9.1.2024
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction Portrait #10 Elisabeth Schimana Screening
Elisabeth Schimana & Igor Gross Virus #1.3 Mutation for percussion solo
Moderation: Seppo Gründler
echoraum, Vienna
XX Y X & IMA 2024
Presentation of the IMAfiction series in cooperation with IMA Institute of Media Archeology / Elisabeth Schimana.
IMAfiction is a portrait series dedicated to women artists from the field of media arts with a focus on sonic art.
In this series of 5 Austrian and 5 international female artists (Liesl Ujvary, Rebekah Wilson, Heidi Grundmann, Eliane Radigue, Andrea Sodomka, Maryanne Amacher, Anne La Berge, Electric Indigo, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elisabeth Schimana), most of the artists chose who they wanted to be portrayed by. The results are homages that are aesthetically diverse, intimate, and refreshingly free from any conventional film format constraints.
Over the course of 2024, all IMAfiction video portraits will be shown in 8-10 events. Wherever possible, the portrayed artist and the filmmaker will be present with a talk and/or live act.
Virus #1.3 Mutation for percussion solo
Compositions for a live-generated electronic sound body (audio score) and acoustic instruments (interpretation) It is a battle and synthesis of the two sound bodies. Together they stay alive. Virus #1 is dedicated to individual instrumental groups.
The live-generated electronic sound body is host and hostess to which the string sounds dock, adapt to it, penetrate it and use it for their replication. At the beginning this body is immune, but in the course of the piece it gives up its resistance, absorbs the string sounds and nothing stands in the way of the virus multiplying.
Elisabeth Schimana
Works as a composer, performer and radio artist since 1983.
She studied Electroacoustic and Experimental Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Computer Music - Composition at the IEM, Graz and Musicology and Ethnology at the University of Vienna. In her work she has been focussing on space / body / electronics for many years.
She regularly co-operates with ORF Kunstradio and conducts research in the field of women's art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and composition workshops internationally. She founded IMA Institute for Media Archaeology.
https://elise.at
https://ima.or.at/de/
Igor Gross
Studied percussion in Vienna. Busy concert activity in the field of contemporary music, including with Klangforum Wien, PHACE Ensemble 20th Century, Ensemble Phidias, Ensemble Platypus. Solo concerts and work with freely improvised music. Regular projects with orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, RSO Vienna, Vienna State Opera and many others.
https://www.igorgross.org
https://echoraum.at
19.3.2024
Michaela Schwentner Wechselwirkung (2020-21) – Screening
Pia Palme & Sonja Leipold Vanishing Shores – Live performance
echoraum, Vienna
Wechselwirkung (2020-21)
A music theatre piece for singer, dancer, ensemble and electronics (2020) created by Pia Palme, Paola Bianchi, Juliet Fraser, Irene Lehmann, Christina Fischer-Lessiak − an artistic research collaboration group as part of the PEEK Project On the fragility of sounds
World premiere 13.11.2020
Produced in cooperation with Wien Modern 33
Duration: 60 min
Pia Palme – concept, composition, text, bass recorder
Juliet Fraser − voice (soprano), dance
Paola Bianchi − choreography, dance
Christina Fischer-Lessiak − artistic assistant, research, production
Irene Lehmann − dramaturgy
Lars Mlekusch – conductor
Ensemble PHACE
Doris Nicoletti – flutes | Reinhold Brunner – bass clarinets | Daniele Brekyte – violin | Rafał Zalech – viola | Barbara Riccabona – violoncello | Alexandra Dienz – double bass | Berndt Thurner – percussion
Molly McDolan − oboe da caccia
Sonja Leipold – harpsichord
Veronika Mayerböck – light
Christian Sundl – event assistant
For the video & trailer
Michaela Schwentner – film direction and concept, editing
Christina Bauer – sound design, recording
Martin Siewert – sound editing
Martin Putz – camera
Produktion FWF PEEK Projekt On the fragility of Sounds AR 537
mit Unterstützung der KUG Kunstuniversität Graz, ZfG
Koproduktion mit Wien Modern 33
@WUK Vienna, Projektraum
About the piece
Combining the distinctive creative process of choreographer Paola Bianchi with the compositional practice of Pia Palme, the piece has been devised in an experimental, non-hierarchical, collaborative way. The question of transmission between the disciplines was woven into the entire process of the group. We developed both precisely composed materials and improvisational modules. A storyboard designed by Palme and Bianchi brought these modules together and specified the spatial configurations. The storyboard was completed with Lehmann’s advice on dramaturgy and with feedback from Fischer-Lessiak. Every member of the creative group shared their particular expertise and experience. Soprano Juliet Fraser brought in her expertise as a singer. In her performance, she linked together Palme’s score with Bianchi’s oral instructions, giving feedback at every step during the process. She embodied Palme’s music and Bianchi’s choreography. The theatre scholar Dr. Irene Lehman and Christina Fischer-Lessiak, a musicologist and cultural worker, joined the group to further enrich the collaborative practice and discourse. The results explored the consonance, dissonance and interferences between voices, sounds, spaces and bodies – a polyphonic assemblage in which movement in space shapes music and sound shapes bodies in space. Also, multiple temporalities converge in the piece: Francesca Caccini’s soundworld and texts interfere with contemporary music and text, the intense period of the pandemic merges with pre-pandemic ideas and concepts.
