12 December 2008 19:30

Click on image for slide show.

An evening of innovative contemporary music performed by the Wrong Ensemble, an experimental music group established in 2008 by Polish visual artist and composer Wojciech Kosma. Wrong Ensemble is dedicated to performing musical and music theatre works by non-musical artists. For this performance the London based group of amateur and professional classical musicians were Phil D’Aroso, Sarah Kaldor, Nicola Kearey, Kate Lush, Sonja Paço-Rocchia, Wojciech Pucilowski and Chris White.

The performance included Kosma’s recent compositions, ‘Headfuck’ and ‘Blowjob’, ‘Off, On, Off, On, Off, On, Off, On, Off, On, Off, On, Off, On, Off, On’, a composition by Berlin based artist Oliver Laric, and ‘Minesweeper’ by Polish new-media artist Jan Simon. Scores for ‘Headfuck’ are available, please contact the gallery for details.

Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His artworks and performances are often spatial, sonic, obliquely interactive and poetic, creating speculative aesthetic interventions in public and gallery space. He has exhibited, undertaken commissions and residencies and performed widely in a variety of institutions and arts organisations, as well as informal networks of cultural producers. Most recently in MOMA Warsaw and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is currently research student at Goldsmiths University in London. www.wojciechkosma.com

Oliver Laric studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and, together with Aleksandra Domanovic, Christoph Priglinger and Georg Schnitzer, is one of the co-founders of the platform VVORK. His recent exhibitions include 50 50 2008 ↓ ↑ TOUCH MY BODY, Seventeen, London, I love the Horizon, Le Magasin-Centre National d’art Contemporain, Grenoble, Montage: Unmonumental Online, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and Becks Fusions, ICA, London. oliverlaric.com

Jan Simon studied psychology and sociology at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. He works chiefly with films and interactive installations, which make use of motifs from computer games. His works were exhibited at a number of group shows, both in Poland and abroad. In 2006 he was nominated for the Passport of Polityka award.

Headfuck

Headfuck, the main work presented by IMT is an attempt to write music in an ‘universal’ way. The score is folded into rules, which from a simple and short notation create more complex vertical and horizontal musical structures. The score is a set of commands that requires performing real-time operations and various perceptive tasks to render instructions for playing the instrument. These operations (ranging from counting, adding and subtracting to listening, looking and using senses otherwise) are feed with specific parameters.

Various events are parameterized: other players’ sounds (rhythmical or pitch characteristics), physiological functions (pulse, eye-blinking or breath cycle) or visual elements (audience‘s features or light changes). Using these parameters musicians execute in-score algorithms and generate events, that then become parameters for other algorithms, transforming players into an interiorly dependant and interactive network and - given the random (e.g. eye-blinks) or relative (perception) nature of events - unfold the score in a chaotic way.

However, development rules for that chaos are precisely notated and up to some degree interactions can be predicted, particularly in the most basic individual phrases. What cannot be controlled compositionally is the evolution of the piece: it isn’t conducted or better said: it is conducted by multiple distributed units, synchronized with players’ heartbeats or perception. Musicians have to make notation as they perform it and in the course of this process use their minds extensively. Such minds’ engagement has important consequences for music: performers are left without the opportunity to label their sound emotionally. It is clear that players have to fail regularly and this struggle creates constant tension, which is even more amplified by necessity of focusing on occurrences like one’s pulse or eye-blinks, resulting in almost meditative state in musicians (best reflected on their faces).

Headfuck and Other Contemporary Chamber Music was curated by Pawel Kaminski and supported by the Polish Cultural Institute

Posted under archive-listing, events-listing