Coinciding with the opening of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s major exhibition at FACT Liverpool, Sedition is pleased to launch the Sirens collection, a collaboration between Kurokawa and sound artist Novi_sad. The series of five digital editions is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated book featuring essays and high resolution images of the work. Collectors who purchase the full collection will receive a complimentary book with audio CD delivered to their door.
Sirens is an impressive body of work that brings together data and digital systems, sound waves and performative gestures. A complex soundscape developed by Novi_sad and the sweeping, shifting composite visual forms of Kurokawa interact and respond to each other to create an immersive audiovisual experience.
The starting point for the collaboration came in the form of collating large amounts of data from periods of stock market turbulence, alongside recordings of soundscapes captured at historical moments of financial crisis (1869, 1929, 1987 and 2000). Novi_sad worked with five sound artists to manipulate the recordings using a variety of sound analysis techniques, using the structure of the complex numerical sequences comprising the stock market data to inform and respond to emerging sound formations. Listen to samples from the audio tracks here.
The results, both conceptually and sonically complex, were in turn responded to by Kurokawa, whose digitally rendered moving image work calls to mind both interstellar landscapes (as in his current exhibition unfold at FACT Liverpool) and molecular collisions. The visual sequences in Sirens hint at, distort and overlay recognisable forms and imagery while consistently promising to dissolve and re-form.
The arrangements explored in Sirens directly relate economic disruption with creative power; the more the market dips and crashes, the more complex the audiovisual arrangements become. Deriving from Greek myth, the name of the project Sirens alludes to relationships between temptation, chaos, regulation and creation.
Sirens has been presented in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including at Fotomuseum, CH, Volumens Festival, ES, Le Fresnoy, FR, MAC Birmingham, UK and Einstein Kulturzentrum, DE.
--
The Sirens collection is available a series of five audiovisual pieces on Sedition in digital editions of 500 each.
Purchase the full collection and receive a 20% discount along with a complimentary printed book and audio CD featuring the sound pieces created for the work.
