The program includes performances, installations, and panel discussions that present and examine the manifestations, contestations, and provocations of gender in contemporary music and sound art. These cultural fields are often presented as neutral or neuter, having often escaped the gender-inflected interrogation that has informed other art forms, such as media arts and photography, in Europe and the US during the past three decades.
 

GenDyTrouble: Cyber*Feminist Computer Music

2015, Annie Goh

GenDyTrouble: Cyber*Feminist Computer Music is a multi-channel sound performance, part of the larger project GenDyTrouble. The performance is made up of several parts or miniatures, each drawing on a different aspect of technofeminist, cyberfeminist, gender studies and queer theory discourses, exploring these within the typically masculinist genre of computer music.

The project GenDyTrouble has its beginning point in the common etymological ground between generative art/music and gender studies (Latin: genus, generis, generare, Greek: genos, gonos). It performs a symbolic collision between Iannis Xenakis' "Génération Dynamique Stochastique" approach to waveform synthesis (shortened to "GenDy") and Judith Butler's foundational work of queer theory "Gender Trouble" and seeks to understand generative processes as a source of emancipatory potential. The impetus of computer music's fascination with generative processes and algorithmic composition is re-interpreted using sonic transformations as a metaphor for the construction of gender.

Annie Goh (UK) is an artist and researcher working primarily with sound, space, electronic media and generative processes and their social and cultural contexts. She has been based in Berlin since 2008 and holds degrees in Sound Studies, Generative Art and German and European Studies. Recent exhibitions and performances include Wendelstein-Höhlenmediale (Brannenburg), Arthackday at LEAP and transmediale (Berlin), Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), NGBK (Berlin), Heidelberger Kunstverein (Heidelberg), Ars Electronica (Linz), NK (Berlin) and Klangstaetten Stadtklaenge (Braunschweig). She was awarded the Elsa-Neumann Scholarship of Berlin in February 2014 for her project "Myths of Echo". She has co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival since 2013 and is currently a guest lecturer at Berlin University of Arts and Humboldt University, Berlin.

•

Plot

2015, Lynn Book & Katharina Klement

Land, story, plan, scheme, area—the polyphony inherent in the semiotics of plot becomes the shifting ground for this new Book/Klement collaboration. With voice, piano and electronics they will tease and agitate sound, text and action into provocations that challenge forms of power, knowledge and privilege. The fan serves as a multiplier; a superstructure that reorients plot into (dis)arrays that include microplot, polyplot, plot thickenings, plotsam and jetsam. Fan is by necessity an extension of a body in motion and insists that all bodies including hybrid and sonorous bodies make plotting the undreamt necessary.

Lynn Book is a transmedia artist working across disciplines and cultural spheres through extended body, material practices and technologies to make performance, exhibition, online works and public projects. Her work centers on the transformational potentials between people, practice and place and has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. Lynn Book projects have been seen and heard internationally at Roulette, the Kitchen, Symphony Space, Bowery Poetry Club and the Knitting Factory in New York, the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, among others in the US.

Her current project is UnReading for Future Bodies, a video suite comprised of 3 volumes that takes on performative knowledge making in the digisphere. Video book 1 and a study for 2 have been screened and developed as performance installations in Berlin, Budapest, Naples, the UK and Australia, and included in several online scholarly journals in Europe.

Book currently lives in North Carolina where she teaches broad spectrum creativity at Wake Forest University and where she also serves as Associate Director for the Program in Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. She is also a faculty associate and graduate advisor with Transart Institute, an international MFA / PhD Practice school in contemporary art, since its inception in 2004, teaching regularly in Berlin.

Katharina Klement was born in Graz, Austria in 1963. She studied piano, composition and electro-acoustic music at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Moreover she studied Music Technology at the University of York, U.K. In her private studies she learned about dance improvisation and plastic arts and sculpture.

Klement is a Composer-Performer in the field of notated and improvised, instrumental and electronic music. She creates instrumental and electronic compositions and focuses on spatial conceptions. Her work includes crossover projects in music, text, video and performance. Klement has also written numerous multi-channel compositions in combination with instrument(s) and /or vocals. Her particular interest lays on the piano and its extended playing techniques, as well as on sound installations.

She is a founder and member of numerous ensembles for improvised music. Since 2006 Klement has been a lecturer for a course of study called “electronic media and computer music” at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

Sexing Sound is co-sponsored by Goethe-Institut Chicago, Experimental Sound Studio, the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.