Ryōan-ji

Ryōan-ji temple garden in Kyoto. I'm currently preparing for an audio-visual performance, together with Michael Francis Duch, of John Cage's composition Ryōan-ji. The concert will take place at Kunsthall Trondheim on 14th. December.

Ryōan-ji zen garden

Part of John Cage's score

Digging up the past.....

A Facebook post I received recently from a former student featured the photo below, which she had taken at the offices of Trondheim City Council. A digital photo print series I made in the late nineties, probably 1998 I think. The work was entitled "Stupid Sky; Blonde; Bird" and was bought by the Trondheim department of culture. I never documented it when it was exhibited, so this photo is the only evidence I have of the work! The sky was a sunset over Byåsen, Trondheim. The blonde woman in the middle was a tv newsreader. And the bird sitting on the computer screen was a dove belonging to a student, Ebba Moi, who asked me to take care of it while she was visiting her family in Sweden. Thanks to Anne-Marie Waag for the photo!

The Seen at Kunsthall Trondheim

Wednesday 1. November 20.00, Kunsthall Trondheim.

Concert by The Seen 

with video projections by Jeremy Welsh.

Concert arranged by New Music Trondheim.

Terranova

Terranova is a new video work currently showing at Kunstgarasjen, Bergen. The material for the video was shot during a residency at Liminaria 2017, at Terranova Arte e Natura, Arpaise, southern Italy, in September 2017. Terranova is one of two works made as a result of the residency. The first, in collaboration with Trond Lossius, was a performance/projection with 4 channel surround sound, presented at the conclusion of the Liminaria project. The material from this performance will be re-edited to make a two-screen projection installation with multi-channel sound.

The Impossible Room

The first phase of the project The Impossible Room (or The Impossible Space) took place as a short performance at Trondheim Cinematek on 6th. October. The performance featured Michael Francis Duch (double bass) Tone Åse (voice and electronics) Arild Vange (texts and reading) and Jeremy Welsh (video projection). The next phase of the project will be a presentation by Duch and Welsh at the conference Sounding Out The Space in Dublin between 2 - 4 November. After that it is planned to arrange a series of site-specific workshops over the coming year to test out ideas and methods that can form the basis of an application for an artistic research project. Current plans include a workshop and performance to take place in spring 2018 at Surnadal Billag, a new centre for projects and residencies in Surnadal, Møre & Romsdal.

Performance at Trondheim Cinematek, 6 October 2017

Det Umulig Rom / The Impossible Space

"The Impossible Space" is an opera project in its early stage of development, and is a transdisciplinary collaborative project between various parts of the Music Conservatory and the Department of Fine Art, NTNU.

Musicians Tone Åse and Michael Francis Duch, music technologist Sigurd Saue, visual artist Jeremy Welsh and writer Arild Vange will investigate spaces and spatiality, and the possibilities of altering an audience's perceptions and experiences of the space they are in.

On Friday October 6th. 14.00 at Trondheim Cinematek there will be a short performance and presentation, as a launch of the project and an initial testing out of some of the ideas and methods to be investigated. The event is free.

The event will also include a presentation of the collaborative project "Hører du ikke hva jeg danser, eller?" by  Oslo-based composer Ivar Grydeland and dancer Siri Jøntvedt.

Image: Ivar Grydeland & Siri Jøndtvedt

Liminaria 2017

Trond Lossius and myself are currently on a residency in Terranova, Arpaisa, southern Italy, as part of Liminaria, an international sound art project curated by Leandro Pisano and beatrice Ferrara. This residency is hosted by TANA (Terranova Arte Natura) an art and ecology project initiated by Tiziana de Tora and Marco Papa. Our participation is the result of a collaboration agreement between Bergen Center for Electronic Art (BEK) and Limiaria. It is planned to follow this up with a visit to Norway in 2018 or 2019 by Italian participants in the project. We have been making field recordings in sound and video around the district in the natural landscape and in neighbouring villages. The residency concludes with a screening event on Saturday 9 September.

http://www.liminaria.org/en/

Terranova, Arpaise

The Atmospherics, 2017 developments.

The Atmospherics, an ongoing sound and video project by Jeremy Welsh and Trond Lossius is currently in its fourth year, and will continue into 2018 and beyond, taking on new forms as it develops. 2017 began with a new installation at HardingarT, in Utne, Hardanger, which co-incidentally was also one of the locations used for the first field recordings made for The Atmospherics. This was the sixth installation in the series and was entitled "The Atmospherics 6: The Seat With The Clearest View". It was comprised of three HD video projections and an eight channel surround sound installation. The next phase will take place in September as part of Liminaria 2017, an international sound art residency and workshop in the region of Fortore, Italy.

Images from the exhibition here.

installation shot at HardingarT

17th. Seoul International New Media Festival

I'm happy to be showing my video work I.O.D. (1984) as part of a retrospective programme of video art from Norway within the 17th. Seoul International New Media Festival. The programme has been curated by Farhad Kalantary, director of Atopia, Oslo.

I.O.D. has previously been shown at numerous video art and experimental film festivals since it was premiered in 1984. It won an award at the 1984 Tokyo International Video Festival, and has been tv broadcast in several countries including the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Sweden. In 2013 it was included in a major exhibition of video art at the National Museum, Oslo, where it is also part of the museum's permanent collection.

http://www.nemaf.net/shop_goods/goods_list.htm?category=0B060000

London, March 2017

Two days spent in London on 9th. - 10th. March 2017, mainly for the occasion of "Emergence From The Underground", a film & video screening dedicated to the memory of Mike O'Pray, founder of the Film & Video Umbrella. The programme was screened  at the BFI South Bank/National Film Theatre, introduced by William Fowler, Steven Bode and myself. Aside from attending this event, I visited the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at Tate Modern and Eduardo Paolozzi at The Whitechapel Gallery. Both good exhibitions. And in between I walked the streets of London, more or less aimlessly, occasionally pausing to photograph small details encountered en route. Photos below, not in chronological order. At the Tate bookshop I acquired, and then rapidly read, Jon Day's "Cyclogeography: journeys of a London bicycle courier". A good addition to my growing library of books about places/walking/exploring etc.

Reflections in buildings at Bankside, behind Tate Modern

Looks like a near miss, but not really...

Menu board of a traditional London cafe near Bankside

And the interior of the same cafe. There used to be hundreds of places like this, now very few remain.

The start of a "paper trail" of discarded stuff along the South Bank from Bankside to Waterloo

Deflation

Composition 1

Cup 1

Cup 2

Cup 3

Composition 2

Composition 3 (NME today)

Composition 4, leaning mattress and cup

Home for someone, an urban oasis squeezed between luxury apartment buildings.

Composition 5, casual sculpture

Introduction to the screening at NFT

Documentation (not documentation)

The documentation pages here now contain mostly dead links. The Picassa image hosting pages that were used for documentation have been deleted since Google changed its image hosting platform.

New documentation will be posted in the near future!

The Atmospherics 6: The Seat With The Clearest View
HardingarT, Utne, January - February 2017