FLUIDITY: Symposium on
female and non-binary people in multimedia
Monday 29.04.2024 09:30 – 21:00, ligeti center, 9th & 10th floor
A full-day program offers intensive discussions on the impact and contribution of women and non-binary individuals in the field of multimedia. Professional composers and sound artists share their experiences to raise awareness of their role.
The accompanying workshops provide a unique opportunity to work directly with renowned composers and deepen the creative process in multimedia. Female and non-binary students are particularly encouraged to participate.
With Jana De Troyer, Janne Kummer, Brigitta Muntendorf (Keynote), Konstantina Orlandatou, Katharina Rosenberger, Birgit Ulher, Jeanne Charlotte Vogt, Carmen Kleykens Vidal, Ying Wang, Joana Welteke, Dong Zhou and others
Please register at: agentur@ligeti-zentrum.de
Program
10th floor
09:30 - 10:05 Presentation 1- Jana De Troyer: Music is my canvas
Is multimedia a means or a genre? Jana De Troyer provides an intimate insight into her creative process, where curiosity, technology, and a broad field of interests intersect. Her conceptual approach incorporates diverse topics, such as the Belgian financial market or the sound of kissing, into her work. Multimedia is one of these expressive forms on her artistic playground, where electronics, video, or instruments blend with intensive research, dancing robotic insects, and serialism. She will present her answer to the above question and share more about her journey on April 29.
Jana De Troyer
Jana De Troyer explores the dynamic boundaries between styles and disciplines, skillfully shifting between her roles as a composer, saxophonist, improviser, human, sound artist, and programmer. Coming from a background as a contemporary saxophonist, De Troyer has always been curious about further exploring and fusing various modes of expression. This “Experimentierfreude” has brought about a myriad of creative collaborations with composers, musicians and artists from other disciplines such as visual arts, dance and coding.
De Troyer pursued her Master of Music in Contemporary Performance and Composition at HfMT Hamburg, EMTA Tallinn, KMH Stockholm, and CNSMD Lyon. She also completed a master's program in saxophone performance at the Musikhochschule Lübeck. She has been an Artist in Residence at Künstlerhaus Lauenburg, subnetAIR (Salzburg), and EMS (Stockholm), won the Lions Club Lübeck Liubice Förderpreis, and performed on stages from Turku to Taipei.
10:05 - 10:40 presentation 2 - Dong Zhou: Being AFAB and Making Electronic Music
The presentation will be about my personal story as an AFAB (assigned female at birth) who makes and studies electronic music, my research on women in the audio industry in China, and the women and non-binary role models on my journey.
Dong Zhou
Dong Zhou (no pronouns/she) is a composer-performer based in Hamburg. Zhou gained the B. A. in music engineering in Shanghai Conservatory and M.A. in multimedia composition in Hamburg University of Music and Drama. Zhou won several prizes including the first prize of 2018 ICMC Hacker-N-Makerthon and the finalist of 2019 Deutscher Musikwettbewerb and Nota-n-ear Award 2022. Zhou’s work was included in ‘Sound of World’ Microsoft ringtones collection and Zhou was commissioned by festivals and institutions including Shanghai International Art Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, Stimme X Festival, etc. Zhou is currently a doctoral candidate in ICAM of Leuphana University, member of Stimme X e. V. Zeitgenössisches Musiktheater Norddeutschland and Deutscher Komponistenverband Hamburg.
10:40 - 11:15 presentation 3 - Janne Kummer: DIS-AI_IDENTIFICATION
This lecture explores the politics of representation and identity in relation to AI-generated images and avatars. It explores the socio-political implications of AI on identity and society, with a particular focus on discrimination within the context of algorithmic information processing.
To comprehend the societal influence of AI, it is crucial to recognize that AI systems are fundamentally socio-technical, encompassing the social context in which they are developed, utilized, and interacted with.
We will engage in discussions, analyses, and reflections on the implications of AI-generated representations, exploring how they shape identities and contribute to the formation of societal beliefs.
