Myself and other artists from the Material Sound project at Black Mountain College Museum shared some new work online for “Material Sound at Home” presented by the Black Mountain College Museum. Follow this link to see the work at - http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/material-sound-at-home/
Still image from: Knitting Experiments, 2020. Wire, butchers glove, electronics, prepared knitting needles, video card, video copy station.Note: Video contains flashing images.
Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, The Planet, 1966
plastic collage and synthetic polymer paint on plywood
122.0 × 122.0 cm
Pia van Gelder, Psychic Synth II, 2019
Electronics, video, sound, electroencephalography
I am pleased to announce an exhibition of my work along side an incredible collection of the work of Stanislaus Ostoja Kotkowski. A rare opportunity to see a survey of his work, including a very rare early theremin!
Born in Poland, Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski (1922-1994) moved to Australia in 1949 and became pivotal in development of Australian experimental and new media art. Pioneering the use of electronics, he made innovations in computer and laser technology, including kinetics and sound, which he applied to visual art, music and theatre.Solid Light will be accompanied by an interactive installation by Sydney-based multimedia artist Pia van Gelder. Her Psychic Synth II uses electroencephalograph headsets with video and sound synthesisers to create a feedback loop between the human brain and technology, translating the participant’s alpha waves into colourful abstract projections and sounds.
I will be showing a new work Psychic Synth II which explores electroencephalography with analogue video and audio synthesis. Stay tuned for documentation. If you’re in Melbourne, or surrounds, come along to the show. It opens on
Psychic Synth II / Apparition Apparatus
McClelland Sculpture Gallery
390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin,
Victoria, 3910, Australia
https://www.mcclellandgallery.com
2 April – 14 July 2019
Opening Sunday 7th April, 3pm
I wrote a paper about a work I made in 2015 called “Relaxation Circuit” an appropriation of a curious circuit from the history of electrotherapy invented by Leon Ernest Eeman, with the edition of a bio-synthesiser. It can be found in the current issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/459050/459051
Material Sound opens tonight
Exhibition dates: Friday 9 February - Sunday 29 April
MAMA, Murray Art Museum Albury
546 Dean Street, Albury
Curated by Caleb Kelly, Material Sound features newly commissioned work by artists Vicky Browne, Pia van Gelder, Caitlin Franzmann, Peter Blamey, Ross Manning, and Eric Demetriou.
Opening with a festival of live performances
Program available here: http://www.mamalbury.com.au/see-and-do/Programs-and-events/events-@-mama/material-sound-opening-weekend-programme
Wednesday, December 13, 7pm
69 Broadway, Asheville, NC
Australia-based scholars and artists Caleb Kelly, Pia van Gelder and Peter Blamey will make a rare North American appearance at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center to discuss and perform works that examine the relationship between sound and visual art within the space of the gallery. Kelly will speak about his book Gallery Sound (Bloomsbury 2017) and van Gelder and Blamey will both perform. Asheville’s own Pete Speer from Make Noise will also join them.
more: link
Recumbent Circuit (2016) will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Curated by Alexander Boynes
Opening 15th September, 2017 6-9
15 Sep 2017 - 11 Nov 2017
In an age that increasingly exists online and in virtual spaces, Ex Machina invites viewers to consider the role of the physical machine as artwork, only truly experienced in the flesh. Ex Machina explores contemporary Australian kinetic artwork, and how machines are not only a tool, but artworks in their own right.
Featuring works by Nicci Haynes, Brian McNamara, Stelarc, Pia van Gelder and Arthur Wicks
Sounding the Future until 22nd September
UTS Gallery
curated by Gail Priest, with Gail Priest, George Poonkhin Khut, Pia van Gelder & Tom Smith, Peter Blamey
The show:
Sounding the Future is an exhibition curated by Gail Priest that speculates about what art in the future will sound like. The exhibition will present sonic “possibles and potentials” ranging from almost-here transhuman mediations, to far-future post-anthropocene aftermaths, with some apocalyptic contingencies in between. We always speak of “visions of the future,” but what if we were to let the auditory realm lead our imaginings? Does the dialogue about futurity take on new dimensions when considered through a different sense ratio? These dreams of future soundings, inflected by our present day, also offer reflections on how we listen now. The artists will develop new work that considers the impacts of new technologies, degrading environmental conditions and the prospect of a post-human world.
More Info on UTS Show
Exhibition Catalogue
Sounding the Future Project Website
The work:
IRON STAR, by Pia van Gelder and Tom Smith
Pythagoreans proposed that the movement of the orbiting sun, moon and planets around the earth produced sound. This ‘music of the spheres’ prefigured ongoing discourse around sound and space. Some Pythagoreans reasoned that this celestial chord wasn’t heard playing in the background because we had learnt to filter out. Whereas Aristotle was confident that if the planets did hum, our world would shatter due to the immense scale of their corresponding vibrations. Aristotle’s hypothetical is an early iteration of circular debates around the (im)possibility of non-anthropocentric perception—debates that continue to take up space in contemporary philosophy.
Iron Star reframes these questions by thinking through the possibility of an iron future. In the distant future, approximately 10 to the power of 1500 years from now, it is theorised that all matter will converge to its most stable nuclear form, iron—the last element a star produces before it goes supernova. In this future, when earth is no longer, the galaxy will be filled with giant stars of iron, transformed through a process of cold fusion. The temperature will be unfathomably cold. Lingering stellar energy, leftover heat from the stars’ earlier plasma form, will result in enormous fluctuating electromagnetic fields. No human can accurately conceive of this iron universe. By this time our bodies will have long since disappeared. There will be no sound. There will be no light.
Iron Star projects into the furthest possible reaches of the future, and upon failing to imagine it, returns to the symbolic universe in which iron is but one of countless signifiers. Iron Star depicts the final state of the universe as a set of processes that will end humanity—while concurrently, iron’s use value and symbolic efficacy is shown proliferating into an array of human centric objects, derivatives and metaphors. Within Iron Star, as in the universe more generally, iron exists ambivalently as language, material, object, symbol, and future—but also as the immanent cancellation of all these strata of reality.
Photographs by David Lawrey, courtesy UTS Arts
Stella Rosa McDonald interviewed Emily Cormack, the curator of Primavera 2016: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/emily-cormack/ Some interesting words about the connections between works and the story of the show.
If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on till the 4th of December at the MCA.
https://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/primavera-2016/
Pia van Gelder, Recumbent Circuit, 2016, installation view, Primavera 2016: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2016. Electronics, speakers, wood, image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Jacquie Manning.
Tomorrow (Thursday 3rd November) at 5:30pm, I will be doing a tour of the Primavera show and talk about my work, followed by a hands on biosynth jam at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
More details here: https://www.mca.com.au/events/lights-later-primavera-artists/
Photo by Lucy Parakhina
Emily Parsons Lord, Danae Vanenza and myself have curated the monthly event Artbar at the MCA, on tonight from 7pm. We have taken over 4 levels of the MCA with performances, installations, workshops and spectacles that interrogate intangibilities and sensual phenomena outside of the visual.
(image: Inner West Sound System)