Three-year long cooperation with the Contemporary Art Foundation In Situ – initiated with a residency of Keith Rowe back in 2015 – gained a new form in 2017: artists, carefully selected by a team of sound curators, were invited for study visits, during which they prepared a programme of their activities for the next edition of the Sanatorium of Sound Festival. Thus, cooperation between the Wrocław-based cultural institution and the foundation from Sokołowsko transformed analogous to the AIR Wro programme itself, within the framework of which, since 2017, we have started the implementation of study visits as a permanent element of our activities. Continuation of cooperation with the foundation enabled further support of new and creative curatorial practices referring to the subject of sound and music and the search for new strategies at the intersection of art and technology. Cooperation platform, realised in cooperation with In Situ, was sum up during a „A-I-R Sanatorium Dźwięku 2018: wokół sound artu” meeting. The artist talk was held on 16.08 in Wrocław.
Ryoko Akama came to Sokołowsko as the first invited artist in march 2017. Her goal was, among others, to prepare a new installation. Her "Object Migration 01" piece was presented during hte Sanatorium of Sound Festival, but also during the Avant Art Foundation (in a developed formula).
Ryoko Akama is a sound artist/composer/performer, who approaches listening situations that magnify silence, time and space and offer quiet temporal/spatial experiences. Her sound works employ small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles, creating tiny occurrences that embody "almost nothing" aesthetics. She composes text events and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with international artists. She runs melange edition label, amespace and co-edits.
In June 2017 Alfredo Costa Monteiro, yet another artist invited to Sokołowsko, conducted a workshop entitled "Sound improvisation: strategies for here and now". Throughout this workshop, Monteiro and participants of the event analyzed what are the new approaches on sound by making a historical review of some of the 20th century experimental sound practices, and tried to decipher some of this complexity by questioning the means used to carry out experimentation in music.
Alfredo Costa Monteiro is an audiovisual artist born in Portugal, living in Barcelona , Spain. He studied sculpture/multimedia at Fine Art school in Paris with Christian Boltanski. In 1992, he moved to Barcelona. Since then, his work stands somewhere between sound art, visual art and sound poetry. His installations and sound pieces, all of a low-fi character, have in common an interest for unstable processes, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect.
A series of study visits organised within the framework of A-I-R Sanatorium Dźwięku 2017 was completed by Arnold Haberl (NOID) and Klaus Filip, who presented their project "sonic luz" in Sokołowsko, whose main idea is based on the departure from the repeatability and stability of synthesizers. In the case of this project, sound generation is based on moving objects collected on the table - lamps or light sensors - which in effect enabled us to look inside the instrument and the mechanism on which it is based. In addition to the presentation of "sonic luz", Haberl and Filip also curated "sanatory17" – a review exhibition consisting of the latest activities in the field of sound art, in its framework presenting their object "Photophon".
Arnold Haberl is a composer, improviser and performer. Haberl is, above all, a cellist experimenting with electronic music. His artistic interests oscillate between solo and group play, soundart installations and video art. He collaborated with numerous musicians (including Klaus Filip, Taku Unami, Keiko Uenishi / o.blaat, Axel Dörner, Christian Weber, ErikM, Dieb13, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Burkhard Stangl, Yan Jun, Taku Han-Noda, Carl Stone), choreographers (João Fiadeiro, Colette Sadler, Akemi Takeya, Philipp Gehmacher) and visual artists (Alexander Schellow, Heike Kaltenbrunner, Erik Hable, André Goncalves). Together with Klaus Filip, he created ppooll, an open source application for MAX MSP for interactive activities, presented at the Cycling74 conference in San Francisco in 2009. He is also the organizer of the interdisciplinary Reheat festival, as well as the curator of the sound art exhibitions at the Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf festival.
Klaus Filip is a performer and composer of the composer and one of the first Viennese composers who used the laptop on stage in 1993. The main medium that is currently used are sinusoidal waves. As a sound artist, he is looking for sound and light in the field. Klaus Filip has created a programming environment for composers called ppooll used by musicians around the world. He is a lecturer in sound art at the University of Vienna.