The musician David Loscher and I have put a text to music a text that was written the day before the introduction of the masquerade. The day before Christmas we released the following music video in the company of friends:
vimeo.com/breitkopf/kontaktkultur

Der Musiker David Loscher und ich haben einen Text musikalisch umgesetzt, der am Tag vor der Einführung der Maskenpflicht verfasst wurde. Am Tag vor Weihnachten veröffentlichten wir dazu folgendes Musikvideo im Kreis von Freunden:
vimeo.com/breitkopf/kontaktkultur



Website:
ato.vision/artists/benjamin-breitkopf
benjaminbreitkopf.de

Monster erotica, also referred to as monster porn is a “subgenre of erotic literature that involves sexual encounters between humans and monsters. It sometimes crosses over with erotic horror.” “Monsters are kinda hot” is an experimental sound piece exploring sex and the taboo. Through the lens of sound my work aims to burst the social framework of sex, and reconstruct understanding of our bodies, sexuality and those relationships we consider most intimate. During lockdown I found my taste in porn becoming more extreme, the same experience for my peers. Content I thought was taboo became my staple and so I decided to explore it in my art practice. I wanted to address this strange obsession with monster porn in a way that was laughable, relatable and accessible. From those I have spoken to, watching monster porn is one of those phenomenon a lot of people have dabbled in but are too ashamed to admit to because, well… it’s weird. I aim to open the floodgates on what we can talk to our peers about. The audience is encouraged to laugh and hopefully feel a little less shame around having masturbated over a few tentacles in lockdown. Outside of “Monsters are kinda hot”, my work involves performance art, photo-media and video art to explore femininity, capitalism and consumerism. Traditionally, I work with “cute” aesthetics to explore excessive consumption and its environmental impact. Often the work will manifest as comedic videos and portraits taken with digital camera. In my Honours thesis, I studied cute and pink aesthetics, discovering their strong link to capitalism and modern consumer culture. There is an insidious reasoning behind the abundance of pink/cute merchandising that my work aims to explore in a sophisticated, artistic way.



Social media:
youtube.com/channel/UClN10D583wZQNuJ-fWj787g
instagram.com/sweet_baby_princess

Spring arrives and the outside collapses. While there is nothing to worry, we are in Natalys dream: making new friends on the basketball yard, or trying.

Thanks to Alina Sauernheimer and Nuria Glasauer for the text, Latifah Rada for consultation and Nataly Hulikova for location research!





Website:
vitikoschell.de

Social Media:
instagram.com/vitiko.s

Sounds of the city of Bologna taken from above when everything was silent.



Nationality and location:
Bologna (Italy)

Website:
gabrieleconfaloni.wordpress.com

Social media:
soundcloud.com/gabriele-confaloni
gabrieleconfaloni1.bandcamp.com

During the first lockdown last year I created the artist book “puppenruhe”, consisting of texts, drawings and digital collages, which form a story about observations in my own four walls, introspection and the play with alternative concepts of reality. The supposed lack of freedom during quarantine turns out to be a possibility of unfolding; out of solitude, space for transformation emerges.

The sound work “puppenruhe” is a musical rendering of this artist book and combines synthesizer sounds with spoken word and vocals, as well as noise fragments and the interplay with my own echo.



Während des ersten Lockdowns letzten Jahres entstand das Künstlerbuch „puppenruhe“, bestehend aus Texten, Zeichnungen und digitalen Collagen, die sich zu einer Geschichte über Beobachtungen in den eigenen vier Wänden, Selbstbetrachtung und dem Spiel mit alternativen Realitätsentwürfen verbinden. Die vermeintliche Unfreiheit der Quarantäne stellt sich als Möglichkeit der Entfaltung heraus, in Einsamkeit entsteht Raum für Transformation.

Die Klangarbeit „puppenruhe“ ist eine Vertonung dieses Künstlerbuchs und verbindet Synthesizer- Klänge mit gesprochener Stimme und Gesang, sowie Geräuschfragmenten und dem Wechselspiel mit dem eigenen Echo.



Nationality and location:
German, Ulm (Germany)

Website:
johanna-mangold.de

Social media:
instagram.com/johanna.mangold

Dream Catalogue


Project
Dream Catalogue is a sonic project with the goal to research neuroscientifically and sociologically recurring dreams or dream accumulated experiences, and represent them into soundscapes. The dreams we are collecting are the dreams which have their internal memory based on the previous dream episodes.

Hypothesis
Studies show that the brain areas that are responsible for dreaming are also responsible for consciousness, perception, and mental imagery. Can this in any way can mean that the brain perceives reality and dreams in the same way? Does this mean that the brain values both experiences the same? Do we accumulate dream experience in recurring dreams as we do accumulate life experience in our memories?

Method
There are two background stages in the project: neuroscientific research, sociological research and data collection. During neuroscientific research, we study the brain processes while dreaming and the history of dream research in order to get a conceptual basis and the background for sociological research. During sociological research, we collect voice recordings of the dream narrative using the protocol of the qualitative open interview. Based on the collection there is a dream classification. The classification is shaped by the repetitive parameter in storylines. The name of the soundscape consists of the dream classification codes.