The premiere and the performances were not open to the public. We arranged the venue Projektraum at WUK into a ‘COVID-safe’ theatre space and rehearsed the piece according to the pandemic regulations at the time. Performances were then recorded and filmed. We changed the stage concept so that the required safety distance could be kept between the members of the ensemble as well as between the performers. The trailer therefore shows an adapted arrangement and choreography, not the original design. I completed the composition during the first lockdown period in Austria in the spring of 2020 and made adjustments that became necessary because of the pandemic later that year, during a residency in Switzerland. The artistic process of all the contributors resonates the difficult situation during that year. Michaela Schwentner produced a film of the premiere which was shown online in January 2021.
https://www.piapalme.at
https://www.fragilityofsounds.org
https://www.wienmodern.at/2020-pia-palme-wechselwirkung-de-1610
http://www.jade-enterprises.at
VANISHED SHORELINES
a piece for extended harpsichords with microtonal tuning and electronics (2022)
Sonja Leipold - harpsichords
Pia Palme - electronics
The piece makes use of extended playing techniques and is designed as a contemporary chaconne that is repeatedly interrupted by wide, calm soundscapes and drones. Reduced noise mingles with baroque opulence, blurred or condensed by microtonal moods.
Field recordings recorded in a Finnish forest near Turku are integrated into the polyphonic and partly live-generated electronic part. Fragrant coniferous forest covers a coastal area that only a few centuries ago formed the floor of the sea.
https://piapalme.at/works/vanished_shorelines/
www.sonjaleipold.net
9.4. 2024
Hanna Schimek and Angelica Castelló SYRINX AND PAN – An Arcadian dramolet
echoraum Vienna
21.5. 2024
IMAfiction #08: Electric Indigo – Screening
Electric Indigo Under Way Elastic – Live performance
echoraum Vienna
4.-8.6.2024
Irini Athanassakis – KORE (solo exhibition)
Closing: Anat Stainberg & Sara Zlanabitnig A CHAT (live performance)
Sehsaal Vienna
Having or making children was long considered the most natural thing in the world, even if it didn't always seem so easy.
The modern world mainly practises birth control and family planning, trying to get the demographic curve under control, fertility is an exception. These developments are diametrically opposed to the old fertility rituals and cult objects. At the same time, reproductive technologies are booming and the boundaries of what is feasible and ethically acceptable are constantly being pushed.
KORE means daughter and is the name of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. According to Homeric mythology, she spent part of the year with her husband Hades in the underworld and another part of the year on earth with her mother; then the earth blossomed and was fertile.
What could today's and tomorrow's picture narratives on the subject of KORE look like?
A work spanning more than fifteen years on infertility, the desire to have children, reproductive technologies and motherhood questions some aspects of this major topic. 80 drawings in which medical, biochemical, mythological, feminist and philosophical images and texts become pictures. A number of objects were also created, such as a gold-plated mystery object (Uterus), a crocheted snake (Sac de l'éspoir) and a black-painted, oversized pomegranate seed modelled from clay.
11.6.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #06: Maryanne Amacher – Screening
Merche Blasco FAUNA – Live performance
echoraum Vienna
IMAfiction portrait #06: Maryanne Amacher, video still
Screening of IMAfiction portrait#06 Maryanne Amacher
A video portrait by Elisabeth Schimana & Lena Tikhonova (A/US, 2013, 33 min)
Maryanne Amacher was born in Kane, PA in 1938. She studied with George Rochberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the University of Pennsylvania. She founded her famous telematic City Link Series (1967-79) at the SUNY-Buffalos Centre of the Creative and Performing Arts. Together with Marvin Minsky's Triadex Muse, she began developing ear tone music at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the 1070s. With torse and Lecture on the weather (1975), she created two large-scale works with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage respectively.
Since the 1980s, she has developed stagings for her works Ways of Hearing: these mini sound series defined the dramatic format of TV series at the time, which developed over days and weeks; the music for Sound-Joined-Rooms series explores multiple, overlapping acoustic environments and structure-born sound. A selection of the sound characters from this series was released by Tzadik Records on two CDs.
In 2005 Amacher received the Golden Nica at the ARS Electronica. Until her death in 2009, she taught as part of the MFA programme at Bard College in New York. (Text: Bill Dietz, Mica Silver; translation from English: Sabine Sanjo)
https://ima.or.at/de/projekt/imafiction_portrait06/
https://www.blankforms.org/the-maryanne-amacher-foundation
Elena Tikhonova is a film director, screenwriter, editor and VJ. Born in the Soviet scientific city of Obninsk, the 'city of the peaceful atom'. Graduated from the Moscow Film University 'VGIK', camera for feature and documentary film. Vienna has been the centre of his life and work since 2000. She realises documentary films as well as short and experimental films, including 'Elektro Moskva', a film about electronic music in Russia. As VJ 'Mirnji Atom' ('peaceful atom') she performs with various artists.
http://www.rotorfilm.at
Elisabeth Schimana has been working as a composer, performer and radio artist since 1983. She studied Electroacoustic and Experimental Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna Music and Performing Arts
in Vienna, Computer Music - Composition at the IEM, Graz and Musicology and Ethnology at the University of Vienna. In her work she has been focusing on space / body / electronics for many years.
She regularly co-operates with ORF Kunstradio and conducts research in the field of women's art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and composition workshops internationally. She founded IMA Institute for Media Archaeology
https://elise.at
https://ima.or.at/de/
Merche Blasco © Echoraum
Merche Blasco is a multimedia artist and composer from Spain who currently
lives in Berlin. She was a DAAD scholarship holder for Music and Sound in Berlin
2022-2023, performed at MaerzMusik in March 2024 and at the CTM Festival
and Heroines of Sound in Berlin in 2023.
She designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyse
embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new ways of listening.
