On Sunday 2 June, FIBER Festival, STUK and the Brakke Grond present a day filled with sound art from the Netherlands and Belgium under the title Neighbouring Frequencies. The programme - consisting of installations, performances, and lectures - is the final day of FIBER Festival, which takes place at various locations in Amsterdam. With Neighbouring Frequencies, the three organisations present the richness and many manifestations of sound art within both countries. Sometimes collaborations and cross-pollination between the neighbouring countries emerge. Visitors are invited to learn about the history, present and possible future of sound art, from the perspective of Flemish-Dutch collaborations, while also looking at developments in Wallonia.
How did sound art develop in both countries? What are specific and unique traditions or trends? What historical and contemporary overlaps and collaborations are there across the border? Expect a day-long programme of lectures and sound art performances, complemented by a compact exhibition featuring four Flemish sound art installations.
Performances & Lectures
The afternoon is dedicated to sound art performances by Dutch and Belgian artists. These are open to the public and will take place in the main hall of the Brakke Grond. The programme will start with two short lectures that will give a brief overview of sound art developments in both countries.
Expect a daytime program featuring lectures and sound art performances, complemented by a compact exhibition showcasing Flemish and Dutch sound art installations. The exhibition Neighbouring Frequencies will be on display at the Brakke Grond from May 30th to June 16th.
What is sound art?
Sound art - a hybrid collection of artworks, self-developed instruments, design projects and performances that all start from an experimental investigation of sound - is gaining increasing public interest. Sound art brings together elements from media art, music culture and composition, architecture, software development, creative coding, and audiovisual creativity. It does this increasingly so, with a social focus. Sound art has many forms and appearances - from spatial installations, experimental stage performances, online projects, to soundwalks and much more.
Neighbouring Frequencies allows visitors to meet a wide selection of makers to discover the richness of the Belgian and Dutch fields. The collaborative initiative between FIBER Festival, STUK, and de Brakke Grond is rooted in sound and experimental art, but aims to create a vibrant platform that embraces different disciplines. The initiative seeks to promote interdisciplinarity and foster connections while welcoming artists, designers, makers, and innovators from different fields to engage in dialogue, explore and create new paradigms within the artistic and creative landscape.
The program on June 2nd is part of the FIBER festival (May 29th to June 2nd). In addition to the lecture and performance program on the 2nd of June, the exhibition Neighbouring Frequencies will be on display from May 30th to June 16th.
Performance program
Suzan Peeters
As an experimental accordionist, Peeters expands the acoustic sound spectrum of the accordion by using objects, transducers and live electronics. The core object is a massage board, which makes her body and the instrument vibrate and oscillate. Sound and movement are closely connected as the sound is following the movement of the bellows. By attaching a transducer to the bellows, the accordion is transformed into a speaker. The transducer offers an extra dimension to the instrument, creating texture and a subtle amplification to the acoustic sound.
Maria Komarova
As part of our sound art programme Neighbouring Frequenties at de Brakke Grond, Maria Komarova will present her latest performance Krajïna. In Krajïna the artist sonically manipulates objects found on the coast of northern Portugal, in combination with field recordings, and electronics. Krajïna is an alluvial gathering of bark, cork, rubber, wires, roots, plastic, electret capsules, motors, batteries, stones, speakers, and integrated circuits. These objects resonate, shake, feedback, and tremble, altering the polarity of the meanings we assign to them.
Amos Peled
Phantom Limb is a project exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and a black box interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. The artist revisits a personal memory archive of time spent in the seeming stillness of healthcare centres to investigate conceptions such as the distance of the human body from the self, the hierarchical relationship between the inside and the outside, pain as a poetic message, and the lack of internal symmetry. On Sunday, June 2, Amos will perform as part of the focus day on sound art from the Netherlands and Belgium.
Aernoudt Jacobs
Aernoudt Jacobs presents the Dutch premiere of Akoetrope. A unique and self-developed rotating sound machine, which is both an intuitive device and scientific strategy for understanding the persistence of sound cognition. The device is freely inspired from the Phénakisticope/Zoetrope devices that were invented around 1833 that use the phenomenon of iconic memory (or persistence of vision) to create a moving image in the human brain.
In the sonic domain we can find a relatively similar phenomenon called ‘echoic memory’ – sounds which resonate in the mind and are replayed for a brief amount of time shortly after being heard. Both phenomena rely on short term sensory memory information that lingers on the threshold between perceiving and remembering.
