NEWS
AUGUST 2016, UNTOLD STORIES, Quiet Cue, Berlin
Composition for WiFi, GPS, Architecture, Furniture and People, explores sound as a method of socio-political investigation. Working with the properties of sound as a vibrational force WiFi and GPS networks are sonified into sub-frequencies specifically tuned to the room, thereby causing architecture and furniture to vibrate. By translating humanly imperceptible networks into the medium of sonic vibration, we are reminded that every object and every being, contains resonate frequencies that can be activated through sound.
Simultaneously used for global communication and surveillance, WiFi and GPS infrastructures inform our everyday experience by expanding our urban boundaries to the geopolitical and information channels of the world. Providing an audible presence for these otherwise intangible infrastructures allows for a direct sensory experience that encourages listening as a mode of examination.
16th JUNE 2016, FILTER V, SPEKTRUM, Berlin
An initiative of ZONA DYNAMIC, the FILTER - Sound Art Series is an edition of temporary collaborations between 2-3 artists focusing on conceptual, context-reflective artworks that intervene in temporary spaces.
FILTER V is an experiment dealing with the power dynamics inherent to surveillance states across both physical and digital domains. Focusing on the intangibility of monitoring and capture infrastructures embedded within the networks we connect to and communicate with everyday - how does this affect collective movement?
Realised as a participative performance and sound installation in collaboration with Liat Berdugo, Eliza Goldox and Holger Heissmeyer. In the guise of aerobic instructions, collective movement is tracked and the body is used as a point of analysis. Liat Berdugo's Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics incorporates everyday gestures such as zooming, swiping and flicking, that our technological devices have taught us to do, commenting on the corporate reach into our homes, psyches and bodies. The captured data is translated into sonic rhythms, enabling a listening mode of examination and creating an ongoing ritual and soundscape.
14th MARCH 2016, Ambush Gallery, Sydney
Panel discussion with Gudrun Gut, Brooke Olsen, Gail Priest about visibility of women in music and the arts. Hosted by the Goethe Institute.
25th January 2016, Intangible Threat,
a showcase by class Sound, Art and Technology-poiesis, UdK.
Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel 2016 festival, Berlin
“Sound, Art and Technology-poiesis” is an artistic praxis course at UNI.K – Studio for Sound Art and Sound Research, Faculty of Music, Berlin University of the Arts. Led by Daisuke Ishida and sound artist Jasmine Guffond during the winter semester 2015/2016. Participants were encouraged to create a work investigating contemporary personal, social and political issues with a special focus on the intangibility of surveillance in the digital domain, through the use of the similarly ephemeral medium of sound.
Interview with Stray Landings about music and recent projects.
facebook.com/jasmineguffond
soundcloud.com/jasmineguffond
ART
ANYWHERE ALL THE TIME, A PERMANENT SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR LIFE
android application / listening walk
Sound Studies Master Austellung, Kühlhaus, Berlin, 2015 Kongress der Möglichkeiten, Kunstraum, Bethanian, Berlin, 2015 Shedsound, Experimentelle Klangkunstreihe, Shedhalle, Tübingen, 2015 Liquid Architecture Festival, The Channel, Arts Centre, Melbourne and First Draft, Sydney, 2015
An application for android devices that sonifies wireless WI-FI and GPS networks, providing a sonic presence to phenomena that usually lies beyond human perception. Intersecting with the social, technological and political convergences within contemporary, mobile society – one walks through the city intercepting these wireless global infrastructures, the sonification of which, creates a compositional mapping within our everyday environments.
Portable smart devices, by the very characteristics that determine their success, also make them particularly suitable as surveillance devices. Wi-fi technology, cell phone towers and locative media provide specific geo-reference to material territories so that it becomes possible to quite literally ‘follow the actor’.
By providing a direct sensory experience of data through sound I’m interested in how it feels to live in a culture where our public space is mediated by technological infrastructure that simultaneously empowers via communication and compromises via mass surveillance. Do our smart devices operate primarily as bridges or walls?