Janne Kummer
Janne Kummer (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performing and digital art, game design, music and critical theory. JK’s work explores the representational politics of bodies in both analogue and digital space, currently focusing on current developments in Artificial Intelligence. JK uses their work as a tool to question existing power structures and develop alternative queer feminist visions of the future. Their creative process is based on a somatic understanding and recognizes the body as a primary source of knowledge. JK’s background as a martial artist (Muay Thai and K1) forms the basis for their performative movement practice.
11:30 - 12:30 Keynote - Brigitta Muntendorf: 3D-Audio and AI Space
Sound dramaturges on the example of ORBIT - A War Series
3D-Audio Space Oratorio for AI Voice Clones and Electronics
Immersion requires its own dramaturgies to bring music, narrative, and the role of the audience into a specific engagement for this medium. The 3D-Audio Space Oratorio ORBIT - A War Series, premiered at the Biennale Musica Venice 2023, explores dramaturgies and narratives that partially originate in virtual reference spaces, such as Environmental Storytelling, and new formats based on an interaction between composition and reception. The use of sound synthesis, AI, and deep learning technologies for digital voice and singing generation creates immortal warriors and a posthuman, techno-futuristic choir that proclaims the opera of the future, both sensuous and political.
The use of artificial singers seems a logical consequence of immersion: In a space where sound takes on actions and performance, it is automatically the audience that, as a physically present entity, is assigned a new role.
Brigitta Muntendorf
In her works, German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf creates a sound cosmos of analogue-digital expression with her often large-format music, dance theatre or 3D-sound projects. Her most recent compositions include ARCHIPEL (Ruhrtriennale/Theater der Welt/Tanz im August, 2021), a project with dance company MOUVOIR and architect Sou Fujimoto, and MELENCOLIA (Bregenzer Festspiele, 2022), a transdigital music theatre for Ensemble Modern. In 2023, she presented ORBIT – A War Series at the Biennale di Venezia, a 3D-Audio space oratorium based on Nancy Spero’s War Series about the wars against the female body for AI Voice Clones and electronics.
Muntendorf is recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers Prize and the German GEMA German Music Authors’ Prize. In 2023, the recording of her Trilogy for two pianos was awarded with the German Record Critics’ Award. Her works are presented at international music and art festivals such as Kyoto Experiment, ULTIMA Oslo, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Munich Biennial, Hollandfestival or Festival d'Automne Paris. Her current research happens in scientific-artistic collaborations with partners such as d&b audio and S+T+ARTS / Ars Electronica. Since 2018 she is professor for composition at the HfMT Cologne and director of the Institute for Contemporary Music.
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch Break
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13:45 - 14:20 Presentation 4 - Carmen Kleykens Vidal:Visualization of XR artists*: Issues, trends, and dissident actions in virtual performativity
It is complex to discuss visibility within the use of XR technologies3 in art because there is a widespread tendency to adapt normative models in their implementation, a lack of accessibility to these technologies, and a referential and structured invisibilization of non- normative propositions compared to the primary model. Who can create art using VR glasses, who has them adapted to their needs, and what processes have been undertaken to adapt them? It is possible that the technology per se is already grounded in erroneous principles for a fair visualization of non-normative users, specifically for artistic use. There is also a lack of productive means for these profiles, generating different currents in their use, contrasting trends between virtuosity and error, virtual representation, or virtual identity. A spectrum of grays where we accept the challenges that technology poses within the work, embracing them as a community and individual, or attempting to minimize its impact, making temporary, economic, social, spatial, and identity compromises to carry out the work.
Carmen Kleykens Vidal
Carmen Kleykens Vidal (1998, País Valencià, elle/she/they ) is a multimedia artist, researcher and performer based in Hamburg, Germany. Her work explores XR technology for Queer-feminist awareness, using voice, body, space and sound as main sources of virtual action and political messages.