Through her constructed devices, Merche seeks to establish a more horizontal relationship with other entities and distance herself from parameters such as
precision, power and control. As an alternative form of performance, she develops collaborative spaces with instruments that maintain their own agency, in
compositions in which her body and the live exploration of organic materials
are central elements.
Her work increasingly focuses on creating participatory sound performances in
public spaces to connect people in unfamiliar surroundings through collective
music-making and listening.
Performances and installations: MaerzMusik, CTM Festival, Heroines of Sound,
Sonar Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, NIME Conferences, Whitney Museum
of American Art, The Shed, Tsonami International Sound Art Festiva Chile,
The High Line in New York, SONIC Festival, Mapping Festival Geneva, Queens
Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile.
https://half-half.es/about_me/
https://www.heroines-of-sound.com/artists/merche-blasco/
https://www.digitalinberlin.de/merche-blasco/
24.9.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #02 / #07: Anne La Berge / Rebekah Wilson – Screening
Anne La Berge – Live performance
Anne La Berge + Rebekah Wilson – Talk
echoraum Vienna
Rebekah Wilson and Anne La Berge have crossed paths for more than 20 years as performers, researchers, teachers and friends. Each of their interactions has added a new facet to their intricately woven relationship, in which their discussions about music, networks and life have neither beginning nor end. They simply continue to spin their shared story.
For this event, Anne interviewed Rebekah and Rebekah interviewed Anne. They delved into their own IMAfictions from long ago and traced the connections from then to now.
Anne La Berge — A portrait by Rebekah Wilson (2015)
"Anne La Berge's particular strength lies not only in her virtuoso playing or her lively interest in technology - she also clearly enjoys it.Whether she approaches this topic humorously or circles around it reflectively, one thing is beyond doubt: her sharp mind, scientifically trained by her father, does not ignore the audience and their feelings, but she is never so preoccupied with herself that she cannot act in the here and now.Her music and performances are free of any cynicism or postmodern criticism that does not allow for joy.Her music is fascinating and infectious.
As a listener, you marvel at her technique and want to know if her stories are true and where she draws her inspiration from. As a composer-performer, you want to be on stage with her.
We are lucky to have female composer-performers like Anne. I, for one, have always felt particularly comfortable on stage when Anne was there. Her music and her personality are an almost inexhaustible source of strength, and as she is constantly travelling, performing and teaching all over the world, I am sure that many, many others have also experienced how unwavering her joy in art is and how uncompromisingly she shares her passions." (Rebekah Wilson)
https://annelaberge.com
Rebekah Wilson — A portrait by Elisabeth Schimana (2006)
"Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova is pure fiction. For years she named herself after a character in a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trained as a composer, haunted the web and became an icon during her lifetime. It was not until 2002 that she reappeared as a physical person and became a curator at STEIM in Amsterdam. In her current rebirth phase as Rebekah Wilson, she also finds her way back to her home country of New Zealand, from where she set out to be Netochka Netzvanova." (Elisabeth Schimana)
https://ima.or.at/de/biografie/rebekah_wilson/
12.11.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #03: Heidi Grundmann / #05: Andrea Sodomka – Screening
Andrea Sodomka, Norbert Math (alien productions): The power of degree zero is the distributing intelligence
AI-generated text and sound performance
Presentation: Doris Ingrisch
12.11., echoraum Vienna
pt. I
IMAfiction Portrait #03 Heidi Grundmann
A portrait by Roberto Paci Dalò (2007, 29 min)
A portrait of Heidi Grundmann can‘t avoid our two decades of close friendship. A beautiful period full of collaborations, words, laughs, wine, tears, energy, projects, sounds, fights and more. Obviously not simple for me to deal with her history which is also the history of her passionate full support to – at least – three generations of artists dealing with radio, telecommunications, media art, network projects, and more.
Travelling across something like 40 years of private and public life in a sort of permanent electric field, the enormous quantity of data Heidi accumulated, is here literally squeezed in 29 vertigo minutes which include some touching personal memories and a refl ection concerning the situation of women in arts and society. This is, in my opinion, a precious document and I was profoundly happy to have had the opportunity to work together on this portrait. Roberto Paci Dalò
Heidi Grundmann
IMAfiction portrait #03
Roberto Paci Dalo
pt. II
IMAfiction Portrait #05 Andrea Sodomka
A portrait by Gabriele Mathes (2010, 18 min)
"What distinguishes Andrea Sodomka, to my mind, is her ability to reinvent herself time after time, setting out again and again, gauging her own boun-daries. Her oeuvre ranges from painting to radio art, from photography to sound installation, from making inner spaces audible up to filling large rooms with live electronic sound.
Her open-minded notion of her own authorship is grounded in the tradition of working in artists’ networks. 'Young artists today take for granted that the idea of authorship is eroding because they grew up with the internet', says Andrea Sodomka. This form of communication and cooperation, which takes into account the internet, was practiced by the networking pioneers Andrea Sodomka and alien productions in their art projects as early as the mid-90s.
Her music and work cannot simply be pigeonholed under composer or visual artist. But there is a designation that aptly describes the artist Andrea Sodomka. The designation would be researcher, someone who seeks the new without compromise. For her boundaries – also those between genres – mean only one thing: the desire to cross them." Gabriele Mathes (Translation *Brainstorm)
Andrea Sodomka
IMAfiction portrait #05
Gabriele Mathes
pt: III
The Degree Zero Power is the Distributive Intelligence is a quote from the libretto of the AI opera Performing Utopia by alien productions, which will be premiered as a radio opera commissioned by ORF Kunstradio in 2021. In Performing Utopia, the AI-generated texts are interpreted by human singers and speakers. In The Degree Zero Power is the Distributive Intelligence, the focus is on virtual voices: virtual singers - virtual voices - virtual sounds.
