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Christoph De Boeck - Sound Incorporations | ||||||||||||
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 The Sound Incorporations DVD-ROM documents a research event that took place in Antwerp, Belgium on May 8th, 2004. The DVD contains a set of video presentations given by various artists. The symposium was hosted by the Performance Studies department at the University of Antwerp, MUHKA (Museum of Contemporary Arts) and APT (Arts Performance Theatricality postgraduate programme). The DVD also contains a research paper written by Christoph De Boeck, although the full paper is only available in Dutch. In the English overview of the paper, Christoph attempts to explain the motivation behind the event:
The core of the DVD are the videos, all of which are in English. Some are interviews, others are presentations or lectures. Each video is approximately 30 minutes to one hour long, with 10 minutes for questions, and provides a link to skip straight to the questions. Charo Calvo is interviewed on her sound and music work for dance, theatre and film. She discusses her approach, and how music, dance and film represent certain truths (she uses the a metaphor of movement), and how music can sit between cultures. Calvo also discusses collaborations with Jan Fabre and Wim Vandekeybus. Of particular interest is the sound design work she produced for State of Dogs, a hybrid documentary and fictional story in which she was asked to create a bridge between the metaphysical concept of reincarnation and reality. The discussion is enlightening, and State of Dogs is played towards the end of the interview. Kim Cascone gives a lecture on laptop music and performance, focussing on the history of music production, and Cascone starts the lecture with a performance of what he was playing back in 2004. In some ways one could be critical of the premise of this lecture, but Cascone's observations of laptop music and the shift in cultural trends around music performance and delivery keep it compelling. Thomas Crombez gives an in-depth lecture entitled "Unheard of Theatre", based on his paper in which he investigates the concept of a "transgressive theatre, and what this might mean in the context of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio's latest work, the "Tragedia Endogonidia". Yves De Mey and Alex Waterman (Eavesdropper & Waterman) are interviewed on their collaboration (Untitled - Eves and Waterman, released on Knobsounds), which took the form of cello and digital processing of those cello sounds. Despite a background in drum and bass DJing and production, Eavesdropper is now active in composing electronic music for dance, theater and other performance formats. The interview contains two tracks from Untitled, and a discussion on the background and processes involved in their collaboration. Musicologist Jelle Dierickx gives lecture on the relationship between oral tradition and multimedia, through his research on the sound of poetry (polypoetry, a term he redefines at the start of the lecture). The slides are overlaid across the video, conveying some of the important points clearly. Scott Gibbons, electronic and electro-acoustic composer, is interviewed on his collaboration with Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and discusses sound design, collaboration and alchemy. The interview is of a different format to the others, with Gibbons sitting in a cafe. Gibbons explains the reasons why he was interested in collaborating with Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and the video contains footage of the resulting work. Michael Hoogenhuyze gives an absorbing lecture on image and sound, covering sound design and elements of the history of sound design. Josh Martin a musician and sound designer who works with dance and theatre productions gives a talk on interactive systems and movement sensors. He questions what "interactive" means, and how interaction can be defined and subsequently applied to performance. He gives an example where a person walks across the stage, triggering sound generation, and then he asks "is this interaction?" According to his definition, it is not. The majority of the discussion is on this topic, and the fact that to him, interaction requires perception, rather than simple machines responding to events. The talk features videos of the performances that he's produced. Bart Meuleman and Senjan Jansen are interviewed on their collaborations on a theatre project which is based on the life and works of American artist Louise Bourgeois. Sound Incorporations appears to make an accurate portrayal of the actual event, and the material is thought-provoking. A computer is required to watch the videos, however, and they are not DVD quality. A flash interface is provided to access text, PDFs, videos and links, and this is user-friendly for the most part. The overall production of the DVD-ROM does fall down slightly with the text that covers each video, sometimes it looks as if it's been copy and pasted from each video's related papers, rather than simply being an overview of the lecture itself. Review by Alex Young
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