Carmen had started their doctoral studies with Dr. Alexander Schubert and Dr. Konstantina Orlandatou in HfMT Hamburg, on October 2024 inside their current research of XR multimedia art, virtuality and feminist awareness.
For their performative approach and compositional ideas, she collaborated with DieInstitution.com, Melanie Mohren und Bernhard Herbordt - Faust winners to experimental category 2022 as Theatre Directors - with the production Die Versammlung and the production Die Oper, inside Theatre Rampe, Stuttgart.
Founder of GlitterBox Collective, an interdisciplinary young artist collective currently sponsored by MOIN, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein GmbH. They work together in their individual pieces and collectives artworks, premiering installation/performances in Ms Artville 2023, Habitat Festival 2023, VogelBall 2023, Spectrum festival 2023, Kultur&Gut, BlurredEdges etc.
She was Artist Resident 2023 in GRAME Musiques Exploratoires - Centre national de création musicale (Lyon) and artist resident of l’Incubateur de Royaumont (Paris) with Regrat Duo, formed in 2021 with Carolina Santiago Martinez, a multimedia Duo + piano that explores new technologies and the resignification of the gesture perception. Inside this project, she is current collaborator of LisiLog.com.
Their work will be show in WePresent2024, New_generations X ZKM, BlurredEdges Festival, Champs Libres Festival Strasbourg, Monoton Series Murcia etc in the season 2023-24.
14:20 - 14:55 Presentation 5 - Birgit Ulher: Split Friction – audiovisuelle Arbeiten
Split Friction is an interdisciplinary project by Birgit Ulher that operates at the intersection of exhibition, video, performance, concert, and sound installation. In a three-day exhibition at Errant Sound in November 2023, several works by the Hamburg-based artist and musician were presented in context and accompanied by the release of a publication of the same name.
The video works "How to Get Away I & II", "How to Get Away by Car", "Wanderlust", "Flotsam & Jetsam" feature moving object sounds in indoor and outdoor spaces, recorded at locations with special acoustic properties. The sound and concert installations "Public Transport" and "Robo Tins" are soundscapes with moving objects in space, playable both as concert installations and presented as pure sound installations.
Birgit Ulher Bio
Birgit Ulher has been living in Hamburg as a freelance musician, sound artist, and composer since 1982. Born in 1961 in Nuremberg, she initially studied painting and fine arts, which continues to exert a significant influence on her music. Ulher has developed a range of extended playing techniques for the trumpet, allowing her to craft a unique musical language centered around sound. She works with the trumpet, radio, metal foil and everyday objects, to produce electronically resonant sounds using purely acoustic means. Her particular interests lie in microtonal aspects, sound fragmentation, and the spatial dimension of sound. Beyond material exploration, she is deeply intrigued by the relationship between silence and sound.
Since 2006, she has been working with radio sounds fed to speakers, employing them as trumpet mutes. The trumpet simultaneously serves as both transmitter and receiver.
Her solo work encompasses compositions with pre-recorded elements, such as "Traces" and "splitting 21" (a collaboration with Michael Maierhof), as well as compositions for sound installations, like "Reveille", created for the sound and light installation 'Wake Up' by Allora & Calzadilla, and concert installations like "Public Transport" and "Robo Tins."
Coming from a background in visual arts, she has cultivated a diverse artistic practice that spans acoustic and electroacoustic projects, solo performances, concert and sound installations, videos, conceptual pieces, and concerts in the realm of improvised/experimental music.
14:55 - 15:30 Coffee Break
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9th floor
15:30 - 16:30 Workshop 1 - Joana Welteke: Unvorhersehbares Storytelling
The workshop focuses on playfully dealing with words and language, improvising together as a group, and discovering content connections that may not make sense at first glance. After various practical exercises, a random-based audio sampler will be introduced in the second half, which we will use as an artistic tool in an impulse-driven storytelling process.
• Target audience: Youth and adults
• Languages: German and English are possible
• Preparations for participants: Participants should bring a thick and a thin pen.