"What interests me most about working with artificial intelligence is the fuzziness, the mistakes, the imperfections." Andrea Sodomka, 2024
Performing Utopia
Biographies:
Heidi Grundmann, born in Innsbruck in 1938, lives in Vienna. As a cultural editor and art critic at ORF radio, Heidi Grundmann founded the KUNSTRADIO-RADIOKUNST programme in 1987, which has been supplemented by KUNSTRADIO ON LINE since 1995. Involved in the development and realisation of innovative telematic radio art projects. Curator of international symposia, events and exhibitions. Texts and lectures on media and radio art.
Heidi Grundmann
Andrea Sodomka, born 1961 in Vienna. Artist, composer, curator; studied at the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna and at the Academy of Music, Vienna (Institute of Electroacoustics).
1995-97 curator for Media Art at OK Center of Contemporary Art, Upper Austria.
She works in the fields of intermedia, installation, electronic music, net.art, radio art, video and artistic photography.
Productions and commisions (selection): wien modern, ARTE, ECAS-European Cities of Advanced Sound Network, Jeunesse musicale), EBU-European Broadcasting Union, RNE Radio Nacional de España, ORF-Kunstradio, ORF-Zeitton, Ars Electronica Festival, musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Viertelfestival Niederösterreich, OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich, Festival der Regionen, TONSPUR im Museumsquartier Wien, die Ensembles die reihe, Repertorio Zero, early reflections.
Andrea Sodomka
Doris Ingrisch is a cultural scientist, associated at the Institute for Cultural Management and Gender Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna/ mdw. Her research and publication focuses include art&science&gender, history of science, cultures of knowledge in dialogue, exile/emigration research, qualitative, experimental methods and arts-based research.
Doris Ingrisch
https://ima.or.at/
https://echoraum.at/
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #01: Liesl Ujvary Screening
Brigitta Bödenauer FADING CREATURES live performance
3.12., 8pm echoraum Vienna
IMAfiction Portrait #01 | Liesl Ujvary
A portrait by Martin Breindl (2006)
Liesl Ujvary comes from a generation for which using computers is not a matter of course. Her approach is probably best described by Martin Breindl in his text “Bewegung in Möglichkeitsformen, über Liesl Ujvarys Musik” (Movements in Probability Shapes — about Liesl Ujvary’s music):
When producing music or images the author Liesl Ujvary plays controlled games, transforming her (sound- and image-) objects from one (possible) state into another (also possible) state. She can perform these transformations because she exclusively works at the virtual machine whose integral part she herself has become as a cyborg. Her achievement as a cyborg is that she understands and exploits the potentials of this human-machine fusion from the inside out (this does not necessarily mean that she has to fully understand the technology she uses, but rather that she is able to enter the potential fields offered by this technology). (Martin Breindl)
This is my body. Right now I am here. I have certain perceptions, ideas, emotions. Right now I am doing this and this. I cause and control my thoughts and actions. I talk about and reflect upon myself. I have a conscience. I am who I was yesterday (Liesl Ujvary)
Camera: Magdalena Vetter
Film editing: Martin Breindl, Magdalena Vetter
Text, music, images: Liesl Ujvary
Format: 4:3
Language: German
Subtitles: English
Duration: 17:30 min
Bonus audio tracks: ghostengine, sprechen ohne sprache / alpha version remix / membrane als vermittler / 7 artefakte / heavy loops version / softworlds / sprache der gene / sex + tod + klangeffekte
Shot at Botanischer Garten, Belvedere, Wien and Liesl Ujvary’s Studio
Supported by Niederösterreich Kultur and Bundeskanzleramt:Kunst
Liesl Ujvary was born in 1939, in Bratislava/Slovak Republic. She came to Austria in 1945, childhood in Lower Austria and Tyrol. Studies in Vienna and Zurich (Slavic studies, old Hebraic literature, art history). Several sojourns in Moscow. Dissertation on Ilja Ehrenburg’s “Julio Jurenito.” 1968 Dr.phil. at the University of Zurich. 1969/70 university teaching position for Russian language and literature at Sophia University (Jesuit university) in Tokyo. 1970/71 one-year advanced training course for Russian teachers at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Since 1971, she works as a writer in Vienna. Poetry, prose, radio plays, photos, music. Artificial intelligence, computer art. Work commissioned by Kunstradio/ORF. Translations from Russian to German. Various awards and scholarships.
Participation in IMA projects
IMAfiction portrait #01
Hidden Alliances - versteckt verbunden
Liesl Ujvary
Performance by Brigitta Bödenauer
A fragmented collage, a cacophony of forgotten whispers and faded echoes. The boundaries become blurred and reality shifts. A surreal landscape of impressions and emotions emerges: a fleeting illusion of a material world - manipulated and distorted. ‘Fading Creatures’ plays with the remaining fragments of acoustic memories and (re)creates moments of transition and decay.
Brigitta Bödenauer aka bb works in the fields of experimental animated film, installation and produces electronic music. Her activities as a DJ and organiser in the Viennese noise and experimental music scene since the early 1990s are the starting point for her visual works, which always have a strong connection to music. Her films have received awards at various international festivals and are regularly shown in the context of exhibitions. Brigitta Bödenauer writes about film and visual media and teaches in the fields of video editing, animated film and media art.
