Environment And Synthesis with Mark Fell, Cm Von Hausswolff And Rian Treanor

CAMP is a residential arts facility in the French Pyrenees. It's a place where great art is made, new movements are formed, new ideas are explored and groundbreaking people are nurtured. CAMP is located in Aulus les Bains, the last village before the France/Spain Pyrenean frontier chain. The location is spectacular - we are nestled at 750m above sea level, surrounded by snowcapped peaks over 3000m high, ancient forests and cascading waterfalls. There are eagles, lammergeiers, vultures, ibex and bears. Walk out of the residency, and within ten minutes you are completely alone in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe. Aulus les Bains is also a spa village - there are hot water springs, and a thermal spa in the village to take advantage of the healing and relaxing properties of the water.
    
Workshop dates: 06/09/2023 - 2023-09-11
    
The 2022 edition of Mark Fell and CM von Hausswolff's workshop "Environment and Synthesis" was a wild ride - we built shelters in the woods and listened to the rain filling the streams, bounced electronic sound around a disused silver mine at 1600m altitude, performed in the silent, pitch-black forest after midnight, worked through the details of various synthesis techniques and transformed CAMP into a multi-installation work, with speaker arrays and generative audio processes nestled inside and outside the building.

This year, Mark and Carl Michael will be joined by UK producer Rian Treanor. We'll be exploring the relationship between landscape and sound through a series of evolving performative, geometrical, time-based systems and structures. These will include location recording exercises, sound synthesis, the placement of sound within the landscape, durational performances, discussion and analysis, group performance systems, rule-based procedures, focal listening activities, psychogeographic exercises, and exploring and activating space/time. Emphasis will be given to the consideration of spatial audio techniques including multi-microphone and multi-speaker methodologies. We'll be looking at how all these methods can be explored using primitive instruments and materials, and how they change when using digital systems and synthesisers. We'll be working at CAMP, in the studios and recording spaces, as well as out in the epic Pyrenean landscape, in the forests, meadows, high plateaus and rocky peaks of the Pyrenees, exploring the soundscapes of rivers and lakes, glacial valleys and towering cirques.
Mark Fell is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist. Recognised as being "one of the most compelling and influential electronic artists in the world" (South Bank Centre), his practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy and radical politics, and typically explores issues such as time perception, technology, cognition, and collaborative process. Over the past 30 years, Fell's output has grown into a significant body of work: from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems and choreographic performances.

In 2017 Mark curated a major exhibition of sound art for V-A-C foundation (Moscow) "The Geometry of Now", and led a British council research project to India to study Carnatic music composition and emergent electronic arts (with AC Projects Glasgow). Serralves Foundation (Porto) premiered "Intermetamorphosis" (2017), a collection of works by fell which included new commissions as well as retrospective pieces. In 2018 he completed two large-scale multi-spatial sound works "Protomusic#1" for Sage Gateshead, forming their flagship contribution to the Great Exhibition of the North; and "Frameworks" at Palazzo delle Zattere (Venice). 2019 saw two new performative pieces including "Hominin" (Rewire, Den Haag) and "Against Method" (Pirelli Hanger Bicocca, Milan), as well as the solo exhibition "The Concept of Time is Intrinsically Incoherent" (Focal Point Gallery, South End on Sea). Drawing from sacred geometries to programming structures, these works underlined Mark's particular interest in non-linear systems and structures, and our complex inter-relationships with them.

The diversity and importance of Mark's practice are reflected in the range and scale of institutions that have presented his work, including VAC Foundation Palazzo delle Zattere (Venice), Hong Kong National Film Archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Barbican (London), Raven Row (London), Seville Biennale, The Australian Centre For Moving Image (Melbourne), Artists Space (NYC), Moma (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Pirelli Hanger Biccoca (Milan) among others. Mark's work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has as been recognised by ARS Electronica (Linz). He has worked with a number of artists including Yasunao Tone, Laurie Spiegel, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, Terre Thaemlitz, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff and Mat Steel (as SND). Mark is currently a guest professor of media art at Die Staatliche Hochschule fur Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG).

Carl Michael von Hausswolff lives and works in Stockholm. Since the end of the 70s, von Hausswolff has worked as a composer using recording technology as his main instrument and as a visual artist using light projections, film/video and still photography as well as other media. His interests span from social environmental issues and political statements to abstract penetration and supra/sub-reality. He has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (Kassel), the biennials in Venice, Moscow, Liverpool, Istanbul, Sarajevo etc and in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nicosia, Kaliningrad, Tokyo, London, New York, Philadelphia, etc. His music has been played in festivals such as Sonar (Barcelona), CTM (Berlin), L'audible (Paris), el niche Aural (Mexico City), MUTEK, (Montreal) etc. and released works on record by labels like RasterNoton (Berlin), Touch (London), Laton (Wien), iDeal (Goteborg) and MonoType (Warszaw).

His audio compositions from 1979 to 1992 consist essentially of complex macromal drones with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty. In the early 2000s, Carl Michael boiled away even more ornamental meat from the bones, producing pure, intuitive studies of electricity, frequency functions and tonal autism within the framework of a conceptual stringent cryption. Lately, he has also developed a more conceptual form of audio art overlooking subjects such as architecture and urbanism, rats and maggots. He has created a series of social platforms and places where people can meet and consume. His "Thinner- and Low-Frequency Bar" was used at the Momentum biennial in Moss, Norway, Prato, Italy and London and his "Glue- (Tobacco-) and High-Frequency Lounge" was used in Geneva and in Prato. These works show Hausswolff's critical view of society's hypocritical treatment of drugs and addiction. The audience could sniff the highly toxic substances thinner and contact glue while smoking cigarettes and getting penetrated by either low or high sine wave tones.

Carl Michael recently curated the 12th part of the sound-installation FREQ_OUT in Vienna and collaborates with artist Leif Elggren, film-maker Thomas Nordanstad, EVP re-searcher Michael Esposito and recently launched new projects with composer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, composer/artist Mark Fell, musician Jim O'Rourke, author/model Leslie Winer and as Dark Morph (with Jonsi of Sigur Ros). He has earlier collaborated with Pan Sonic, The Hafler Trio, Organum and PHAUSS.

Rian Treanor re-imagines club culture, experimental art and computer music, presenting an insightful and compelling musical world of fractured and interlocking components. Having left a vivid impression with a string of releases on The Death of Rave & Warp sub-label Arcola, his debut album 'ATAXIA' for Planet Mu in 2019 established him as both a disruptive and essential new voice in British underground club music. His latest album 'File Under UK Metaplasm' takes inspiration from his residency at the Nyege Nyege collective's Boutique Studio in Kampala in 2018. Incorporating the high-def bass weight of his home town Sheffield with the enigmatic energy of Tanzanian Singeli and Footwork. Using the programming language Max/MSP he develops bespoke software to explore extended rhythmic techniques and algorithmic processes, building devices that enable spontaneous pattern modulation within various collaborations, workshops, live performances and installations. With recent live shows at the Aphex Twin Curated Warehouse Project (UK), Nyege Nyege Festival (UG), WWW (JP), Unsound (PL), CTM (DE), Le Guess Who? (NL), Mira Festival (SP), Rewire (NL), GES-2 (RU), Serralves (PT), Berghain (DE), No Bounds (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts (UK), Empty Gallery (HK), Irish Museum of Modern Art (IRL), Summerhall (UK). He has also taken part in artist residencies at yU+co[lab] in Hong Kong, Counterflows in India and Shape Platform 2020.