Engages,

Ros Bandt, Michael Fowler, Dylan Martorell, SIBLING + Critical Mobility

Dates: 20 July – 6 August 2011

Bus Projects is pleased to present Critical Mobility, a nomadic public art project exploring the relations between art and globalised public space. Utilising a truck fitted-out as a gallery and performance space, the project features new work by Ros Bandt, Michael Fowler, Dylan Martorell and SIBLING, as well as a ‘pop-up’ performance series entitled Transits curated by BUS Projects’ Gallery Manager Jared Davis.
The Critical Mobility truck will appear at a range of CBD locations throughout the State of Design Festival as well as at Footscray Train Station in partnership with Big West. Critical Mobility will conclude with a public forum on the subject of art and public space at the office of the Big West Festival in Footscray at 2pm, 6 August. This project has been curated by Ryan Johnston, Nella Themelios and Jared Davis and forms part of the State of Design Festival 2011. Critical Mobility at Footscray is a part of the Big West Little Bites program.

Program Dates & Venues:
20, 22 July: ACCA Forecourt, Sturt Street Southbank, 9pm-11pm
22-24 July: Royal Exhibitions Buildings, Carlton, 1pm-5pm
28 July: Queensbridge Square, Southbank, 1pm-3pm
29 July: Queensbridge Square, Southbank, 4pm-6pm
3 August: Footscray Train Station, Footscray, 4pm-7pm
4 August: Footscray Train Station, Footscray, 11am-3pm
5 August: Footscray Train Station, Footscray, 6pm-8pm

Opening Night: 9pm – 11.00pm Wednesday 20 July, ACCA Forecourt, Sturt Street Southbank. Featuring the performance series Transits I, curated by Jared Davis.
Closing Night: 6pm – 8pm Friday 5 July, Footscray Train Station. Featuring the performance series Transits II, curated by Jared Davis.
Forum: 2pm – 3pm Saturday 6 August, Rehearsal Room, Big West Festival Offices, Level 1, 42 Albert Street, Footscray.

Cost: All events are FREE. No bookings required.

ARTISTS & PROJECTS
ROS BANDT
Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, at once a composer, performer and installation artist. Bandt will articulate the truck as an acoustic space: a sounding object; a playable musical instrument; a container for moving sounds from one place to another; an installation place to be explored by the public; and a performing space. The relationship between two sites – the Royal Exhibition buildings and the ACCA forecourt (including the adjacent City Link stack 55 metre chimney) ­– will be the focus of Bandt’s project. Bandt will be available on site at the Exhibition Buildings to record the general public’s “Moving” stories as part of an ongoing installation with sounds recorded in transit, in vehicles and whilst moving. At the ACCA forecourt, she will perform Truckacca on the Tarhu bowed spike fiddle, accompanied by the subterranean sounds and sights of the City Link smoke stack cylinder adjoining the site. Ros Bandt has pioneered sound sculptures, interactive installations and site specific artworks since 1977. Bandt’s award winning works have been commissioned in Europe, Asia and America, including the Paris Autumn festival, the West Deutsche Rundfunk and the ORF Austria. In Australia she has won the Sound Art Australia prize and was the first woman to be awarded the Don Banks Composers fellowship, Australia’s highest honour. In 2010-2011 she toured and lived in Europe designing site specific works in the Yerebatan cistern, Istanbul, Turkey and collaborative performance art at the Tube, Munich, Germany. Her original works are published on Move Records, Sonic Gallery, EMI, New Albion, Wergo and Pozitif Music. Her recent book Hearing Places is available from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. Sound and scores of Grid, a movement from Stack was just exhibited in Berlin and is recorded on Move records. Bandt is also founding director of the online multi-media gallery, the Australian Sound Design Project documenting sound designs in public space in Australia. Her most recent book Hearing Places is published by Cambridge Scholars press, UK.

www.rosbandt.com
www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au
www.move.com.au/disc/3245

MICHAEL FOWLER
Michael Fowler’s research interests centre on the intersection between electro-acoustic music, architecture and landscape architecture. Fowler will use the truck as an acoustic arena, transforming it into a heterotopia of sorts; a place of “acoustic otherness” using samples and sounds that he has collected throughout his travels; mixed and performed live. More than a background soundscape, or a muzak to the truck’s interior, Fowler will create a mobile aural architecture that sits in deference to the typical lo-fidelity auditory experience of a city’s transportation system. The audience will be enveloped for a period of time in a type of auditory suspension, present in and ‘beyond’ the site. Dr. Michael Fowler trained firstly as a musician, studying piano in Australia with Colin Spiers at the University of Newcastle, then in the US at the University of Cincinnati. In 2007-08 he took up advance studies in the synthesizer and synthesizer programming with Antonio Pérez Abellán (Stockhausen-Stiftung). Fowler has performed at venues and festivals in Japan, China, USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Australia presenting electro-acoustic avant-garde music. He has given Australian premieres of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter, and worked with the likes of Steve Reich, Benjamin Boretz, George Crumb and Milton Babbitt. By utilising Barry Blesser’s notion of ‘aural architecture’ as an interrogative lens, Fowler has explored a number of theoretical, analytical and creative projects that locate exemplars of auditory design through inherent deep-level structural conditions. His investigations are interdisciplinary and subsequently utilise diverse methodologies drawn from soundscape studies, architectural modeling, semiotics, music theory and information science. Projects have included sound installations and performances in China, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico and Germany. His current research project, Designing soundscape architectures for urban environments is an investigation into the connection between qualities of soundsape and landscape within the traditional Japanese garden as a design paradigm for the future built environment

