Continuing our mission to explore the possibilities of spatial sound as an expressive medium, MONOM is excited to announce the launch of a new platform for storytelling: SONIC CINEMA.
Cinema from the greek word kinema - to move.
Since the invention of cinematic technology, which freed the image to move giving us the ability to bring our imaginations and dreams to life with unprecedented realism, Cinema has arguably influenced culture more than any other medium in history
MONOM’s SONIC CINEMA will explore new form of cinematic experience - the Sonic Film. MONOM’s Sonic Films - which are an augmented sonic reality experience enabled by 4DSOUNDs audio hologram technology, will provide a framework to create and tell stories that can directly reflect the detail and multidimensionality of human perception - one that is constantly moving and in flux.
Working without defined boundaries of the visual sense, this pure sonic experience opens up new realms of possibility for narrative creation and embodiment where the only limit is the imagination.
Parallel to CTM 2020, MONOM invites the listener to sit on the threshold between the real and the imagined, providing an opportunity for deep awareness of the present moment: a liminal zone - a ‘space of possibles’ where spatial sound fundamentally alters the ways stories are told and experienced.
The program will present Sonic Films that will sit beside AV experiences, meditations and art installations that explore the liminality of perception.
PROGRAM
Daily from 13:30 - 17:30
24 January - 02 February
SONIC CINEMA : SESSION ONE
Lost Space: Rainforests by William Russell with musical contributions from LUM and FLORA (Jonas V. Ronnberg, Anna Melina) and additional sound sculpting by Marc-Andre Müller.
Lost Space: Oceans by William Russell and Robertina Šebjanič with musical contributions from FLORA (Jonas V. Ronnberg, Anna Melina) and additional sound sculpting by Tillman Jex.
Global Sunrise: The Musical Sounds of Dawn by Gordon Hempton with sound sculpting by William Russell and Ro Stambuk.
Earthcry by Sam Potter, Edo Van Breemen and Geoff Dembicki
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
14:00 - 15:30
SONIC CINEMA : SESSION TWO
Seid by KhalilH2OP
nimiia cétiï by Jenna Sutela
Crevices by Xenia Xamanek
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
16:40 - 18:10
COMPOUND TERRAINS
An AV installation developed at The Spatial Sound Institute by Tom Slater and Jeremy Keenan
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
15:45 - 16:25
And
18:25 - 19:05
MONOM HOTEL PRESENTS : CINEMA FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS
An overnight lucid dream experience.
Jan 24th, Jan 25th & Feb 1st
Doors: 23:30
Lights out: 00:00 - 8:00 (overnight)
LIGHT STRIKES
An art exhibition curated by Letizia Trussi – ROOMS OF KAIROS
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
13:30 - 19:30 daily
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
Sonic Cinema : Session One
Lost Space: Rainforests by William Russell with musical contributions from LUM and FLORA (Jonas V. Ronnberg, Anna Melina) and additional sound sculpting by Marc-Andre Müller
Lost Space: Oceans by William Russell and Robertina Šebjanič with musical contributions from FLORA (Jonas V. Ronnberg, Anna Melina) and additional sound sculpting by Tillman Jex
Global Sunrise: The Musical Sounds of Dawn by Gordon Hempton with sound sculpting by William Russell and Rodrigo Stambuk
Earthcry by Sam Potter, Edo Van Breemen and Geoff Dembicki
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
14:00 - 15:30
Single Sonic Cinema Session = 12€
One Sonic Cinema Session with access to the Compound Terrain AV installation and the Light Strikes art exhibition
Full-Day Ticket = 20€
Both Sonic Cinema Sessions with access to the Compound Terrain AV installation and the Light Strikes art exhibition
Conceived by MONOM’s Creative Director, William Russell, Lost Spaces is a Sonic Film series that aims to increase empathetic awareness between the audience and natural environments through the documentation and transmission of its natural beauty and its destruction.
A series of virtual sonic reality experiences, Lost Spaces uses innovative recording and playback techniques designed to recreate in rich detail the sonic environments of some of the World’s most beautiful and life rich natural ecosystems. A journey both sonically and emotionally, these environments and different scenes taken from all over the world will be infused with music and frequencies aimed at stimulating each listeners' imagination - internal visions overlayed with individual memories and experiences.
Storytelling is a powerful medium for expression and communication - a means of increasing social empathy, historically acting as an engine of social/cultural liberalisation and change.
Mediums such as the spoken word, pictures, writing, film, music and sound - have all been used to enhance the power of storytelling, to help transmit knowledge, to guide us from the old world through the threshold into a new world of understanding and awareness. Lost Spacess has been created using a technology built by 4DSOUND which enables the production of sound holograms: highly vivid, spatial appearances of sound that enrich, augment or transform reality as we perceive it.
The series uses this immersive sonic technology and innovative storytelling techniques together as a tool to increase awareness of humans inseparable link to the natural environment and help heal the collective trauma of the extinction of life as we have known it.
The first two Sonic Films in the Lost Spaces series explore the two largest living symphonies of our planet; the rainforests and the oceans - home to over 90 percent of all living beings.
From forests in Finland to the Amazon rainforest, the great barrier reef, to the seas of Sri Lanka from the wetlands of Africa into the Andes mountains, the series will also serve as a hyper-realistic audio map, a sonic archive of these life rich natural spaces that humanity may lose forever.
Lost Space: Rainforests
An enchanting, haunting and at moments terrifying composition of sound, music and voice, the first iteration of Lost Spaces - Rainforest is divided into stages based on falling into and out of synchronisation with nature.
The audience will be taken on a journey connecting human emotions to the dynamics of natural phenomena immersing the listener in the rich sonic environments of rainforests from around the world - home to more species than any other environment, spaces and life that we have lost forever, and ones that are on the brink of destruction.
Lost Space: Subaquatic Oceans
A collaboration between MONOM's Creative Director and 4DSOUND designer, William Russell and artist/researcher Robertina Šebjanič and supported by Projekt Atol Institute with sonic contributions from artists FLORA (Jonas V Ronnberg and and Anna Malina)
The common point of departure of the collaboration is Robertina's art and research focusing on Aquatocene - a cultural, (bio)political and biological realities of aquatic environments and William's wish to emulate this sonic ecological situation in 4DSOUND.In the last decades, the anthropogenic technological presence has increased the presence of human-produced noise, which is severely impacting and polluting the marine environment and interfering with the communication and songs of the marine drawlers who cant' just close their ears. This shift has caused deep distress. The work urges for a reconsideration of how to navigate the water's sonic depth with our omnipresence.
The Sonic Film, Lost Space: Subaquatic Ocean, will take the listener on a journey deep into the subaquatic oceanic world, from the enchanting, surreal and rich bioacoustic environment of pristine subaquatic life - a completely different orchestra playing under the surface of the sea invisible to most, to the harsh reality of today's subaquatic sonic scape.
Global Sunrise: The Musical Sounds of Dawn by Gordan Hempton (remixed in 4DSOUND)
Created by Emmy Award winner Gordon Hempton never-ending wave of bird song follows the rhythm of the earth’s rotation as if the sun never stopped rising and the birds never stopped singing - Beginning in the Ecuadorian Amazon then along a path through Central America, Western North America, the Hawaiian Islands, the vast Australian Outback, Sri Lanka and the Kalahari Desert, returning to North America before descending once again into the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon.
Earthcry
In between the mundane details of your life and the knowledge you carry that something cosmically horrible is happening to Planet Earth is a psychic zone filled with grief, joy and righteous anger. Scientists, politicians, journalists and activists have for decades failed to activate these explosive emotions in the majority of people because they lacked the proper tools. They didn’t realize that this psychic zone is largely impervious to facts or rational argument.
But we, the founders of Earth Cry, a multidisciplinary arts collective, have discovered a new means of entry. By transforming climate change data into 3D sound environments we allow you to truly “hear” our planet’s gasps of pain. This creates an emotional pressure valve that causes you to feel oceanic sadness, seismic gratitude and the sweet volcanic rage of someone who finally realizes what needs to be done to preserve the natural systems that a small group of rich powerful sociopaths are hellbent on destroying.
You become, in other words, utterly awake for the first time in your life.
Sam Potter is an artist and speculative author based in Berlin. His 2018 book 'Ecstatic Data Sets' talks of the emotional effects of emergent technologies and recent prototyping of these ideas lead to this project.
Edo Van Breemen is a composer and spatial sound producer living in Vancouver, Canada. He is the co-founder of Inscapes Spatial Sound and the co-director of Lobe Studio, North America’s first official 4DSOUND studio. Additionally, he composes for film in collaboration with Johannes Winkler as the Transatlantic Film Orchestra.
Geoff Dembicki is a climate change journalist living in Brooklyn. He is a frequent contributor to VICE and other outlets and is author of the book Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change.
Sonic Cinema : Session Two
Seid by KhalilH2OP
nimiia cétiï by Jenna Sutela
Crevices by Xenia Xamanek
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
16:40 - 18:10
Single Sonic Cinema Session = 12€
One Sonic Cinema Session with access to Compound Terrain installation and art exhibition
Full-Day Ticket = 20€
Grants guest access to all Sonic Cinema Session, Compound Terrain installation and Light Strikes art exhibition
Seid
By KhalilH2OP
On the 25th of January, MONOM will premiere the audiovisual piece Seid by Copenhagen trio KhalilH2OP, the collaborative effort of Yen Towers, NikkiH2OP, and Minais B. The Posh Isolation signed trio have adapted their new album with the same title for MONOM’s 4DSOUND spatial sound system, following the esteemed “The Water We Drink” from 2017. Voices, synthesizers, flutes and acoustic guitars will travel between the rooms 16 columns of speakers. Performer Paolo Gile, photographer Frederik Barfod and artist Veronika Vidø have contributed with video material for the room’s four 5 x 3 meter screens, hung between the speaker-columns.
Expect lip-sync, ritual dance and pagan beings. In Old Norse, Seid was a type of shamanic sorcery that functioned as a medium between worlds. The lyrics of vocalist NikkiH2OP plays on this theme, both relating to today's ignorance towards nature and personification of dead objects, but also to the natural, transitional phases happening inside of everyone of us. This connects with the theme of CTM 2020 ‘Liminal’, with the festivals own words: “Liminal phenomena and liminoid states are transitional phases in which a familiar order sees its values and symbols destabilised.” Seid will be presented in three acts: Galdr 2100 (Wetnotes), Sectioned (23.5), Altered (Sky Silky).
Act 1: Galdr 2100 (Wetnotes)
Something Sacred. Traversing from neon blue to fluorescent white.
End now, I still won't settle down. The function of me keeps going even though I'm not there, like a fish out of water. I wipe away tears like I’m driving, drawn out sky to dive in. The sea is still all marble, but never like this.
Act 2: Sectioned (23.5)
Let go of the sky and the feeling I called wings. Reached the point where I know I’m no longer in an upward-pointing arch. I let go of surroundings first and the understanding of my own abilities to navigate in them second. Surface to endless depth, I magnify everything, I am max. I’m the glass that shatters from the heat it amplified itself. Even when I'm in the dark, I’m in the dark with you.
Act 3: Altered (Sky Silky)
It would have been nice to know how much everything hurt. Nice to know how ex’s ballads bite. It’s the biggest deceit, I eclipse like I’ll leave but I lied. Not even the sun tells the truth now.
It’s not that I don't occupy the same vessel as you, but functions have been stripped. It is impossible to tell if I’m in the process of being optimised or deteriorating. While happening, both are painful. My balance is weakened.
We ́re no longer about anything other than us.
We share day and night only forwards.
Seid will run from 25th of January - 1st of February at MONOM, Funkhaus for CTM Festival 2020: ‘Liminal’.
All music by KhalilH2OP
Dance performance by Paolo Gile.
Visual material and editing by Frederik Barfod and Veronika Vidø.
Additional support received from Statens Kunstfond
nimiia cétiï
by Jenna Sutela
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20.
nimiia cétiï (2018) is an audiovisual work by Jenna Sutela using machine learning to generate a new written and spoken language. This language is based on the computer's interpretation of a Martian tongue from the late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela, as well as the movement of Bacillus subtilis nattō, an extremophilic bacterium that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The machine, in this project, is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. The work is also about intelligent machines as aliens of our creation.
nimiia cétiï was created in collaboration with Memo Akten and Damien Henry as part of n-dimensions, Google Arts & Culture's artist-in-residence program at Somerset HouseStudios. Thanks to Kieran Bates from the Institute of Zoology at Imperial College London, Adam Laschinger for sound recordings, and Manus Nijhoff and Leïth Benkhedda for 3D work. The video includes music with Miako Klein in contrabass recorder and Shin-Joo Morgantini in flute, with sound production by Ville Haimala
Crevices
by Xenia Xamanek
Xenia Xamanek presents Crevices a Sonic Film that expands her recent work with disembodied voices, ghosts and distanced intimacy together with the internet phenomenon ASMR and the creation of hyper-present holograms of sound. The piece offers a space to reflect upon the various states human existence may occupy and blurs the line between life and death. As a poetic composition, Crevices explores the ancient Latin American legends and stories about the afterlife addressing the many ways for love to be present.