Participation in IMA projects:
Hidden Alliances - versteckt verbunden
IMA15 Die Gala - Das Videobuch
Brigitta Bödenauer
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction Portrait #10 Elisabeth Schimana Screening
Elisabeth Schimana & Igor Gross Virus #1.3 Mutation for percussion solo
Moderation: Seppo Gründler
echoraum, Vienna
XX Y X & IMA 2024
Presentation of the IMAfiction series in cooperation with IMA Institute of Media Archeology / Elisabeth Schimana.
IMAfiction is a portrait series dedicated to women artists from the field of media arts with a focus on sonic art.
In this series of 5 Austrian and 5 international female artists (Liesl Ujvary, Rebekah Wilson, Heidi Grundmann, Eliane Radigue, Andrea Sodomka, Maryanne Amacher, Anne La Berge, Electric Indigo, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elisabeth Schimana), most of the artists chose who they wanted to be portrayed by. The results are homages that are aesthetically diverse, intimate, and refreshingly free from any conventional film format constraints.
Over the course of 2024, all IMAfiction video portraits will be shown in 8-10 events. Wherever possible, the portrayed artist and the filmmaker will be present with a talk and/or live act.
Virus #1.3 Mutation for percussion solo
Compositions for a live-generated electronic sound body (audio score) and acoustic instruments (interpretation) It is a battle and synthesis of the two sound bodies. Together they stay alive. Virus #1 is dedicated to individual instrumental groups.
The live-generated electronic sound body is host and hostess to which the string sounds dock, adapt to it, penetrate it and use it for their replication. At the beginning this body is immune, but in the course of the piece it gives up its resistance, absorbs the string sounds and nothing stands in the way of the virus multiplying.
Elisabeth Schimana
Works as a composer, performer and radio artist since 1983.
She studied Electroacoustic and Experimental Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Computer Music - Composition at the IEM, Graz and Musicology and Ethnology at the University of Vienna. In her work she has been focussing on space / body / electronics for many years.
She regularly co-operates with ORF Kunstradio and conducts research in the field of women's art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and composition workshops internationally. She founded IMA Institute for Media Archaeology.
https://elise.at
https://ima.or.at/de/
Igor Gross
Studied percussion in Vienna. Busy concert activity in the field of contemporary music, including with Klangforum Wien, PHACE Ensemble 20th Century, Ensemble Phidias, Ensemble Platypus. Solo concerts and work with freely improvised music. Regular projects with orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, RSO Vienna, Vienna State Opera and many others.
https://www.igorgross.org
https://echoraum.at



19.3.2024
Michaela Schwentner Wechselwirkung (2020-21) – Screening
Pia Palme & Sonja Leipold Vanishing Shores – Live performance
echoraum, Vienna
Wechselwirkung (2020-21)
A music theatre piece for singer, dancer, ensemble and electronics (2020) created by Pia Palme, Paola Bianchi, Juliet Fraser, Irene Lehmann, Christina Fischer-Lessiak − an artistic research collaboration group as part of the PEEK Project On the fragility of sounds
World premiere 13.11.2020
Produced in cooperation with Wien Modern 33
Duration: 60 min
Pia Palme – concept, composition, text, bass recorder
Juliet Fraser − voice (soprano), dance
Paola Bianchi − choreography, dance
Christina Fischer-Lessiak − artistic assistant, research, production
Irene Lehmann − dramaturgy
Lars Mlekusch – conductor
Ensemble PHACE
Doris Nicoletti – flutes | Reinhold Brunner – bass clarinets | Daniele Brekyte – violin | Rafał Zalech – viola | Barbara Riccabona – violoncello | Alexandra Dienz – double bass | Berndt Thurner – percussion
Molly McDolan − oboe da caccia
Sonja Leipold – harpsichord
Veronika Mayerböck – light
Christian Sundl – event assistant
For the video & trailer
Michaela Schwentner – film direction and concept, editing
Christina Bauer – sound design, recording
Martin Siewert – sound editing
Martin Putz – camera
Produktion FWF PEEK Projekt On the fragility of Sounds AR 537
mit Unterstützung der KUG Kunstuniversität Graz, ZfG
Koproduktion mit Wien Modern 33
@WUK Vienna, Projektraum
About the piece
Combining the distinctive creative process of choreographer Paola Bianchi with the compositional practice of Pia Palme, the piece has been devised in an experimental, non-hierarchical, collaborative way. The question of transmission between the disciplines was woven into the entire process of the group. We developed both precisely composed materials and improvisational modules. A storyboard designed by Palme and Bianchi brought these modules together and specified the spatial configurations. The storyboard was completed with Lehmann’s advice on dramaturgy and with feedback from Fischer-Lessiak. Every member of the creative group shared their particular expertise and experience. Soprano Juliet Fraser brought in her expertise as a singer. In her performance, she linked together Palme’s score with Bianchi’s oral instructions, giving feedback at every step during the process. She embodied Palme’s music and Bianchi’s choreography. The theatre scholar Dr. Irene Lehman and Christina Fischer-Lessiak, a musicologist and cultural worker, joined the group to further enrich the collaborative practice and discourse. The results explored the consonance, dissonance and interferences between voices, sounds, spaces and bodies – a polyphonic assemblage in which movement in space shapes music and sound shapes bodies in space. Also, multiple temporalities converge in the piece: Francesca Caccini’s soundworld and texts interfere with contemporary music and text, the intense period of the pandemic merges with pre-pandemic ideas and concepts.