Joana Welteke
Joana Naomi Welteke is involved in artistic actions and installations in public spaces and the technical and conceptual development of the generative sampler "record-o-mat." In the interdisciplinary cross-university Hamburg project ligeti center, she develops participatory projects and works part-time as a social artist, street performer, and circus educator.
16:30 - 17:30 Workshop 2 - Konstantina Orlandatou: Introduction to Unreal Engine and its possibilities for VR creation
Unreal Engine (UE) has become a powerful tool not only for video gaming but also for cinematographic productions and XR applications. In this workshop participants will get some insights of how this engine works and what tools can be used for making VR applications.
Preparation for participants:
· It is recommended that the participants bring their personal laptops to the workshop.
· Install in advance the Epic Launcher: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/download
· Download from Epic Launcher Unreal Version 4.27.2
Please install & download the material needed before coming to the workshop, otherwise there will be no time to do so during the workshop.
Konstantina Orlandatou
Konstantina Orlandatou studied composition, music theory, piano and accordion in the Conservatory of Athens (Greece) and multimedia composition (M.A.) at the University of Music and Drama in Hamburg. In 2014 she completed her doctoral dissertation with the title “Synaesthetic and intermodal audio-visual perception: an experimental research” in the University of Hamburg (Department of Systematic Musicology).
Since 2018 she leads the project “Moving Sound Pictures” at the University of Music and Drama in which she uses VR technologies as an interface for art mediation between music and visual arts collaborating with museums such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle. As a multimedia artist and developer, she turns paintings of well-known artists, such as Kandinsky or Mondrian, into immersive 3D modelled spaces, where users can interact with the objects of the paintings and generate music through playful actions. Her VR installations have been presented in numerous festivals, conferences and exhibitions. Since 2023 she is head of the XR Lab of the ligeti center.
17:30 - 18:30 Roundtable - Host: Katharina Rosenberger with Giovanni Dinello, Janne Kummer, Birgit Ulher, Ying Wang
At this roundtable, experts from the multimedia field such as Birgit Ulher, Janne Kummer, and Ying Wang will be present. Together, under the moderation of Katharina Rosenberger, they will examine the professional situation of women and non-binary individuals in the multimedia industry, will raise questions regarding the idea of equal opportunities, and explore strategies for improvement. Additionally, they will shed light on the current gender ratio in multimedia and electronic music programs at music universities and discuss ways to increase the proportion of women and non-binary individuals among the students.
Katharina Rosenberger
Katharina Rosenberger, born in Zurich, is Professor of Composition and has taught composition and sound art at the University of California San Diego for 12 years. Starting April 2021 she will hold the professorship for composition at the University of Music Lübeck.
Her compositions, installations and interdisciplinary stage work have been featured at festivals such as the Warschauer Herbst, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Heroines of Sound, Berlin, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Hannover, Weimarer Frühlingstage, DE, ZeitRäume Basel, Musikfestival Bern, Tage für Neue Musik, Zürich, Festival Archipel, Geneva, CH, Festival Les Musiques, Marseille, FR, Festival Bernaola, Vitoria-Gasteiz, ES, Felicja Blumental Festival, Tel Aviv, IL, Festival reMusik, St. Petersburg, RU, Festival Visiones Sonoras, Morelia, MX, Shanghai Electronic Music Week, Shanghai New Music Days, CN, October Contemporary, Hongkong, HK, as well as in many concert series throughout Europe and the United States.
Rosenberger is a recipient of the 2023 Swiss Music Prize and 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. In the past, she has been awarded with the Hellman Fellowship, San Francisco, the Sony Scholar Award, and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Commission for her composition Gesang an das noch namenlose Land. Her installation work VIVA VOCE and Room V won the “Mediaprojects Award” / Sitemapping of the Swiss Federal Agency (OFC), Berne. Her portrait CD TEXTUREN with the Wet Ink Ensemble, released on HatHut Records, has been awarded the prestigious Copland Recording Grant and was selected for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Bestenliste 4_2012.
