Sound Art/Installation

Question

Hi guys,

So, I'm in Edinburgh, a month into the masters programme, and I find that through all of the really fun stuff - playing with gear, sounds, and ideas - the idea of sound art installation has begun to worm its way into my brain. I love the thought of taking basic/complex/generally interesting concepts and extrapolating them out into aesthetically stimulating experiences for people to enjoy or hate at their leisure. It's a direction I'm very strongly considering going in.

Do we have any sound artists in the house? Can anyone make some recommendations of interesting and stimulating exhibits?

Answer 1

I have been working on a fairly large piece for several months now that I'm super excited about, though I can't talk much about it yet as there is a big element of surprise involved for the visitors. And another smaller, but very technically complicated, one that I am trying to get a residency for so that I can actually fund the darn thing. I so wish I could yap more about them right now. They will definitely be a lot of fun to discuss here after they've shown though. :)

There is loads of great stuff out there. I recently stumbled across this person's work and it's got me all kinds of drooling: http://zimoun.ch/

More on the radar of the general music-making population might be: Giorgio Sancristoforo's audioscan pieces are spectacular. I'll be interviewing him soon for a new online sound art and sound design "mag" I'm launching soon. Very stoked to talk to him. Lately I've become really fascinated with grand scale outdoor stuff. http://www.gleetchplug.com/gleetchplug/Works.html

and Ableton's own Robert Henke has done some really gorgeous work too: http://www.monolake.de/installations/

Cycling '74's Projects page often has some interesting stuff to show: http://cycling74.com/project/

Harvestworks might also be a good place to check out as well: http://harvestworks.org/

There really is tons and tons out there of all shapes and sizes. A little search on Vimeo should yield a few hours of viewing pleasure.

Answer 2

Well...we're all sound artists in some sense. I highly recommend this site if you're into installations. Inspiring stuff up there.

Answer 3

Andrew Spitz here may be a source of useful information (whenever he sees your question).

In the meantime, one of my old professors is heavily involved with sound installations as artwork. He's had installations all over the world, and you can look up the installations/locations on his websitelink text. Not sure which one's (if any) are still active?

Answer 4

I know someone who may help you, he is a sound artist who often work with installations. You can check his website at http://phonotopy.org , great stuff there.

Answer 5

I studied Sound art at LCC, here's their site http://www.soundarts.co.uk/

I'd also check out Crisap http://www.crisap.org/.

Answer 6

While I would love to call myself a sound artist, I reckon I'm more of groupie so I'll plug for the artists I like.

I'm a big fan of Ryoji Ikeda and his installations and performances have always blown me away.

Alvin Lucier and his work I am Sitting In A Room inspired me to use that technique for creating ambience beds.

The performace True sticks in my head because they had mic'd the scaffolds with contact mics and let the actors perform with it.