SOUNDCULTURE '99 Backgrounder
Sound art has existed on the edge of art for decades, and this is one of the first events where sound is central. SoundCulture recognises all the possible varieties of how sound can be used to explore, divine and communicate. It celebrates sound as a viable art form.
Sound art is a relatively new artistic field that embraces a variety of art practices where sound is a key component. The first festival held in Sydney in 1991 featured sound performance, sound sculpture, site-specific public art works, events, spectacles, new media and technologies, radio projects, invented instruments, exhibitions, and symposia and involved sixty participants in 12 different venues.
The next festival to be held in Tokyo was smaller but more tightly curated, allowing interesting collaborations to occur between its participants. Richard Dale curated the New Zealand contingent - comprising Philip Dadson, John Lyall and Juliet Palmer - and the festival proved very productive, both professionally and artistically, for these artists. Philip Dadson has since presented his Tokyo piece, Art Now, at the Museum of New Zealand; John Lyall has presented further versions of his piece at Artspace and Juliet Palmer has continued to develop her career as a composer with several notable international commissions, including one for the Argo label.
The third festival, held in San Francisco, was huge. It involved 228 participants and 32 presenting organisations from the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, while 17 exhibitions, 10 panels and 55 performances and other events were throughout the San Francisco Bay area. The range of sound practice included radio and telephonic works, acoustic ecology, noise, cultural theory, appropriation, high and low-tech activities, educational events for kids, sound works for public spaces, sound for film and so on. This wide array of works was matched by the variety of circumstances in which the work was found.
Events were held in museums, universities, public and commercial galleries, performance spaces, warehouses, on beaches, on radio waves, in a shopping mall, in a harbour, in a cinema, on a public bus, on the internet and in night clubs. Several events highlighted the function of sound as it plays out in a social landscape. Don Wherry's Harbour Symphony, played on the horns of a number of boats moored in the Port of Oakland, kicked off the performance with a noontime performance for intrigued office workers, tourists and SoundCulture participants. Kazue Mizushima's outdoor performance brought automobile traffic on a nearby road to a crawl, and Kathy Kennedy's piece, involving a spare soundscore via a small transmitter and augmented by the improvisations of dozens of performers, gently undid a shopping mall.
SoundCulture '99 will be a strongly bicultural and multicultural event with a deliberately equitable representation of cultures from around the region. It will be curated to emphasise the "culture" in SoundCulture - the distinct sound traditions, practices and environments that feed into contemporary sound practice.
Current venues for SoundCulture '99 are as follows: