Extended Bodies
Extended Bodies is an audio-visual event focusing on the interface between humans and the contemporary environment. The performances present a range of artistic perspectives exploring how radioactivity, mining, construction and chemical proliferation shape our environment.
iko - Ephemeral Equilibrium
Inspired by the story of the Fukushima butterfly and its genetic mutations following the nuclear disaster in 2011, "Ephemeral Equilibrium” explores the fragility of the natural world and its vulnerability to human activity. "Ephemeral Equilibrium" is a call to action, inviting listeners to consider their own impact on the environment and the role they can play in fostering a more sustainable future.
Tōru Takemitsu - And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind (1992)
Performed by Trio Farben
Written by the prolific composer Tōru Takemitsu in 1992, “And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind” is based on a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Like Rain it sounded till it curved” and strongly influenced by Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp (1915). Takemitsu wrote that the piece “has as its subject the signs of the wind in the natural world and of the soul, or unconscious mind (or we could even call it ‘dream’), which continues to blow, like the wind, invisibly, through human consciousness.”
Callum Murray - CONCRETE
“CONCRETE” is an improvised audiovisual performance in which found sound material from nature, musical instruments, and electronic sounds, are processed by a computer algorithm, and then visualised. The algorithm improvises, along with the performer, to create a concrete - an audiovisual surface, which has intricate detail, and is built from an aggregate of many different materials.
Danilo Ricci - Cycle of Stone
Through a performance based around the electrical signals of plants, "Cycle of Stone" explores the chronological phases of human interference in our environment. Sometimes through alteration, sometimes through generative intervention, we are constantly interacting with the environment.
Leonard Maassen – Heart of a Glacier
“Heart of a Glacier” engages with the notion of ecological grief. Audio and video recordings made by the artist inside the Morteratsch Glacier (Switzerland) present a landscape view that is microscopic in its framing. The resultant footage documents this rapidly vanishing and rarely accessible landscape in a highly intimate way. What is the role of nostalgia in a time of environmental turmoil? Can we see beauty in the changes occurring around us?
Indira Zhangabayeva – Invisible (featuring Trio Farben and Benjy Sandler. Video by Beth Walker)
“Invisible” is a piece about the energetic worlds we are surrounded by. The vibrations around us create our physical world, but also hold invisible information that we can feel. Everything in this world was created by, and consists of energy that vibrates. The Environment can thus be divided in two. Into visible worlds: materials made up of energy in the form of atoms, and invisible worlds: the vibrations that don’t have a physically manifest form.
Reduced entry is available for students at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Please email leonard.maassen@gsmd.ac.uk for a discount code.