Reviewing

Electropixel 12

Ben Owen, Solar Return, Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi

Horspiel Machine

For Governor’s Island Electropixel 12 proposes an evening of sound art and live cinema centered around the idea of Nature and cities with performances that includes the sounds of nature (water, insects, stratosphere, trees…) and listening in different cities around the globe.

Live outdoor performances with Ben Owen, Solar Return, Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi and the Horspiel Machine.

Saturday August 6, 2022 – 7 pm – 9pm FREE

Harvestworks Art and Technology Program, Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island

A Festival of emerging digital cultures and free electronic practices, Electropixel is part of an international network of electronic arts festivals. The festival opens a singular space allowing the meeting of artists (audiovisual, musicians, visual artists, intermedia, performers, etc.), theorists, programmers, tinkerers, and inventors of all kinds and of the factories of the everyday.

For this new edition of the Electropixel festival, we plan to deepen the relationship to the collective and to shared creation through a network of international exchanges. The festival continues to imagine and think about the new modalities of artistic creation during the pandemic and in particular the disintegration of the idea of commonality and sharing. We need to find links in creation, new ways to explore new writing together rather than being isolated, confined, separated. How to build creations that represent multiple and delocalized collectives.

For Governor’s Island Electropixel 12 proposes an evening of sound art and live cinema centered around the idea of Nature and cities with performances that includes the sounds of nature (water, insects, stratosphere, trees…) and listening in different cities around the globe.

http://electropixel.org | http://apo33.org

•       BIOS
BEN OWEN
Ben Owen works with sound with various approaches, improvised, recording, listening and scored pieces. His instruments are simple electronics; played, mixed, open to their own trajectory of small sound, broken and accidental. His interest is in the sustained, immersive, minimal soundscape which interacts within a space as well as as a part of an outside environment. Over the past few (pre-pandemic) years he’s found more interest in presenting works, performing and recording in outdoor spaces.

“Ben Owen is an investigator, explorer and illustrator of the physical properties of the world we inhabit. His work across multiple media, including sound, video and, importantly, stone litho printmaking, is motivated by a desire to more deeply understand the inner life and character of the materials he works with, rather than an impulse to control or implement them. While Ben doesn’t shy away from the use of the computer, he is much more interested in the rich dynamism of the structures and forces he investigates — electricity, light, ink, spatial acoustics, field recordings — than in the power and precision of software-driven techniques.” – Morgan Packard

http://benowen.info/ | https://ben-owen.bandcamp.com/

SOLAR RETURN

Nantes based artists Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi created Solar Return in 2009. Taking electromagnetic phenomena as a starting point for their audio creations. They have produced various scores for dual audio synths/oscillators/DIY electronics etc…which reflect patterns and electromagnetic events such as solar flares and inner city mobile phone masts, hidden sonic environments as well as the unfathomable audio world of kitchen appliances. Through their performances the duo tunnel deep into the world of frequency, static and sound as a physical experience, where they mix environmental recordings from the cosmos to pylons to Nuclear power plants with Live electronics and various antennas as instruments. Jenny Pickett was the first to perform Live using the huge VLF antenna as an instrument with her performance Cosmic Power Lines at the HAB Galerie / MusĆ©e des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2013 and then with Solar Return playing the physical space, the audience and the architecture of the venue through a movement.
https://solarreturn.bandcamp.com/ | https://www.facebook.com/solarreturnmusic

JENNY PICKETT
Jenny Pickett’s practice crosses: sculpture, sound, drawing, video, interactivity and performance. This plurality of mediums garner layers of meaning, she often explores her subject through the influences of sound upon the gaze and vice versa, altering both sonic and visual counterparts, asking the viewer to rethink their encounter with the oeuvre. Pickett’s preoccupation lies at the point at which technology (new or ancient) becomes the landscape or the body by accumulating their prior states, our prior norms.
http://jennypickett.art

JULIEN OTTAVI
Doctor in Arts, Composer, Artist, Curator. A media activist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongue destroyer, experimental filmmaker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and body performances. Since 1997, he has developed composition work using voice and its transformation through computers. Active developer of audio/visual programs with Puredata, he has also developed for many years DIY electronics (radio transmitters, oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, video transmitters…etc) in the perspective of knowledge sharing on technological development.


http://noiser.org

https://soundcloud.com/thenoiser

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYwTCBFsGnGfkH0t327FYsQ

Ben Owen

Ben Owen works with sound with various approaches, improvised, recording, listening and scored pieces. His instruments are simple electronics; played, mixed, open to their own trajectory of small sound, broken and accidental. His interest is in the sustained, immersive, minimal soundscape which interacts within a space as well as as a part of an outside environment. Over the past few (pre-pandemic) years he’s found more interest in presenting works, performing and recording in outdoor spaces.

“Ben Owen is an investigator, explorer and illustrator of the physical properties of the world we inhabit. His work across multiple media, including sound, video and, importantly, stone litho printmaking, is motivated by a desire to more deeply understand the inner life and character of the materials he works with, rather than an impulse to control or implement them. While Ben doesn’t shy away from the use of the computer, he is much more interested in the rich dynamism of the structures and forces he investigates — electricity, light, ink, spatial acoustics, field recordings — than in the power and precision of software-driven techniques.” – Morgan Packard

Solar Return

Nantes based artists Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi created Solar Return in 2009. Taking electromagnetic phenomena as a starting point for their audio creations. They have produced various scores for dual audio synths/oscillators/DIY electronics etc…which reflect patterns and electromagnetic events such as solar flares and inner city mobile phone masts, hidden sonic environments as well as the unfathomable audio world of kitchen appliances. Through their performances the duo tunnel deep into the world of frequency, static and sound as a physical experience, where they mix environmental recordings from the cosmos to pylons to Nuclear power plants with Live electronics and various antennas as instruments. Jenny Pickett was the first to perform Live using the huge VLF antenna as an instrument with her performance Cosmic Power Lines at the HAB Galerie / MusĆ©e des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2013 and then with Solar Return playing the physical space, the audience and the architecture of the venue through a movement.

Jenny Pickett

Jenny Pickett is a member of the artists’ collective APO33 (art and technology research lab) in France, where she works on projects ranging from interactive installations to experimental music and performance. She is a member of various ensembles including: Onsemble (Orchestra of Nantes and St Nazaire), Orgone (Contemporary percussion group), OFFAL (Orchestra for Females and/at Laptops) and forms part of the duo Solar Return with Julien Ottavi. Pickett is a PhD Candidate at Cyprus University of Technology where she is attached to the Media Arts and Design Research Lab (MADlab). Her research interests include critical approaches to music and technology, interactivity, hybrid and participatory practices in art. Her thesis is : Do it with others (DIWO), Methodologies for artistic production and education. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Arts and an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently a lecturer in ā€˜Art and Techniques of Representation’ at the Nantes School of Architecture (ENSA).

Julien Ottavi

Doctor in Arts, Composer, Artist, Curator. A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and body performances. Since 1997, he develops a composition work using voice and its transformation through computer. Active developer of audio/visual programs with Puredata, he has also developed since many years DIY electronics (radio transmitters, oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, video transmitters…etc) in the perspective of knowledge sharing on technological development. Main developer for the Gnu/Linux operating system APODIO for digital art and A/V & streaming diffusion. His practices is not limited to the art spheres but crosses different fields from technological development to philosophy / theoretical research, bio-mimetic analysis & experimentation. For many years he reflects on the relations between experimental practices and collective practices within the creation of autonomous collective groups, putting in question the authorship strategy of the ā€œart ideologyā€.