Experimenta Social #31:
Within Earshot
How is technology facilitating new forms of audience engagement and experience of sound in art? This month’s speakers use digital and analogue technologies to experiment with sound technique, composition and listening, redefining the fields of performance, installation, dance and public art.
Composer and sound artist Nat Grant creates electroacoustic and improvised works for live performance and installation, with an emphasis on storytelling and the intricacies of sound. Performance-maker and Artistic Director of Chamber Made, Tamara Saulwick, utilises digital, mobile and analogue technologies, with a particular emphasis placed on the role of sound in live performance, reflecting on how we connect, confront and negotiate with one another.
Come and listen to our speakers as they discuss collaborating across artforms, their use of technologies and how they confound audience expectations through experimentation.
Experimenta Social is presented in partnership with ACMI X, and supported by Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO.
About the Speakers
Tamara Saulwick
Tamara Saulwick
Tamara Saulwick, is a performance-maker, director and dramaturg who works across and between artforms to create works for theatres, galleries and public spaces. Building on over twenty years experience, Tamara’s individual practice has coalesced in recent years into a singular and compelling voice. Utilising digital, mobile and analogue technologies, with a particular emphasis placed on the role of sound in live performance, her works reflect on how we connect, confront and negotiate with one another. Tamara’s work has toured nationally and internationally and been adapted for radio. Recent touring projects include ‘Endings’, a work for portable record players, reel-to-reel recorders and performers presented in Canada, USA, Ireland and the UK, and immersive audio-visual work Alter, which toured throughout China in 2018.
In 2017 Tamara was appointed Artistic Director of Chamber Made, a Melbourne based company, which has been innovating at the nexus of performance, sound and music for thirty years. In this role, Tamara continues to conceive and direct new works, collaborate with lead artists from outside the company, and mentor emerging artists exploring cross-artform practice. Tamara is an Australia Council Theatre Fellow (2015/2016) and has a PhD in Performance Studies from Victoria University (2015). Her doctoral research investigated dramaturgies of sound in live performance.
http://tamarasaulwick.com
https://chambermade.org
Nat Grant
Nat Grant
Nat Grant is a multi-skilled artist and researcher with more than 15 years experience across live performance, recording, digital arts, and community arts: a drummer, percussionist, composer and sound artist with a focus on creating multidisciplinary, long-form musical compositions, performance events and installations using traditional and graphic notation as well as improvisation. Nat’s music and sound art works are through-composed, texturally focused and minimal, with an emphasis on storytelling and the intricacies of sound.
As a composer Nat has created original chamber music, durational sound art works, and has composed and created sound design for theatre, dance, film, and live art, including for ITCH Productions, Jonathan Homsey Productions, and The Stain. As a teaching artist Nat has been involved in projects with a number of community groups including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Footscray Community Arts Centre, and the Crashendo! Sistema program.
Nat performs regularly at venues around Melbourne and has also presented creative and academic work internationally, at the Sound: Gender: Feminism: Activism conference in Tokyo, in Hong Kong and China with fellow sound artists the Amplified Elephants, the Percussive Arts Society’s Annual Convention and two Y2K live looping festivals in the US. Nat has attended residencies in Melbourne and Mexico, and has had work presented in galleries in Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Collaboration is key to much of Nat’s work, including previous and current partnerships with Jolt Arts, the Adam Simmons’ Creative Music Ensemble, Liquid Architecture, and La Mama Musical.
http://www.natgrantmusic.com/