Luke Fowler is a Scottish artist, filmmaker and musician born in 1978. From archives, he has developed a singular and collaborative practice, poetic and political, structural and documentary, but above all deeply human. With an emphasis on community practices, heterodox thinkers and the history of the left, his 16mm films tell the story of alternative movements in Britain, from anti-psychiatry (Ronald David Laing) to feminist photography ( Pavilion), experimental music (the Scratch Orchestra) and workers’ education (Edward P. Thompson and the WEA). While some of his early films deal with music and musicians, sound itself becomes a major concern in his more recent works. He exhibits internationally and was notably nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012.
Workshop description: At this time (1955-1962) I started to use the portable tape recorder to collect sounds in society and use them in my compositions. Looking back on it now, I think it was a different approach compared to what used to be and is still called the soundscape.* From 1967-1970 the musique concrete composer Luc Ferrari composed the work Presque Rien no.1 it was a radical break from the tradition of the acousmatic; bringing social and subjective modes of listening to the foreground for the first time. At first listen Presque Rien appears as a documentary recording of a day unfolding in a small fishing village, yet in actuality it is carefully composed and mixed from a series of recordings made from the same spot over the course of several days; condensed via seamless editing to give the impression of events unfolding chronologically in real time. Ferrari pursued the strategies of autobiography and sonic narrative within his manifold practice – coining the terms “memorized sound” and “anecdotal music” to describe his highly original practice. Taking these quietly radical strategies as a starting point or methodology; the workshop will integrate hands-on exercises/practical experiments in combination with a series of screenings and talks to investigate how artists draw on daily reality, auto-biography, personal collections, notebooks, journals and diaries to transcend and interrogate the documentary form. I thought that the sounds I had recorded were like images, not only for me who could remember them, but also for the innocent listener. They conveyed often contradictory images that catapulted themselves inside the mind more freely than if they could actually be seen.
Additional Information:
https://arts-paris8.fr/edam/cours/ecologie-des-pratiques-critiques-a/
Duration: 6 days on site