The premiere and the performances were not open to the public. We arranged the venue Projektraum at WUK into a ‘COVID-safe’ theatre space and rehearsed the piece according to the pandemic regulations at the time. Performances were then recorded and filmed. We changed the stage concept so that the required safety distance could be kept between the members of the ensemble as well as between the performers. The trailer therefore shows an adapted arrangement and choreography, not the original design. I completed the composition during the first lockdown period in Austria in the spring of 2020 and made adjustments that became necessary because of the pandemic later that year, during a residency in Switzerland. The artistic process of all the contributors resonates the difficult situation during that year. Michaela Schwentner produced a film of the premiere which was shown online in January 2021.
https://www.piapalme.at
https://www.fragilityofsounds.org
https://www.wienmodern.at/2020-pia-palme-wechselwirkung-de-1610
http://www.jade-enterprises.at
VANISHED SHORELINES
a piece for extended harpsichords with microtonal tuning and electronics (2022)
Sonja Leipold - harpsichords
Pia Palme - electronics
The piece makes use of extended playing techniques and is designed as a contemporary chaconne that is repeatedly interrupted by wide, calm soundscapes and drones. Reduced noise mingles with baroque opulence, blurred or condensed by microtonal moods.
Field recordings recorded in a Finnish forest near Turku are integrated into the polyphonic and partly live-generated electronic part. Fragrant coniferous forest covers a coastal area that only a few centuries ago formed the floor of the sea.
https://piapalme.at/works/vanished_shorelines/
www.sonjaleipold.net



9.4. 2024
Hanna Schimek and Angelica Castelló SYRINX AND PAN – An Arcadian dramolet
echoraum Vienna


21.5. 2024
IMAfiction #08: Electric Indigo – Screening
Electric Indigo Under Way Elastic – Live performance
echoraum Vienna

4.-8.6.2024
Irini Athanassakis – KORE (solo exhibition)
Closing: Anat Stainberg & Sara Zlanabitnig A CHAT (live performance)
Sehsaal Vienna
Having or making children was long considered the most natural thing in the world, even if it didn't always seem so easy.
The modern world mainly practises birth control and family planning, trying to get the demographic curve under control, fertility is an exception. These developments are diametrically opposed to the old fertility rituals and cult objects. At the same time, reproductive technologies are booming and the boundaries of what is feasible and ethically acceptable are constantly being pushed.
KORE means daughter and is the name of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. According to Homeric mythology, she spent part of the year with her husband Hades in the underworld and another part of the year on earth with her mother; then the earth blossomed and was fertile.
What could today's and tomorrow's picture narratives on the subject of KORE look like?
A work spanning more than fifteen years on infertility, the desire to have children, reproductive technologies and motherhood questions some aspects of this major topic. 80 drawings in which medical, biochemical, mythological, feminist and philosophical images and texts become pictures. A number of objects were also created, such as a gold-plated mystery object (Uterus), a crocheted snake (Sac de l'éspoir) and a black-painted, oversized pomegranate seed modelled from clay.







photos by Josh Müller






photos by Michaela Schwentner
11.6.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #06: Maryanne Amacher – Screening
Merche Blasco FAUNA – Live performance
echoraum Vienna

IMAfiction portrait #06: Maryanne Amacher, video still
Screening of IMAfiction portrait#06 Maryanne Amacher
A video portrait by Elisabeth Schimana & Lena Tikhonova (A/US, 2013, 33 min)
Maryanne Amacher was born in Kane, PA in 1938. She studied with George Rochberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the University of Pennsylvania. She founded her famous telematic City Link Series (1967-79) at the SUNY-Buffalos Centre of the Creative and Performing Arts. Together with Marvin Minsky's Triadex Muse, she began developing ear tone music at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the 1070s. With torse and Lecture on the weather (1975), she created two large-scale works with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage respectively.
Since the 1980s, she has developed stagings for her works Ways of Hearing: these mini sound series defined the dramatic format of TV series at the time, which developed over days and weeks; the music for Sound-Joined-Rooms series explores multiple, overlapping acoustic environments and structure-born sound. A selection of the sound characters from this series was released by Tzadik Records on two CDs.
In 2005 Amacher received the Golden Nica at the ARS Electronica. Until her death in 2009, she taught as part of the MFA programme at Bard College in New York. (Text: Bill Dietz, Mica Silver; translation from English: Sabine Sanjo)
https://ima.or.at/de/projekt/imafiction_portrait06/
https://www.blankforms.org/the-maryanne-amacher-foundation
Elena Tikhonova is a film director, screenwriter, editor and VJ. Born in the Soviet scientific city of Obninsk, the 'city of the peaceful atom'. Graduated from the Moscow Film University 'VGIK', camera for feature and documentary film. Vienna has been the centre of his life and work since 2000. She realises documentary films as well as short and experimental films, including 'Elektro Moskva', a film about electronic music in Russia. As VJ 'Mirnji Atom' ('peaceful atom') she performs with various artists.
http://www.rotorfilm.at
Elisabeth Schimana has been working as a composer, performer and radio artist since 1983. She studied Electroacoustic and Experimental Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna Music and Performing Arts
in Vienna, Computer Music - Composition at the IEM, Graz and Musicology and Ethnology at the University of Vienna. In her work she has been focusing on space / body / electronics for many years.
She regularly co-operates with ORF Kunstradio and conducts research in the field of women's art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and composition workshops internationally. She founded IMA Institute for Media Archaeology
https://elise.at
https://ima.or.at/de/





Merche Blasco © Echoraum
Merche Blasco is a multimedia artist and composer from Spain who currently
lives in Berlin. She was a DAAD scholarship holder for Music and Sound in Berlin
2022-2023, performed at MaerzMusik in March 2024 and at the CTM Festival
and Heroines of Sound in Berlin in 2023.
She designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyse
embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new ways of listening.
