News/Research

ATC Revisited: Laetitia Sonami

19 Nov, 2013

ATC Revisited: Laetitia Sonami

For those unable to attend the ATC lecture on Monday, October 14th, we’ve brought you a brief recap of the highlights!

Laetitia Sonami continued the success of the 2013-2014 Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium series with her talk entitled “Your Presence is Required: Performance, Control, and Magnetism,” which charted the trajectory of her sound art career, on Monday, November 18th at UC Berkeley.

Using the wire as the thread to her various works, Sonami described the genesis of her project the lady’s glove, which created sound through gesture via over thirty sensors sewn into her glove, and a box that converts analog information to digital sound. As she developed an understanding of gesture as it relates to music, she became increasingly interested in the wires themselves, and soon began using them in a different form, embroidering walls with wire to look like text. In this way, she began to consider memory, space, and meaning. Sonami then began wondering what it takes to get people to listen. Her following installations demanded audience members move through space and take stock of their surroundings, whether through toilet plunger Ipod earphones or a pipe connected to a wall or sound curtains on a Rijeka dock.

Sonami has shifted from these controlled sound landscapes and efficient systems to a more organic, volatile form of art in recent years. Interrogating the transaction between different worlds, and rethinking interfaces, she has started looking for spaces of interaction and instruments that demanded adaptation. Sonami has therefore built instruments that reveal unimaginable spaces and connections, such as the belowtron and the wheel. She now seeks to create neural networks in which springs are agitated to change audio information. Since springs aren’t reliable, she constantly has to alter her form of play, creating new worlds of sound.

The ATC lecture series continues on December 2nd with Zhang Ga discussing “From Timelapse to Timecollapse: Rethinking New Media Art and Platform China.”