For instance, soundscape “00 02” stands for – Category: Dream [00] → Continuous Dream [02]. In continuous dreams, the storyline evolves or a part of it develops in the next dream episodes. These dreams keep in them the full world with its settings and the memory of all previous happenings.



Nationality and location:
Ukrainian, France

Website:
myroslava.me

Social media:
instagram.com/myrslava
facebook.com/myroslava.kuts

At the time of creating my work “Loop 407”, 407 days had passed since the first Covid19 case was confirmed in Germany. During the first and second lockdown, most cities seemed deserted, factories stood still, and citizens had to isolate themselves from each other.

Silence also grew in many people’s own homes. To capture this state, I recorded the soundscape of my living room while doing everyday routines. By looping a 20 second recording sequence, I created a sound-on-sound-recording. This resulted in 407 recordings, from which an inverted silence grew. Gradually, certain frequencies built up and overlapped each other. Snatches of conversation, the creaking of a chair, or the rustling of clothing soon got lost in a cacophony of jarring sounds. I spliced a 20-second tapeloop from the resulting material and transferred the cumulative sounds and resonances to a reel-to-reel recorder. I then filtered the audio signal through several synthesizers and sampled it in my DAW to create pads and percussive sounds. By recording, arranging and cutting the various samples, the piece “Loop 407” was finally created.

Only sounds created during the recording were used for this work. Thus, the resulting composition is a reflection of silence and isolation.



Social media:
instagram.com/raphaelaletsee

Technically, this composition is built using lo-fi analog machines (hardware), field recordings and files that I have collected from the internet and transformed into samples. It is an experimental work that is in the limits of a sonic piece and a soundscape.

The central theme of this sound piece is the desolation of social and personal spaces as a consequence of the prolonged quarantine. In the context of the pandemic that we are experiencing as a planet, measures have been taken towards social distance as a way to prevent the spread of the plague. However, this social isolation has generated disastrous consequences both in the social relations and in the inner core of human beings.

The isolation and desolation of spaces as a result of the plague have produced, especially in those who live in cities, a deep anguish. The future that seemed far away is now a desolate present that repeats itself. Uncertainty takes hold of our perspectives and everything seems to be destined for non-realization.

Another consequence of the social isolation that I develop in this piece is the feeling of loneliness. The obligatory solitude that expands within us despite the abundant technology that they offer us to be connected. Nothing replaces the physical contact of yesteryear. There is some extreme dehumanization in that sense. What we are experiencing in recent months is proof of this. While we are alone in our homes, others agonize in the solitude of the hospitals and say goodbye to their loved ones through a screen. As never in history, we are surrounded by barbarism and technology.

Have we definitively entered a dystopia from which we will never emerge again?



Nationality and location:
Chilean, currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Website:
rodrigoromero-flores.wixsite.com/arte

Social media:
vimeo.com/rodrigoromero
soundcloud.com/user-354006010

At the beginning of 2021, with England in coronavirus “lock-down”, I made a decision to start creating a series of weekly audio works. Something like a sonic sketchbook, or perhaps diary. Each piece would be one minute and nine seconds long; with the idea that by the end of the year, if I carried the project through, they would total up to an hour’s worth of sound. Each work would in some way reflect experiences, thoughts or encounters from that week.

“60/52:01-08(revisited)” is a compilation of these individual works from the first two months of this year. It is a composition of manipulated field recordings, voice, found material and electronic sound. The individual weekly components appear here in the same order they were produced, with some minor editing and adjustments made to create a more satisfactory whole.



Nationality and location:
British, London (UK)

Website:
simongoodwin.audio

When I first saw the call for works I was not sure I could respond, but after considering the subject and the idea for some time I heard one sound very clearly. It is one that I notice quite often in my quiet surroundings, especially during 10 days of quarantine at the beginning of the month.

The clock in the space I have been given for an artistic residency at Ferme-Asile, Switzerland has the ability to come to the foreground of the sonic environment here. It signifies the passing of time, which all of us are feeling has become distorted through confinement, lockdowns, curfews, working from home, not meeting with friends or family... it is a constant, the ticking marking the passing seconds faultlessly.

But listening to me writing this text from the perspective of the clock, how does time pass...? Does it pass swiftly or slowly? Are you aware of how much time has passed once you finish listening to the audio piece?

Did you become distracted, daydreaming and suddenly it was over? Or did the time drag, the piece seeming never to end?

I suggest listening to the piece through speakers if possible, allowing it to combine with your own space and time by infiltrating it. I also suggest you read this text before listening to the piece rather than while listening to be able to contemplate these questions and your observations.



Nationality and location:
UK national currently based in Sion, Switzerland

Website:
simonwhetham.co.uk

Social media:
facebook.com/simonwhethamartist
vimeo.com/simonwhetham