Name: Searching for Sferics by sound art hannah
Duration: 10 min
Description: During a residency at Full of Noises (Barrow-in-Furness) in September 2021, I built a series of antennas to pick up the Earth’s natural static. In this piece, I use Dan Tapper’s recipe for a hoop antenna and listen for lightning and atmospheric disturbances around Cumbria. This project was support by a DYCP grant from Arts Council England.

Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In ARRESTED WELCOME, the first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, she employs a feminist perspective and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of welcome. With a focus on lessons that contemporary artists teach about the potential of hospitality, Aristarkhova looks at Linda Hattendorf’s documentary The Cats of Mirikitani; the Serbian-born installation and performance artist Ana Prvački’s project The Greeting Committee Reports . . . ; American artist Faith Wilding’s performance Waiting; Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei’s aesthetics of hospitality; American bioartist Kathy High’s project Embracing Animal; Mithu Sen’s artworks that explore questions of radical hospitality and crossing borders; Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro’s art project Brides on Tour; and Ken Aptekar’s exhibition Neighbours in Lübeck, Germany. 

Aristarkhova is professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art and Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. 

She is joined today by Jorge Lucero, an artist born, raised and educated in Chicago. He is chair and associate professor of art education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lucero's books include Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy, Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The Most Radical Form of Expression to Ever Exist, and the forthcoming What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Teaching?. Lucero is coeditor of the international journal Visual Arts Research and sits on the editorial boards for the Journal of Social Theory and Art Education, the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.

This conversation was recorded in February 2021.

More about ARRESTED WELCOME: z.umn.edu/arrestedwelcome
Irina Aristarkhova: https://stamps.umich.edu/people/detail/irina_aristarkhova
Jorge Lucero: www.jorgelucero.com

An open-access edition of ARRESTED WELCOME is available at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/arrested-welcome.

Who is welcome? Hospitality and contemporary art.

During a residency at Full of Noises (Barrow-in-Furness) in September 2021, I built a series of antennas to pick up the Earth’s natural static. In this piece, I use Dan Tapper’s recipe for a hoop antenna and listen for lightning and atmospheric disturbances around Cumbria. This project was support by a DYCP grant from Arts Council England.

Searching for Sferics

According to the ICAF website "ICAF is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global network, and, every three years, an international festival that emerges in Rotterdam, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world. ICAF’s main goal is to offer space for reflection and development of the community arts movement, locally, nationally, and internationally.  

Everything ICAF produces is built around the idea that community art is a worldwide, cutting edge and urgent arts movement – the only one of its kind. Furthermore, for ICAF, understanding the context behind each community arts practice is central to all that we do, to ensure we actively build bridges to communicate between differences in knowledge and experiences across social, economic, geographic, and political boundaries."

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly attended this year’s festival - ICAF 9 - with a view to meeting people and producing a series of podcasts to help capture the energy of the festival and help spread some of the ideas. In this first special ICAF edition of our podcast, Sophie and Owen meet in a room at one of the festival sites, on the last full day of the festival, to look back over what they have experienced.

Reflections Of A Festival

In 2016 five cultural workers felt frustrated by collaborative working. They wanted a tool to openly and critically talk about process. From an initial spark of inspiration they created Cards on the Table, a card game designed to help people have potentially awkward conversations about a collaborative process they had just been through.

Sophie Hope was one of those cultural workers and she went on to develop the game with Henry Mulhall. Owen Kelly talks to them about how it works, whether it works, and what plans they have for it in the future.

Cards On The Table

In Episode 28 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ben Fink and Kate Fowler about the new two-volume publication from Roadside Theater in Appalachia, Art in A Democracy, comprising play scripts and commentary from this stellar community-based theater’s history in Appalachian coal country and beyond, 1975-2000. 

We touch on the need for sharing learning, generation-to-generation; the impact of changes in public funding that impose scarcity and competition; the obstacles capitalism places in the path of cultural democracy; and more.

Art in a Democracy

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include ‘The Right to Record’ (2021) - a creative campaign with disabled activists, which successfully lobbied the Government to change a harmful clause within the benefits system; ‘Meet Me on the Radio’ (2020-21) - a weekly Resonance FM programme co-produced with elders isolated during lockdown; and ‘o-o-radio!’ (2023) - a project at Wysing Arts Centre, constructing homemade radios with d/Deaf young people, to better understand how hearing aids operate.
 
Hannah has a particular interest in transmission arts - she experiments with DIY radios and produces zines to make these technologies accessible. She is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp, and has produced works for Radio Art Zone (2022), Movement Radio (2022), and Radiophrenia (2020-22). 

In this episode Owen Kelly makes a genuine inquiry into the possible interfaces between feminism and ham radio.

Feminist Acts Of Ham Radio

Lady Kitt is a disabled artist and drag king, describing their work as “Mess Making as Social Glue”. Kitt works on long term, collaborative projects driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful.

Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations / sites for exchange made from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines. They use crafting, performance, joy and research to create objects, interactions and events, with the wild ambition of dismantling and mischievously re-crafting spaces and systems they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull.

In this episode Kitt describes a ‘collaborative sandwich’ activity that helps to build relationships at the start of a community project, and ways they make space for listening throughout this work.

Building listening into everything

Alyssa Moxley’s »City Replica Souvenir,« a composition reflecting on the pioneering composer and KSYME co-founder Iannis Xenakis’ unrealised »Athens Polytope.« Moxley attempts to deconstruct the sound politics and massive coordination inherent in Xenakis’ city-sized proposal to a smaller, souvenir-sized aesthetic abstraction.

Credits

Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις took part within a wider project titled Chronotopia, initiated by CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut Athen. Through several events and commissions the initiative  aimed to highlight connections between experimental music, research, and media practice, for instance via re-articulations of pre-modern musical forms and practices, media-archeological research, or archives amongst others. 

Co-produced by CTM Festival, Goethe-Institut Athen, Athens & Epidaurus Festival. In collaboration with KSYME/CMRC.

Mastered by Rashad Becker, Berin.
Artwork by VOJD.

CTM Editions 001
All Rights Reserved to the respective owners.

Chronotopia Echoes / Α​ν​τ​η​χ​ή​σ​ε​ι​ς

City Replica Souvenir

Free download

Alyssa Moxley - City Replica Souvenir

Thursday 1 February 2024
CTM 2024 – Sustain
radialsystem

Pre-recorded talk by Fleur Ramsay followed by discussion with AM Kanngieser, Mere Nailatikau, and KMRU. Moderated by Anita Jóri.

An expert in indigenous rights and international environmental law, Fleur Ramsay will give a pre-recorded input on the current situation of peoples and places of the Pacific, giving context to the installation »Oceanic Refractions.« after which the artists AM Kanngieser, Mere Nailatikau, and KMRU will speak about their installation further with the scholar Anita Jóri, touching among other on how the work was conceptualised and created, on the Pacific context in which it is grounded, as well as on the techniques and ethics of working with testimony and field recordings.

»Oceanic Refractions« was co-produced by CTM Festival and transmediale with funding by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (German Capital Culture Fonds), Creative Australia and with support from the European Commission.

CTM 2024: Listening in Oceania

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio works with community groups for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds.

Searching for Sferics

sound art hannah

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