Pykinon Demas, sound art performance, 2014

2014 | Exhibition "Self Conscious", ACG Gallery, Deree – ACG | Athens, GREECE
curated by Sotirios Bahtsetzis

​Πυκινόν Δέμας (Πυκνό Σώμα) is a collaborative project between visual artist Effie Halivopoulou, composer Tim Ward, mezzo soprano Effi Minakoulis and members of the Deree Choir and Laptop Orchestra. The five members of the laptop orchestra are engaged in an in situ performative act, producing and manipulating sound based on prerecorded material created by the other participants. At the heart of this material are numerous recordings of a poem (a compilation of 19 fragments from a lengthy work entitled “On Nature”, an elegy to truth and human beliefs by ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides) as spoken by Effie Halivopoulou and Effi Minakoulis and subsequently sung in different improvised forms by the choir. Each voice and reading has its own unique timbre, rhythm, articulation and way of occupying its acoustic space. In their precompositional work, the members of the laptop orchestra explore these recordings, using sound transformation processes to highlight certain elements, extract features and contours of the sounds and slowly produce a rich and diverse collection of interrelated sound material. Then, in performance, the members of the orchestra draw upon this pool of sound material and layer it in the exhibition space into five independent streams of sound. These can be heard individually or in combination to produce a multilayered sonic texture – a texture that is spatial in its very nature, as the listeners and performers are physically within it and can move and change their physical and sonic perspective. In a similar manner the members of the laptop orchestra move around the exhibition space, trailing a cable connecting them to their own personal speaker which acts as their individual voice in the overall texture.

Effie Halivopoulou & Tim Ward
 
Tim Ward is a digital composer who lives and works in Athens
Effi Minakoulis is a mezzo soprano who lives and works in Athens