DYLAN MARTORELL
Dylan Martorell is a visual artist and electroacoustic musician. He develops sound-based sculptures and installations, improvising with whatever materials and objects are at hand. Martorell will set up a recording studio inside the truck incorporating hand-made instruments and the full suite of mobile sound systems he has been producing over the last few years. Other artists and the general public will come together in a series of blind date improv sessions, which will be documented in stills and audio. Born in Scotland, Dylan Martorell has been exhibiting and performing for over a decade within Australia and internationally as a musician and artist. Sound in all its various forms, musical diasporas, fourth world mythologies and the natural world are all important touchstones in a multidisciplinary practice that takes in everything from costume design and performance to hand drawn musical scores, screenprints and video. Influenced by time spent in Mexico, North Africa, Japan and more recently Indonesia, his practice couples an ecstatic sense of improvisation with a highly disciplined style of detail, relying as much upon a use of found objects and chance as it does upon repetition, focus, sine waves and black ink. It is this nexus of sound and image that is at the heart of a constantly evolving body of work where drawings become ideas for musical costumes and instruments, where performances evolve into ideas for drawings etc. and where materials, patterns and sounds are recycled, reworked and recombined to create new combinations and where the micro mimics the macro and the gallery space becomes the venue for a work that is always in progress. His bands Snawklor, (with artist Nathan Gray) and The Hi God People have played on trams in Osaka, wine cellars in Toulouse, bars in New York, sewerage drains and flying fox colonies in Melbourne, art galleries in Rotterdam and Tokyo, carpet shops in Tangiers, and supported such luminaries as the Dead C, OOIOO and Sonic Youth, collaborated with Damo Suzuki and Lakota psychic healer Shamir Thunder Eagle and have both recently celebrated 10 years of relative obscurity. www.hiddenarchive.blogspot.com

SIBLING
Founded in 2005, SIBLING are a design collective whose practice relies on collaboration across a diverse range of platforms and disciplinary fields. For Critical Mobility, SIBLING will explore and exploit the conditions that enable nomadic forms of behaviour and subsistence, overtaking the truck as a site for the establishment of a transient ‘SIBLING Nation’. In The Accursed Share, George Bataille shows how a goat may be utilised as a symbiotic mechanism within a group, becoming the central system for nomadic life to exist. The goat requires vegetation to graze, grow, thicken its coat, fuck, reproduce and begin the production of milk. The coat is used for warmth, milk is used to drink and make cheese, meat is used for food. Nomadic life then relies on the maintenance of its resources and must move on once these are exhausted. In this instance, the most ubiquitous technological tool of our times – the portable communication device – will act as the ‘goat’ of SIBLING Nation. The symbiotic relationship SIBLING as a group have with this device, relying on it for both interaction within the group and with an external environment, will be customised in various ways. Rather than designing something new as a method for living or occupying public space, the truck will become an artefact where through the depositions of their nomadic lifestyle SIBLING will invite exchange and interaction with the viewer. Founded in 2005, SIBLING collects a diverse group of creators from fields including but not limited to architecture, landscape urbanism, visual communication, cultural analysis and culinary arts. SIBLING are connected by a continuous dialogue on topics ranging from new communal lifestyles, to food harvesting, to the construction of nations and social systems.
cargocollective.com/sibling

TRANSITS I & II
Transits will see the BUS mobile art space activated as a fleeting performance space in pop-up events for Critical Mobility. Taking the mobile art space as both a ‘station’ in itself as well as a never-stationary site of transition, Transits will furtherCritical Mobility‘s investigations of mobile site and place.

TRANSITS I
9pm – 11.00pm Wednesday 20 July, ACCA Forecourt, Sturt Street Southbank.

Featuring:

1. The VISUAL ARTISTS’ NON-ORCHESTRA (curated by NIC TAMMENS)
   The Visual Artists’ Non-Orchestra is looking for artists to play their abandoned instruments, pots, pans, ready-mades, paint brushes, thrift store drum kits, teenage transgression christmas present guitars, Semiotext Xeroxes, band camp clarinets, trash cans, ukeleles, dusty acrylic recorders, hippie parent’s bongo drums, italian grandparent’s piano accordions, forks, spoons, assorted silverware, dust busters, vacuum cleaners, primary school era “three blind mice” played violins, closet wind instruments, down tuned bass guitars, broken Marclay-esque record players, vocal chords, corduroy pants, ringtones, traditional folk instruments, scrap A4s, Katzenklaviers, boxes of old catalogues, failed sound art experiments, etc. TURN UP, DE-TUNE, DROP OUT

2. EVELYN MORRIS

3. A once-off collaborative performance featuring ERIC DEMETRIOU, SAMAAN FIECK, CHRISTOPHER LG HILL, DAVID PALLISER

TRANSITS II
6pm – 8pm Friday 5 July, Footscray Train Station.

Featuring outside the truck:

DANAE VALENZA: Blindfold Piece (composition for blindfolds and musicians) Blindfold Piece is a performance/experiment that restricts the visual properties of musical collaboration. A group of musicians are blindfolded for the duration of the performance and each plays an instrument that they have not touched or played before. The work is created through the generative nature of personal inquiry and play, within a collaborative context. For Transits, this piece was performed by Lewis Mulvey, Francis Plagne and Nic Tammens.

aKITCHENproject: For Transits, aKITCHENproject present videos of performances from their recent Trans-Siberian Arts Centre project. Filmed on various train platforms between Russia and China, these performances aimed to re-create works by emerging Australian artists and instigate new works through its performers, britt+jon. This time around, britt+jon are rigging up screens to the back their bikes and bringing the videos of these performances to Footscray train station in a feat where two bikes need to work in tandem with a static projection to create a working reel.
Featuring inside the truck:

DYLAN MARTORELL
Plus sporadic performances with experimental instruments arranged for use by artists and the general public.