Through her constructed devices, Merche seeks to establish a more horizontal relationship with other entities and distance herself from parameters such as
precision, power and control. As an alternative form of performance, she develops collaborative spaces with instruments that maintain their own agency, in
compositions in which her body and the live exploration of organic materials
are central elements.
Her work increasingly focuses on creating participatory sound performances in
public spaces to connect people in unfamiliar surroundings through collective
music-making and listening.
Performances and installations: MaerzMusik, CTM Festival, Heroines of Sound,
Sonar Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, NIME Conferences, Whitney Museum
of American Art, The Shed, Tsonami International Sound Art Festiva Chile,
The High Line in New York, SONIC Festival, Mapping Festival Geneva, Queens
Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile.
https://half-half.es/about_me/
https://www.heroines-of-sound.com/artists/merche-blasco/
https://www.digitalinberlin.de/merche-blasco/
24.9.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #02 / #07: Anne La Berge / Rebekah Wilson – Screening
Anne La Berge – Live performance
Anne La Berge + Rebekah Wilson – Talk
echoraum Vienna
Rebekah Wilson and Anne La Berge have crossed paths for more than 20 years as performers, researchers, teachers and friends. Each of their interactions has added a new facet to their intricately woven relationship, in which their discussions about music, networks and life have neither beginning nor end. They simply continue to spin their shared story.
For this event, Anne interviewed Rebekah and Rebekah interviewed Anne. They delved into their own IMAfictions from long ago and traced the connections from then to now.
Anne La Berge — A portrait by Rebekah Wilson (2015)
"Anne La Berge's particular strength lies not only in her virtuoso playing or her lively interest in technology - she also clearly enjoys it.Whether she approaches this topic humorously or circles around it reflectively, one thing is beyond doubt: her sharp mind, scientifically trained by her father, does not ignore the audience and their feelings, but she is never so preoccupied with herself that she cannot act in the here and now.Her music and performances are free of any cynicism or postmodern criticism that does not allow for joy.Her music is fascinating and infectious.
As a listener, you marvel at her technique and want to know if her stories are true and where she draws her inspiration from. As a composer-performer, you want to be on stage with her.
We are lucky to have female composer-performers like Anne. I, for one, have always felt particularly comfortable on stage when Anne was there. Her music and her personality are an almost inexhaustible source of strength, and as she is constantly travelling, performing and teaching all over the world, I am sure that many, many others have also experienced how unwavering her joy in art is and how uncompromisingly she shares her passions." (Rebekah Wilson)
https://annelaberge.com
Rebekah Wilson — A portrait by Elisabeth Schimana (2006)
"Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova is pure fiction. For years she named herself after a character in a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trained as a composer, haunted the web and became an icon during her lifetime. It was not until 2002 that she reappeared as a physical person and became a curator at STEIM in Amsterdam. In her current rebirth phase as Rebekah Wilson, she also finds her way back to her home country of New Zealand, from where she set out to be Netochka Netzvanova." (Elisabeth Schimana)
https://ima.or.at/de/biografie/rebekah_wilson/






12.11.
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #03: Heidi Grundmann / #05: Andrea Sodomka – Screening
Andrea Sodomka, Norbert Math (alien productions): The power of degree zero is the distributing intelligence
AI-generated text and sound performance
Presentation: Doris Ingrisch
12.11., echoraum Vienna






pt. I
IMAfiction Portrait #03 Heidi Grundmann
A portrait by Roberto Paci Dalò (2007, 29 min)
A portrait of Heidi Grundmann can‘t avoid our two decades of close friendship. A beautiful period full of collaborations, words, laughs, wine, tears, energy, projects, sounds, fights and more. Obviously not simple for me to deal with her history which is also the history of her passionate full support to – at least – three generations of artists dealing with radio, telecommunications, media art, network projects, and more.
Travelling across something like 40 years of private and public life in a sort of permanent electric field, the enormous quantity of data Heidi accumulated, is here literally squeezed in 29 vertigo minutes which include some touching personal memories and a refl ection concerning the situation of women in arts and society. This is, in my opinion, a precious document and I was profoundly happy to have had the opportunity to work together on this portrait. Roberto Paci Dalò
Heidi Grundmann
IMAfiction portrait #03
Roberto Paci Dalo
pt. II
IMAfiction Portrait #05 Andrea Sodomka
A portrait by Gabriele Mathes (2010, 18 min)
"What distinguishes Andrea Sodomka, to my mind, is her ability to reinvent herself time after time, setting out again and again, gauging her own boun-daries. Her oeuvre ranges from painting to radio art, from photography to sound installation, from making inner spaces audible up to filling large rooms with live electronic sound.
Her open-minded notion of her own authorship is grounded in the tradition of working in artists’ networks. 'Young artists today take for granted that the idea of authorship is eroding because they grew up with the internet', says Andrea Sodomka. This form of communication and cooperation, which takes into account the internet, was practiced by the networking pioneers Andrea Sodomka and alien productions in their art projects as early as the mid-90s.
Her music and work cannot simply be pigeonholed under composer or visual artist. But there is a designation that aptly describes the artist Andrea Sodomka. The designation would be researcher, someone who seeks the new without compromise. For her boundaries – also those between genres – mean only one thing: the desire to cross them." Gabriele Mathes (Translation *Brainstorm)
Andrea Sodomka
IMAfiction portrait #05
Gabriele Mathes
pt: III
The Degree Zero Power is the Distributive Intelligence is a quote from the libretto of the AI opera Performing Utopia by alien productions, which will be premiered as a radio opera commissioned by ORF Kunstradio in 2021. In Performing Utopia, the AI-generated texts are interpreted by human singers and speakers. In The Degree Zero Power is the Distributive Intelligence, the focus is on virtual voices: virtual singers - virtual voices - virtual sounds.
