Specialisation and Exhibiting

Week6-Sound Arts Lecture Series

Adam Basanta (b. 1985) is an artist, composer, and performer of experimental music. Born in Tel-Aviv (ISR) and raised in Vancouver (CAN), he lives and works in Montreal (CAN) since 2010.

His work investigates technology – a continuous spectrum spanning from mud-brick to machine learning – as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping systems; a nexus of cultural, computational, biological, and economic forces. In uncovering, augmenting, and creating systems of entanglement, he is trying to uncover a sense of “liveness” or dynamism resulting from the unpredictable performances of various actants pulling independently in collective balance. The works are visual, but equally, choreographic and performative. Through a variety of media – installation, kinetic sculpture, sound, and computational image-making – he often employs commercial technological readymades as a core vocabulary, displacing them into an artistic context. Placing technological processes and artifacts in unconventional and absurd relationships to one another, he aims to create a fissure in their normative functions, reflecting on their roles as contemporary prosthetics with which we co-exist in a hybrid ecology. His research and creation processes involve a balance of qualitative and quantitative approaches. He is particularly interested in the interplay between the two seemingly polar-opposite, binary viewpoints, and strive towards a cross-pollination in which one feeds and complicates the other, and vice versa. 

I view art-making as a form of continual search and discovery, a way of engaging and becoming in the world. This guiding principle – of continual change, risk-taking, and acquiring of new skills – underpins the diversity of practice, methodologies, and output media which result from it. Each work is an imperfect record of a particular moment, and the overarching thematic meanings are found in the discontinuities between various works and approaches.

I am very shocked by his piece Acro on how to gather different materials on this small bridge and how they all mix well and stand with each other. The force and tension compressed by different materials have their own sense and it is very interesting to look at. Some of them are from nature, and some of them are very artificial. The attention is drawn to the overlap of opposing facets of monumental ruins: a resource to be reused as raw materials, a trace of lost ingenuity, a reminder of the triumph of impermanence over permanence, an enduring material remains testifying that all present cultures are equally destined to become archeological artifacts. A temporary sculpture whispering: “Memento mori, memento mori”.

I also spend time on listening to this four-channel piece interference as well cause I think it would be really helpful for my ambisonic submission. I find it quite bright and light which is something I won’t expect cause in my opinion clarinets and obe are quite strong and having heavy density.