Stryx presents an exhibition of work resulting from collaborations between Birmingham based composers Zach Dawson and Richard Stenton, singer Christina Jones and Stryx artists Megan de Greef, Karolina Korupczynska and Duncan Poulton.
The show will allow the viewer to experience a series of experiments combining sound, visual and performance art developed by the artists over the period of September and October 2016.
Info:
Megan De Greef (collaboration with Jones)
Megan’s four performances are frantic in their need to speak, but they find themselves surrounded by the deceased and thwarted by conflict.
They will never be able to fully comprehend each other
This performance renders society as paralysed and wounded through humanity’s increasingly damaged psyche, preventing people from communicating with one another. Involving waste pipes that fill the gallery space and the opera, Dido’s Lament, sung by Christina Jones through one pipe, with the trumpet call directed through another by composer Zachaeus Dawson.
Birds of the night, spare the entrails of the girl
The Strix – a mythological bird that would disembowel children at night and drink their blood – acts as a metaphor for conflict. The Strix performs to a polyphony of sounds including the recycled opera of the first performance, reworked by composer Richard Stenton.
The fire sermon
This performance is intended to be an ASMR experience and may cause tingles in the body. It is an experiment that uses the Buddha’s fire sermon – an incantation thought to achieve liberation from suffering by detaching the five senses and mind. Sung in a whisper.
The final distribution of my property
A playful last will and testament in the structure of a poem and read by several children, in order to express the fragile psychological and physical danger humankind poses to it’s own offspring.
Karolina Korupczynska
Plants Behaviour Experiment - Circadian Rhythms (collaboration with Dawson)
Through 24 hours selected plants absorbed the motivational speeches of various narrators. In this piece Korupczynska and Dawson combine time laps photography / video with experimental sound compositions.
Human Physiology Experiment I - Heart Beat Rhythm
Using an ECG monitor Korupczynska studied her heart beat in various states - at rest, excitement, stress - exploring her body's physiological reaction to others.
Human Physiology Experiment II - Brain Waves Rhythm (collaboration with De Greef, Jones and Stenton)
Using a brain wave sensor Korupczynska explored various reactions to sounds including ASMR and anger through binaural activity visualisations.
Duncan Poulton (collaboration with Stenton)
Jetsam is defined as unwanted material or goods that have been thrown overboard from a ship and washed ashore, especially that which has been discarded to lighten the vessel. Jetsam is an assemblage of found footage, scoured from the internet in an exercise not dissimilar to treasure hunting. A study of the changeable, mercurial qualities of water and its relationship to digital video as a medium.
The sound for Jetsam mimicked the process of found material collection as the video, exploring water sounds on the edge of obvious synthesis and convincing simulations. The two components of the work are looped independently causing them to indeterminately collide in moments of disjuncture and moments of seeming synchronicity.