“Listening where you are what you are: around the microphone “: A workshop at Altitudes Festival

“Listening where you are what you are: around the microphone”
A workshop by Nilo Gallego and Rui Costa
A Binaural/Nodar production for Altitudes Festival (Campo Benfeito, Portugal)
Monday, August 10th – Thursday, August 13th, 2015 (14h00-17h00)

“Maybe we can’t hear hearing but certainly we can observe the act of hearing.”
Marcel Duchamp

Sound is often refered as something neutral that is sensed in the same way by everyone. It’s not like that. There are a thousand of nuances that depend on those who participate in the listening experience (the speaker, the listener, their personal memories and moods etc.) but also on the recording and broadcasting media. On the other hand, there is the actual, specific real (as in Campo Benfeito, Castro Daire, Portugal) of a dense and subjective spatial/durational context.

During the workshop “Listen where you are what you are: around the microphone” more than *doing* (music, sound) participants will be *translating* (space, movement, thought) in sound traits, which will be organized in a final collective sound performance.

Photo credit: “Octubre”: Recording sounds by Sheryl Sánchez “TV Cultura (Peru). Some Rights Reserved

Nilo Gallego. Ponferrada, León (Spain), 1970. Nilo is a musician who conducts performances in which sound experimentation is the starting point. His works have a playful component, seeking the participation of others. He plays drums, percussion and electronics. He recently developed several collective projects like “Lab 987” with Chus Domínguez and Silvia Zayas presented at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2013/14. “Emisiones cockatoo” with Arantxa Martinez, a project around radio and choreography presented at Inpresentable Festival, Madrid in 2012 and “Pigmeo Orquestina” with Chus Domínguez, Noemi Fidalgo and Raul Alaejos, dedicated to site-specific performance.

Rui Costa is a sound artist living in Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1998. He is a founding member of the cultural organization Binaural/Nodar and presently he is the editorial director and strategic adviser. In the early 2000’s, Rui Costa collaborated with the Spanish musician Iñaki Ríos, with whom he developed electronic composition systems programmed on Max/MSP, Lisa and Csound and developed a series of site-specific works in Nodar, with subsequent presentations in Portugal, Spain and the United States. In 2008, Rui collaborated with the Italian vocal performer Manuela Barile in a large-scale project entitled “La Scatola”, which was conceived as a series of installations and audiovisual performances. The premiere was at Binaural/Nodar’s artist residency center. This project was also presented in Spain, France and Italy. Since 2009, Rui Costa has been developing a series of sound installations entitled “Sightseeing for the Blind”, which deal with the tourist experience of a city. Until now this project has been presented in Lisbon and Aveiro (Portugal). Rui Costa is a regular speaker in lectures and gives workshops dedicated to sound art. Recently, Rui and Maile Colbert did a series of conferences, workshops and performances in several universities and contemporary art centers in the United States about Binaural/Nodar’s artist residency program and context-specific art in general.