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Jul
28

Open Haus Mileece Selected Algorithmic and Biogenerative Works, 1999 - 2024

Series

(Transmissions)
Soundwalk Collective

Summary

Where

Reethaus

When

Sunday, July 28, 2024
14:00-20:00

What

Listening Experience

On July 28, Reethaus welcomes listeners to 360-degree spatial sound immersion by Mileece, the pioneering sonic artist and biophilic technologist. Playing with machines and physics to transform the bio-electrical information of humans and plants into sound, Mileece creates sonic experiences that prompt reflection on the invisible powers in which we are immersed. The composition presented in this Listening Experience combines new recordings and her archive of selected algorithmic and biogenerative works from 1999 to today, moving through her sound design journey. 

This includes new iterations of previous pieces, recordings from various biomes around the world, as well as the groundbreaking album called “Formations” from 2004, based on natural phenomena such as light’s changing patterns.

Mileece creates installations that transform the bio-emissions of people and plants into harmonic, spatial, generative elements of symbiotic composition, delightfully reminding us of our intrinsic, irrevocable biophilia. These latter sounds emerge across species boundaries through a hand-built technology called PiP (Plant Interface for People), a custom “electrobotanigraph” and software system that Mileece created in 2005 during her residency at the innovation lab of the London School of Economics. PiP senses and digitizes the subtle voltages emitted by plants such that they can directly animate an array of synthesizers programmed in SuperCollider.

Mileece’s process evolves the earliest plant biodata experiments carried out in the sixties, departing from basic frequency modulation into the full-throated, textured expression afforded by plants. The gesture is Mileece’s contribution to what technology could be—something that amplifies nature and leads us back to a wilder earth.

Series

(Transmissions)

Soundwalk Collective invites key influences and frequent collaborators featured across their extended body of work to participate in a series that samples from the past 60 years of sonic arts. Reflecting a personal view on collaboration as an essential aspect of the creative process, the series presents a broad summary of the sonic landscapes that they have developed over the past two decades. Seminal masterworks and newer pieces blend into a cohesive yet varied ensemble that spans musique concrète, performance art, contemporary and mystical music. All of these genres have in common a meditative dimension, a transitional nature that has been at the core of Soundwalk Collective’s work.

Other events of the series:

Featured

Mileece

Mileece is a sound artist and inventor of biophilic devices on a mission to promote ecology through technology and the arts. For over thirty years she has hand-built experimental technologies to drive immersive sonic-organic environments intended to “illuminate our innate and hidden connections to the biosphere.” Her installations and performances have been presented in museums such as the MoMA and the TATE Modern and broadcast across the world. She has lectured extensively on phytophilic design at universities and institutions including UCLA, LACMA and Kew Gardens and has published essays on topics ranging from generative music to waste-to-energy systems. Mileece works in a studio filled with gadgets, instruments, notes and plants. She sleeps in an Airstream trailer that is stationed next to the miniature botanical garden she built to inspire her creations.

Featured

Soundwalk Collective

Soundwalk Collective is the contemporary sonic arts platform of founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli. Working with a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, they develop site- and context-specific sound projects through which to examine conceptual, literary or artistic themes.

Evolving along multi-disciplinary lines, Soundwalk Collective has cultivated long-term creative collaborations with musician Patti Smith, late director Jean-Luc Goddard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Waltz, and actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others. In doing so, their practice engages in the narrative potential of sound across mediums such as art installations, dance, music and film.

A unique artistic approach to sound ties together the different forms in which Soundwalk Collective work. Whether in original composition or the use of archival recordings, they treat sound as material that is both tactile and poetic. This allows them to create layered narratives that address ideas of memory, time, love and loss.

Their original score for ‘All The Beauty and the Bloodshed’ (dir. Laura Poitras) won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. More recently, they have scored ‘Stendhal Syndrome’, the latest moving-image work by photographer and artist Nan Goldin for her exhibition at Gagosian NYC. In 2024, they are showing ‘Correspondences’, a new exhibition and performance with Patti Smith at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, the BAM in New York, and the Medellin Modern Art Museum, that weaves an audio-visual journey through literature, art, philosophy and the current state of our planet in reaction to the impact of climate change.