Six sonic explorations of human enmeshment in an expanded ecology
 

How can we humans of the Anthropocene learn to understand the interdependence of our and other life forms and bio-/geological systems across deep time and space?

Encountering the Hyperobject is an ongoing sound composition/radio podcast series that connects social science, artistic research, sound art, and ecologies through the geo-philosophical concept of hyperobjects; “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton, 2013) while both affecting and affected by the lives we live in the present. Hyperobjects can be anything from global warming, to nuclear materials or plastic bags. 

The project takes up Morton’s call for humans to “upgrade [our] ontological tools” and tries to attune its audiences to vital hyperobjects via a sonic language that mixes narrative, field-recordings, ambience, dialogue, music and interviews. Each of the planned six episodes engages and researches a specific hyperobject across Nordic and Arctic landscapes and localities. 

The first episode, DUST, is under development and a work-in-progress version was presented at Inter Arts Center Malmö as a live lecture-performance and immersive sound-installation in December 2017. The performance was followed by an open discussion, the whole event lasting circa 60 minutes. Encountering the Hyperobject is a collaboration between social scientist and artistic researcher Christina Berg Johansen (DK) and sound artist and artistic researcher Eduardo Abrantes (PT/SE).

Photo credit: Maj Horn, IAC Malmö, December 2017
Photo credit: Maj Horn, IAC Malmö, December 2017
Photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes, IAC Malmö, December 2017
Photo credit: Maj Horn, IAC Malmö, December 2017
Photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes, IAC Malmö, December 2017
Photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes, IAC Malmö, December 2017

 

 

OPKALD OG SVAR (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017)

| Eduardo Abrantes

 

Ofte, både i min egen lydkunst og i andre kunstneres, mærker jeg lyde som håndgribelige bevægelser i rummet. En af de mest bemærkelsesværdige, mystiske og alligevel almindelige af disse, skal jeg nævne opkald og svar.
Når du siger ”hej” til nogen, du kender, og de svarer tilbage. Når to skibe blæser deres tågehorn, mens de sejler nær. Når alarmen på en mikrobølgeovn bringer dig tilbage til køkkenet, og dine skyndte trin stepper på gulvbrættet. I musikalsk kontrapunkt. Overalt i naturen under parringssæson.
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Often, both in my own sound work and other artists’, i experience sound as tangible movement in space. One of the most common yet mystifying categories of this movement is “call and response”.
When you say “hello” to someone, and they answer back. When two ships blow their foghorns while passing close. When a microwave alarm brings you back to the kitchen, your steps resounding on the wood floor. In musical counterpoint. Everywhere in nature under breeding season.

Appropriately to its title, Opkald og svar (“Call and response”) was inspired by an invitation to participate in an Æstetisk Salon session, themed “Interaktion – Reaktion”, an artistic research sharing/presentation/dialogue platform created and curated by Camille Roth and Linh Le. Opkald og svar was presented as both a two channel stereo field sound composition and a co-created collective performance, taking place at private apartment situated in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, on October 2017. In its performative phase, the public was invited to divide in two groups, the first venturing out and exploring the acoustic space of the private home by find a call-sound to respond to. The second group would, after a few minutes, also venture out and try to individually position itself in relation to the mid-points of call and response defined by the individual members of the first group, adding their own intermediate sound to the ongoing play. The result was a playful collaborative exercise in sound exploration, active listening, and performative engagement. 

(Photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes, Copenhagen 2017)