Material Studies Workshop | Thursday 14 November 2013, 7-9pm
Material Studies Group
Material Studies Group – Workshop
Thursday 14 November 2013, 7-9pm
Coinciding with the first ever exhibition of Material Residues, video documentation of previous Material Studies workshops and interventions, the Material Studies Group will converge at GV Art on 14th November from 7-9pm for a session of unconstrained collective explorations of the sounds within matter.
Materials will be provided, but you are encouraged to bring your own objects to play!
———————————–
The Material Studies group are Blanca Regina, Matthias Kispert and Andrew Riley. The first series of Material Studies workshops took place at Sound//Space at V22 Summer Club in London in 2012, with further workshops and interventions held at SoundFjord, The Barbican and Cafe Oto, with invited guest participants including Steve Beresford, Ryan Jordan, Iris Garrelfs and Daichi Yoshikawa.
Avant-garde art, be it musically, visually or performance based often appears as somewhat elitist, with a defined hierarchy between those who create the work (the artists) and those experience it (the audience). To people who have not had the fortune of being taught all the codes of the artform, the pieces and the settings in which these are shown can be uncomfortable and alienating.
The Material Studies project seeks to open these experimental artforms to anyone who wishes to participate in the collective, improvised sonic exploration of various materials and objects, whether by actively working with the objects, passively absorbing the interactions of others or by expressing a response to the sonic exploration through visual or written acts.
The use of traditional instruments, terminology and tools of manipulation is avoided. Participants together develop an improvisational language based solely on the sounds that can be teased out of various everyday objects.
No expertise or previous experience is required, instead the sessions focus on the communicative potential of collective improvisation, where every participant needs to listen and react to everything that is happening around, where every gesture has an influence on everything else.
The underlying principle of the project is to promote a corrosion of the space between the artist-performer and the contemplator-audience and to promote the idea that we are all valuable as artists regardless of education or class.