ANYWHERE ALL THE TIME, A PERMANENT SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR LIFE - Walking down the main street of Reykjavík, Iceland
SOUND SELFIE - encrypt your identity in sound
computer / face osc freeware / max patch / usb armbands
West Space, Melbourne, September 2015 Technology and Protest Conference, Technical University, Berlin, 2014
Stationed at the Technology & Protest Conference at the Technical University, Berlin & again at West Space gallery in Melbourne - I provided participants with the opportunity to make their personal Sound Selfie. Looking into the camera on my laptop, facial recognition algorithms detected and analysed conference / gallery attendees’ faces, and the individual facial data generated sound. Exploring modes of participatory surveillance as well as making a parallel action to the usual chain of events for the Selfie, the Sound Selfies were instantly uploaded and archived to a Facebook page.
Investigating how the surveillance of identity can lead to a biological reductionism, I programmed a basic form of digital synthesis (FM synthesis) to emphasise the reductive process of digitally encoding the face into a few basic measurements. By taking measurements at regular intervals and storing them as numbers, digital (binary) encodes by marking thresholds of absolute distinction. The gap between two thresholds is a range of quality, but digitisation imposes a uniform value on this range thereby erasing difference. Digital excludes excess, singularity and uniqueness in favour of static fixed forms. I’m interested in what this means when our identities, choices, and personalities are transformed into streams of data under the algorithmic gaze.
*Facial recognition technologies (FRT) use mathematical algorithms to create a digital template of a person’s face. FRT when employed as a surveillance technology requires no involvement from the person that is being surveyed or incidentally captured by camera. Unlike other biometrics FRT can operate anonymously in the background. People do not need to surrender their face image as they would their fingerprint or their iris scan. A face can be captured and (de)coded without the person’s consent or active participation. FRT is therefore considered to be a ‘silent technology’.
THE INANIMATE
site specific audio visual installation 35 cardboard boxes / video projector / ghetto blaster
Protolab, Kleinmanchnow, Germany. 22.02.2014 Collaboration with Ilan Katin
By treating mundane cardboard boxes aesthetically, rather than for their intended functional purpose, we aimed to invoke a sensual experience and appreciation, that all objects have a life beyond our immediate and static perception of them.
Expanding beyond the rectangular screen, through the illumination of mundane objects, a reshaping of materiality takes place. The projected image, no longer restricted to the conventional frame, allows for the minds eye to become the frame, creating a link between cinema, animation and sculpture. The soundtrack was made entirely from recordings of cardboard boxes being ripped, tapped, cut up, punched caressed, and provides a voice for these inanimate objects.
MUSIC
YELLOW BELL Sonic Pieces, 2015. LP/CD/DDL
'The production here is just incredibly good - an absolute masterclass in restraint through the arrangements, and fearlessness through her use of frequencies - taking you through emotional and sonic highs and lows without ever sounding contrived.'
- Boomkat , January 2015
'Danger may lurk, yet the listener is blissfully unaware. Yellow Bell, the album, is a demonstration of sounds that defy rules.'
- A Closer Listen
'From the buzz, hiss, crackling and crunching, a balanced counterpart of distilled synth layers and short melodic patterns arise in a way that requires talent, craft and feeling. Jasmine Guffond (aka. Jasmina Maschina, aka. Minit) confirms this with her exciting album.'
- Karsten Zimalla - Westzeit
'It’s those glimpses of more accessible beauty, handled so well and coming out of the more nebulous and enveloping passages, that heighten the stakes and enhance what might have been a perfectly adequate exercise in delicate ambient into something deeply entrancing and harder to define.'
- Sounds From the Outer Reaches
ELEPHANT - Music Video by Ilan Katin
LIVE
Nov 19th, Bend/Break, Biegungen Festival, Ausland, Berlin
Nov 26th, Instituto Cultural de Leon, Mexico
Nov 26th, Instituto Cultural de Leon, Mexico