focus: default x iii - 11.10.2024 with Nika Son, Roc Montoriol & Katarina Kadijević, and Adomas Palekas
In this focus newsletter, we would like to share with you more information on our upcoming program
default x iii, Friday, 11th of October, iii workspace, Willem Dreespark 312, 2531 SX, The Hague
Nika Son, Roc Montoriol & Katarina Kadijević, Adomas Pelakas
On Friday, 11th of October, the third season of our sound series will begin with our first event in collaboration with iii (instrument inventors initiative), an artist-run, community platform supporting new interdisciplinary practices linking performance, technology, and the human senses. For our sixteenth program, taking place at iii workspace, we’ve curated an evening of performances by Nika Son, Roc Montoriol & Katarina Kadijevíc, and Adomas Palekas, evoking specific listening modes through both sound and image. - Read more information on the performances below.
doors open at 19:30, performances start at 20:00
Tickets | For this event, ticket prices are based on a sliding scale between 6 and 15 euros. Please select the amount that balances best your love for the program and your current budget.
Nika Son - ‘Scatter’
Within Scatter, Nika Son uses multi-channel sound, video, objects, and light to observe the realms of sleeplessness (insomnia), - flickering between fatigue, restlessness, and yearning. The piece explores how our senses adapt in differing states, probing the distinctions between hearing and truly listening. In a world of constant stimuli and information, the artist plays with shifts in perception, memory, coincidence, and the varying sense of time, while blurring the distinction between what is audible and what is actually visible. Tones, noises, rhythms as well as voices, languages, and ways of speaking interact with surrounding darkness and forced incidences of light.
Nika Son works as a musician, artist, film composer, DJ, and curator in Hamburg, Germany. In her compositions, video- and soundworks she examines multi-sensory perception, its bounderies and interaction, but also forms of manipulation and illusion. Influenced by Musique Concrète and the outer space of electronic music, she plays with modified and fragmented concrete sounds, interwoven with digital and analog synthesis, broken rhythms, voices, and modulated tape, translated into an unusual musical language, as if one watches the audible. Her latest album ‘ASLOPE’ was released via VIS earlier this year, following up albums via labels such as Entr'acte and Futura Resistenza. In her work as a sound artist for experimental film, she is among other responsible for the score and sound design of Helena Wittmann's acclaimed films ‘DRIFT’ and ‘Human Flowers of Flesh’. Most recently she scored the film ‘Failed Emptiness’, the latest feature by filmmaker and artist Mika Taanila. Nika Son furthermore hosts regular art and music events at various venues in Hamburg, and is co-curator of the festival Papiripar together with Felix Kubin and Florian Bräunlich.
Roc Montoriol & Katarina Kadijević - ‘Plants, Speaker Cones, Solar Cells, Lasers, and Bluetooth Speakers’
Plants are often regarded as silent, however they engage with sounds in many different ways. What stories of listening do vegetal encounters entail? Roc Montoriol and Katarina Kadijević have tuned their ears to various hearing membranes. Drawing inspiration from sound artists and bioacousticians, they craft DIY vibration sensors and microphones, by modifying piezo components, ultrasonic microphone capsules, or solar cells. In this performance, they create listening spaces engaging different plant recordings, and other vegetal soundings. By means of speakers, exciters or transducers, vibration motors, solar cells, lasers, or daily objects, Roc & Katarina enact stories of plant listening, and perform vegetal encounters.
Roc Montoriol and Katarina Kadijević are two artists currently based in the Hague and studying at the Institute of Sonology. Their performances combine an interest in plant bioacoustics, sonic ecology, and performativity to investigate geo-biological entwinements between plants, humans, and places.
Adomas Palekas - ‘Rehydration : for four electro-organic circuits - Aerials’
With four electronic circuits, waterdrops, sound, and video projection Adomas Palekas emits the idea: For sound to grow, water must flow. As the drop lands upon a node, organic and inorganic matter dissolves, seeping into the dehydrated pores and cavities, bridging molecular, electric and sonic bonds. Like life on earth, Aerials exist in relationship with water – water that dissolves reagents, conducts reactions, hosts microorganisms and completes the oscillating circuit. The liquid intersection invites environment, both biotic and abiotic to act upon their vitality, whether it’d be temperature, humidity, chemical species, microbial life and it’s residues or even gravity. Fragile, vulnerable, and exposed they oscillate.
Adomas Palekas is a sound artist, engineer, and biotechnologist who works at the intersection of science and art. His current focus is creating sound devices that invite biotic and abiotic worlds to enact upon the music-making process. With these interfaces, Adomas explores processes beyond our sonic perception: microbial metabolism, (in)organic bodies or chemical reactions become the primary compositional forces in the emergent sound works. His creative practice involves design of musical instruments and environment sensing interfaces, performance, field recordings, sound collage, and work with recycled/upcycled materials. He is furthermore involved with the DIY-communities Studium-P and Palanga Street Radio in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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default x iii is financially supported by The Municipality of The Hague and Creative Industries Fund NL.
About Us
default den haag is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in the Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound art performances since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and lectures. - read more