(Dif)Fusing Dislocations: The Body and Material in Sound Installation and Performance (Working Title)

This project focuses on the subjectivity and embodiment of the sonic performer and on the performing (and listening) body’s location/dislocation within manifestations of “space”: physical, acoustic, and social. In this context, the research explores tenuous states: moments of accident and chance, entropy’s role in improvisational/compositional process, fragile states of being and sounding, absence, presence, distance and dis-integration. 

As method, a series of rules-based improvisational/compositional experiments will be undertaken with the aim of developing gestural/embodied approaches to applying interactive electronics within sound performance and fixed media composition – mining tensions between failure and fluency. These experiments will be carried out to develop diffusion strategies that highlight correspondences between embodiment, material, sound and space. The research includes a study of spatialisation and psychoacoustics, and concepts/methods focusing on interaction between algorithmically-based technology tools and gesture in music improvisation. This project additionally engages with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytically-based writing on abjection and the sublime, grounding the practice-based research in theoretical inquiry that addresses embodied subjectivity. Other studio-based research will explore affect theory and embodiment practices (such as Authentic Movement).

The outcome of the project will be the creation of a set of sound performances and fixed media installations, manifesting relationships between the body, materiality, sound, space and situation, and writing articulating the poetics and affective aspects of this inquiry. Researchers and practitioners across disciplines will be invited to create collaborative projects that engage with this approach and to join in public discussions about collective research.

Andrea Parkins is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer, and electroacoustic improviser who engages with interactive electronics as both material and process. Working with an array of sonic materials – amplified drawing tools, objects and surfaces, electronic feedback and custom-built software and acoustic instruments – her research explores connections and slippages between the body, materiality, sound, site, and space. Parkins’ projects encompass multi-channel sound and intermedia installations, electroacoustic performances and compositions, and scores for contemporary dance, experimental film and intermedia performance. Her works have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), Experimental Intermedia, New York (2006, 2019, 2021), Kunsthalle Basel (2014), Kunsthall Bergen (2018), Borderline Festival, Athens (2011); NEXT Festival, Bratislava (2019), among many others. Recent projects include her site-responsive 14-channel spatial audio and visual exhibition, Sonic Spaces for the Stray, presented in 2021 at ROM for kunst og arkitektur in Oslo; her performance/installation, Two Rooms, Variation 1, for 40 loudspeakers and Solo Performer, premiered in 2016 at Akousma Festival in Montreal; and her amplified performance drawing series, implemented in 2017 at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Parkins’ recordings are released by Important Records, Confront Recordings, Atavistic, Infrequent Seams, and Creative Sources; and her writing has been published by Errant Sound. She has been an invited resident artist at Rauschenberg Residency (US), Elektronmusikstudion-EMS Stockholm, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center (US), Performing Arts Forum (FR), and by Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde. Parkins’ projects have received support from American Composers Forum, New York State Council on the Arts, French-American Cultural Exchange, Musikfonds, Meet the Composer, Norwegian Academy of Music, and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.

www.andreaparkins.com