"What interests me most about working with artificial intelligence is the fuzziness, the mistakes, the imperfections." Andrea Sodomka, 2024
Performing Utopia
Biographies:
Heidi Grundmann, born in Innsbruck in 1938, lives in Vienna. As a cultural editor and art critic at ORF radio, Heidi Grundmann founded the KUNSTRADIO-RADIOKUNST programme in 1987, which has been supplemented by KUNSTRADIO ON LINE since 1995. Involved in the development and realisation of innovative telematic radio art projects. Curator of international symposia, events and exhibitions. Texts and lectures on media and radio art.
Heidi Grundmann
Andrea Sodomka, born 1961 in Vienna. Artist, composer, curator; studied at the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna and at the Academy of Music, Vienna (Institute of Electroacoustics).
1995-97 curator for Media Art at OK Center of Contemporary Art, Upper Austria.
She works in the fields of intermedia, installation, electronic music, net.art, radio art, video and artistic photography.
Productions and commisions (selection): wien modern, ARTE, ECAS-European Cities of Advanced Sound Network, Jeunesse musicale), EBU-European Broadcasting Union, RNE Radio Nacional de España, ORF-Kunstradio, ORF-Zeitton, Ars Electronica Festival, musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Viertelfestival Niederösterreich, OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich, Festival der Regionen, TONSPUR im Museumsquartier Wien, die Ensembles die reihe, Repertorio Zero, early reflections.
Andrea Sodomka
Doris Ingrisch is a cultural scientist, associated at the Institute for Cultural Management and Gender Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna/ mdw. Her research and publication focuses include art&science&gender, history of science, cultures of knowledge in dialogue, exile/emigration research, qualitative, experimental methods and arts-based research.
Doris Ingrisch
https://ima.or.at/
https://echoraum.at/
XX Y X + IMA
IMAfiction portrait #01: Liesl Ujvary Screening
Brigitta Bödenauer FADING CREATURES live performance
3.12., 8pm echoraum Vienna


IMAfiction Portrait #01 | Liesl Ujvary
A portrait by Martin Breindl (2006)
Liesl Ujvary comes from a generation for which using computers is not a matter of course. Her approach is probably best described by Martin Breindl in his text “Bewegung in Möglichkeitsformen, über Liesl Ujvarys Musik” (Movements in Probability Shapes — about Liesl Ujvary’s music):
When producing music or images the author Liesl Ujvary plays controlled games, transforming her (sound- and image-) objects from one (possible) state into another (also possible) state. She can perform these transformations because she exclusively works at the virtual machine whose integral part she herself has become as a cyborg. Her achievement as a cyborg is that she understands and exploits the potentials of this human-machine fusion from the inside out (this does not necessarily mean that she has to fully understand the technology she uses, but rather that she is able to enter the potential fields offered by this technology). (Martin Breindl)
This is my body. Right now I am here. I have certain perceptions, ideas, emotions. Right now I am doing this and this. I cause and control my thoughts and actions. I talk about and reflect upon myself. I have a conscience. I am who I was yesterday (Liesl Ujvary)
Camera: Magdalena Vetter
Film editing: Martin Breindl, Magdalena Vetter
Text, music, images: Liesl Ujvary
Format: 4:3
Language: German
Subtitles: English
Duration: 17:30 min
Bonus audio tracks: ghostengine, sprechen ohne sprache / alpha version remix / membrane als vermittler / 7 artefakte / heavy loops version / softworlds / sprache der gene / sex + tod + klangeffekte
Shot at Botanischer Garten, Belvedere, Wien and Liesl Ujvary’s Studio
Supported by Niederösterreich Kultur and Bundeskanzleramt:Kunst
Liesl Ujvary was born in 1939, in Bratislava/Slovak Republic. She came to Austria in 1945, childhood in Lower Austria and Tyrol. Studies in Vienna and Zurich (Slavic studies, old Hebraic literature, art history). Several sojourns in Moscow. Dissertation on Ilja Ehrenburg’s “Julio Jurenito.” 1968 Dr.phil. at the University of Zurich. 1969/70 university teaching position for Russian language and literature at Sophia University (Jesuit university) in Tokyo. 1970/71 one-year advanced training course for Russian teachers at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Since 1971, she works as a writer in Vienna. Poetry, prose, radio plays, photos, music. Artificial intelligence, computer art. Work commissioned by Kunstradio/ORF. Translations from Russian to German. Various awards and scholarships.
Participation in IMA projects
IMAfiction portrait #01
Hidden Alliances - versteckt verbunden
Liesl Ujvary
Performance by Brigitta Bödenauer
A fragmented collage, a cacophony of forgotten whispers and faded echoes. The boundaries become blurred and reality shifts. A surreal landscape of impressions and emotions emerges: a fleeting illusion of a material world - manipulated and distorted. ‘Fading Creatures’ plays with the remaining fragments of acoustic memories and (re)creates moments of transition and decay.
Brigitta Bödenauer aka bb works in the fields of experimental animated film, installation and produces electronic music. Her activities as a DJ and organiser in the Viennese noise and experimental music scene since the early 1990s are the starting point for her visual works, which always have a strong connection to music. Her films have received awards at various international festivals and are regularly shown in the context of exhibitions. Brigitta Bödenauer writes about film and visual media and teaches in the fields of video editing, animated film and media art.
Participation in IMA projects:
Hidden Alliances - versteckt verbunden
IMA15 Die Gala - Das Videobuch
Brigitta Bödenauer