Having studied the rules of composition and been formally trained on saxophone, Xenia Xamanek is an artist who is appealed to ignore all rules in order to approach her idiosyncratic style of music. She debuted in 2015 with her releases on Infinite Waves under her previous alias Equis. Since then she has been involved in several collaborations and projects dealing with site-specific sound art, audiovisuals performances and much more. She released her first solo album under her own name Xenia Xamanek, entitled "Envase" on the danish music platform Anyines, in November 2018.
Xamanek is a true contemporary hardware explorer who pushes her sound material in unusual ways, navigating an adventurous field and creating a surreal soundscape of high standard.
Recent release is the single "Imprints of Her In Bars of House" released July 2019 on Posh Isolation.
Compound Terrains
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, 2nd
15:45 - 16:25
And
18:25 - 19:05
*Access is included in both single sonic cinema session tickets and full-day tickets
Developed in residency at the Spatial Sound Institute, Compound Terrains, by Tom Slater and Jeremy Keenan, is an audiovisual work that emerged from an interrogation of three-dimensional audiovisual spatialization technologies and their role in the production of so-called virtual and disembodied spaces.
Compound Terrains is an attempt to locate the perceived barrier separating digital and physical space and raises the question: are virtual objects now capable of generating the same perceptual effects as real objects? By converging laser beam projections with OpenGL graphics and the immersive audio capabilities of the 4DSOUND system, this installation induces an ambiguity of multistable, digital/physical and dis/embodied space. These hybrid spaces suggest different regimes of synaesthesia, knitting sensations together in varying proportions.
Compound Terrains is perhaps a contemporary contribution to the trompe l’oeil arms race, but essentially it aspires to render the concept moot in our felt experience of its protean light and sound.
https://spatialsoundinstitute.com/Compound-Terrain-2017-2018
https://www.jeremykeenan.info
Light Strikes
An art exhibition curated by Letizia Trussi – ROOMS OF KAIROS
Jan 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st
Feb 1st, Feb 2nd
13:30 - 19:30 daily
*Access is included in both single sonic cinema session tickets and full-day tickets.
Featured Artists:
Friedrich Gobbesso
Nicolas 'NIKI' Kramar
Marie Moon
Isabelle Tellié
Light Strikes, defines the surface of the existing and establishes the visible. It reflects from objects that continuously try to deceive us, carrying their truths and lies. The connective space both represented and traversed by light becomes a malleable component in the hands of the viewer, who is invited – if not forced – to interact and react.
Based on analog optical interplay of light and shadow, the works presented in the exhibition rebel to the status of still object and elude 2D norms and predictability. They fiercely introduce themselves through mind-bending messages and thought-provoking visions sent from the lands of interference, multi-dimensionality, and metamorphosis.
Cinema for the Subconscious
Jan 24th, Jan 25th
Doors: 23:30
Lights out: 00:00 - 8:00 (overnight)
35€ - Ticket includes a pillow, blanket, mattress and breakfast
During CTM, MONOM Hotel will present Cinema for the subconscious, a lucid dream experiment whereby the listener will be taken on an overnight journey through hyper-realistic and surreal landscapes… An augmented sonic reality that aims to fuse with your inner worlds - night time in the amazon, sunset by the ocean, in front of a fire in a cottage in the Andes. - these environments will infused with frequencies and music to stimulate both spatial and emotional responses, placing the listener on the threshold of the real and the imagined, conscious and subconscious.
Waking up to a dawn chorus, the audience will be invited to write down their dreams to research the possibilities of a collective dream state.
How will these sonic universes weave into your imagination?
*Guests will not be allowed entry once the show begins. Guests are welcome to leave at any time but re-entry will not be permitted.
*Guests are welcome to bring additional bedding to make their stay more comfortable.
*Outside drinks are permitted.