Her music can be heard on Mode Records, Hat Hut Records, Unit Records and Akenaton.
Ying Wang
In ihren Kompositionen, beschäftigt sich Ying Wang mit Themen wie Umweltverschmutzung, globale soziale Missstände, politische Verfolgung oder menschliche Beziehungen zu Technologie. Schon während ihres Studiums in Köln konnte sie sich als Komponistin etablieren, die für avancierte, kritisch gedachte Kammer- und Orchestermusik steht. Ihre ursprüngliche Heimat in Shanghai und Peking, wie auch ihre neue in Berlin, bilden einen Kontrast, der in sich in ihren Werken thematisch und musikalisch widerspiegelt. Dabei sucht sie in ihrer Arbeit stets neue Schnittstellen zu anderen Medien und Künsten, wie Tanz, Video, digitale Kunst, Licht, bildender Kunst und Performance.
Seit Ying WANG in Europa niedergelassen hat, hat ihre künstlerische Sprache stetig weiterentwickelt und wurde dafür mit zahlreichen Preisen und Stipendien ausgezeichnet. Die Ensembles und Orchestern, mit denen sie zusammenarbeitete, gehören zu den renommiertesten Musiker*innen in Europa und Asien.
10th floor
20:00 Concert with Jana De Troyer, Fragment (Joana Welteke und Arjun Jamil), Janne Kummer, Gabriel & Catarina Saber, Birgit Ulher and Dong Zhou
Jana De Troyer：
People-Pleaser (2024) for saxophone, video and electronics
duration: max. 10'
When a hip-hop artist sincerely asks, "if you ever think about your audience when you are creating pieces?” maybe it's time for some reflection. After years of living in her musical bubble, Jana De Troyer opens her ears and listens her audience. People-Pleaser is the result of a virtual dialogue between De Troyer and her online following. It is a collaborative composition and research project on artistic expectations, creative decision-making, and “how to make everybody happy.” Where can (or even should) the artist draw the line on which decisions are outsourced and which aren’t?
And who gets the credit in the end?
Dong Zhou:
Big Nipples are Watching You (U.A.), performative installation (c.a. 5 min)
Gabriel & Catarina Saber:
GALATEA
Based on the greek myth, GALATEA is a performance in which the creator attempts to sculpt a new body for theirself. The piece explores the ideas of gender, dysphoria and liminality as the performer tries to cross from the physical to the virtual world. The version you'll see here has been adapted for the Production Lab at the Ligeti Center.
<<When born, I was Galatea
My body was exhumed from the marble
By the violence of the hammer
I extracted my form
Left behind is dust
And ruined stone>>
Gabriel & Catarina Saber: Music, visuals, 3D modeling, animation
Carmen Kleykens Vidal: 3D scanning and model painting
Gabriel/Catarina Saber
Gabriel/Catarina Saber (1996) is an artist, performer and composer born in Brazil. From an early age, she studied music, theater and writing, and has a degree in music composition by UFPR (Brazil), a master in composition with technologies by ESMUC (Spain/Catalonia) and is now finishing her other masters in multimedia composition at HfMT Hamburg.
With the use of technology, her aesthetic explore a interdisciplinary approach to music and performance, imprinting her perspective into gender, capitalism and art with an ironic, overwhelming and iconoclastic spirit.
Birgit Ulher:
Public Transport (2019) for trumpet, LPs, record runner and objects
For the piece, two LPs of sounds from record players were recorded. The records are played using record runners and serve as playback for the trumpet part. The sounds of the record players were composed into an abstract sonic landscape, detached from their original context through the recordings. The record players serve as both the origin of the sounds and their reproduction here.
Janne Kummer：
GUARD
Fragment (Arjun Jamil and Joana Naomi Welteke)：
Live-elektronisches Storytelling
Fragment is a music duo that seamlessly blends organic and synthetic sounds to create soundscapes that evolve in real time. Their performance is a constantly changing auditory narrative that invites listeners to immerse themselves in the sonic experience.