Sonica 2013 – Facing The Future

The Sonica festival returns this year with a programme just as packed as their 2012 debut was, but crammed into a four day long weekend in a smaller selection of venues, allowing easier access to the entire programme for the Glasgow audiences. For those of you who may have missed last year's ground-breaking series of shows, installations and exhibitions, Sonica showcases 'sonic art for the visually minded.' Equal parts sound art, live concert and visual installation, their hybrid performances and carefully-constructed interactive experiences exist on the front line of technology, creative practice and experiential art.

Overseen by Cryptic, the critically-acclaimed theatre company who produced 2010's tech-savvy production of Orlando, the Sonica programme is curated by Patrick Dickie, Graham Mackenzie and Cryptic founder Cathie Boyd. Sipping a coffee in the cafe of Glasgow's Tramway Theatre, Boyd is brimming with enthusiasm for Sonica as a concept, and in particular this year's programme. She demonstrates a few of the interactive features of this year's posters – using an app called Aurasma, smartphone and tablet users can scan the posters to access video and audio content previewing the shows.

“Cryptic have a history of working with technology,” Boyd explains. “Looking at how technology can enhance a performance is very important to us. We live in a digital world now. There is a place for a bigger, more serious dialogue about how we can bring artists and scientists together. When scientists are developing new technologies and prototypes, an artist will look at it in a completely different way – so there's a lot of scope for bringing those together. In Sonica, these two realms are not divided.”

In terms of this year's programe, Boyd says she is “really delighted with the number of live performances” taking place, as opposed to static installations. From Norwegian composer and sound artist Maja S. K. Ratkje, whose live collaboration with visual artist HC Gilje will showcase her jaw-dropping use of cut-up and processed vocals, to Compositions for Involuntary Strings, a performance led by Michaela Davies which sees electronic muscle stimulation used to create a symphony from the paroxysmal movements of string players, there is more of a concert element at play in this year's programme.

Sonica 2013: Voice by Maja S K Ratkje / HC Gilje from Cryptic on Vimeo.

“With Sonica, music is at the core of everything,” says Boyd. She has had “a passion for years about how music is presented visually,” and Sonica is an extension of this. Having run a series of events under the Cryptic Nights banner in 2009, she wanted to create a new cultural space for some of the new generation of artists she worked with. “It's too easy, as an artist or a creator, to only collaborate with or programme the people you know,” she says. “I'm very passionate about supporting the new generation, I think that's really important. So Sonica is also about giving commissions and a platform to some of the best artists from Cryptic Nights, as well as bringing in some of the most dynamic sonic artists internationally.”

One of those artists is Rob Van Rijswijk, who brings two collaborations with fellow Dutchman Jeroen Strijbos to this year's Sonica. The first, Whispers, is inspired in part by a close friend's battle with deafness. It features five ceramic 'trumpets' created by visual artist Pierluigi Pompei. “What he wanted to do with it was to make a sound sculpture, but he himself wasn't able to get the right piece or composition top make it into a sonic sculpture,” Rijswicjk explains. “He asked myself and Jeroen Strijbos to develop it for him. The way the sculpture is positioned, the way it hangs, that is the work of myself and Jeroen.”

Rijswijk's daring work with sonic art is always compositional, but also interactive. “For us, these five horns are an instrument you can write a piece for, as you would write a piece for a violin. We looked at the sonic characteristics of the horns – and of course, ceramics are not great, because they hardly resonate at all. So that was a challenge for us, to find out what we could do with it.”

A 20-minute looped piece featuring voice, traditional instrumentation and concrete sounds is played through the horns, but to hear it all, you have to get close up. “We like to make it more dynamic. You have to step really close to hear the sounds. They really are whispers. That is what we find interesting – to have an interaction with the public.” Previously exhibited at the Ceramics Biennale in Korea, the piece is just as interactive as Rijswijk's other work for Sonica, Walk Wth Me.

Built around a custom-built app, which will still be available after the festival has concluded, it is experienced by walking through specific locations in Glasgow, listening through a smart phone. “Here again, we are looking for the interaction with people,” says Rijswijk. “We like to go out of the four walls of the concert hall, because the outside world is more dynamic – it is more about stories, there is more to tell about people.” Concrete sounds from the surrounding locations are recorded and played back through filters, making the work a constantly evolving piece of sonic sculpture which is site-specific, but also different for each listener. “It is 'physical cinema' – a soundtrack without an image, because the image is the real world,” Rijswijk says.

Sonica 2013: Whispers by Strijbos and Van Rijswijk from Cryptic on Vimeo.

Another fascinating hybrid of installation and concert comes from Robin Meier and Ali Momeni. Their event, Truce: Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation features compositions drawn from the Indian Dhrupad vocal tradition, harmonised with the song of a mosquito. “What got me interested in working with animals and insects was an idea about cognition – how congnitive systems work in nature, and how a cognitive system can be defined,” says Meier. Coming from an artificial intelligence background, he was “interested in how intelligence emerges in nature, and how to simulate it on a computer. In that sense, the cognitive system of a mosquito was like a computational system – so I started wondering how the mosquito's intelligence could be harvested to make something like a biological computer.”

The 'truce' in the title refers to the bond Meier and Momeni developed with their diminutive, biting subjects. “Once the mosquito is there, even though the apparatus may look like a torture device, the actual effect is almost the opposite,” Meier explains. “The mosquito becomes something very fragile. You try not to hurt it. You are in this relationship, this interaction with the mosquito. It won't sting you, you won't kill it, so it's kind of a truce. You can even sing with it – that's how the installation began, I was holding up the mosquito and singing to it and it would tune in with my voice. So it's like making peace with an insect which, if you saw it, you would usually try to kill.”

The music has “drone-like qualities,” but the remarkable things is the mosquitoes themselves, which can harmonise extremely precisely with the noise of the sampled Dhrupad singers. In future, Momeni and Meier hope to take the installation to India itself, and work on a live collaboration between Dhrupad singers and their miniscule insect choir.

This barely scratches the surface of what Sonica 2013 has to offer – a secret venue will be announced for Suspense, a collaboration between Kite & Laslett and visual artist Jack Wrigley, curated by TAKTAL, with music from Golden Teacher and Giles Perring. Cryptic Associate Sven Werner will be presenting The Escapement, the final part of his Tales of Magical Realism trilogy, and in Picture Window, the windows of various public locations in Glasgow will be transformed for four days into pop-up sonic art exhibitions.

“When you go back into the history of theatre, and what it did post-war, it was very much about real life,” says Boyd. “Now, in a way, television makes that kind of close up, real life material much better. So there's a demand from the public for theatre to be much more fantastical and multi-layered. Also, as a result of the internet, we are much more used to multi-platform – it is part of our language.” By helping to define and develop that language, Cryptic are helping to trace the outer limits of what theatre, music and technology are capable when they interact. Experience it for yourself this October.

Sonica 2013: Compositions for Involuntary Strings by Michaela Davies from Cryptic on Vimeo.