anna friz

Probably. So listen to this while wearing a nice cold shirt straight from the fridge (do not listen to electronic gadgets in the cold bath):

Measure the time taken— three pieces (2 new ones, and 1 older one I made with Eric Leonardson) created as part of my ongoing exploration about the perception and standardization of time through time keeping and recording, and radio. They explore the continuous, irregular present, suspended and stretched through habit and drift, and measured against the Futurist dream of time overcome. Published in issue 22 of No More Potlucks, a bilingual online and print on demand journal of politics, art and culture.

photo: Tom Blanchard

For those of you in Winnipeg, you can mosey on down to Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art and catch Road Movie, installed until August 19, 2012. It’s a wonderful piece, conceived and directed by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio. My contribution was the film soundtrack and the sound installation design.

As for new work, I’m currently researching and experimenting with more time-related pieces under the working titles “One minute from now” and  “Zero Hour”, as well as slowly compiling an album’s worth of material to make available in the winter, and doing some writing about transmission art. Lots of travel coming up in the next year: Tsonami festival in Valparaiso Chile (Nov 2012), another short residency at ORF Kunstradio, Vienna (Dec 2012), performing in Evalyn Parry’s SPIN in Vancouver (April 2013), Heart as Arena on tour in Québec (end of April 2013), and a residency courtesy of Radio CONA in Ljubljana, Slovenia (Nov-Dec 2013).

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ROAD MOVIE continues at the 62nd Berlinale Film Festival 2012 until Feb 19.

If you’re in Berlin, you can view/listen daily from 11am-8pm at the Gutschow-Haus, Friedrichstrasse 17.

Ostensibly Road Movie is a film installation, but it has gradually expanded to include two related sound installations made with horn loudspeakers. For Berlin I added a new smaller horn mobile which expands certain sonic elements already present in the main film soundtrack. We also crafted a new horn configuration for the documentary material, something of a whispering gallery of diverse voices and opinions from the characters featured in the films, speaking about the segregated road system in the West Bank, and what such roads and landscape mean to the different people who live there. This second horn installation went into the basement in the Gutschow-Haus (see photo above), which once was school for magic, and is rumoured to be one of the few buildings in the area to have survived the bombings of WWII.

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all photos: Tom Blanchard, 2011

Road Movie, a multi-screen multi-channel film installation about the segregated road system in the West Bank, created and directed by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio, is opening next week at the Berlinale Film Festival. I composed the sound/music and designed the sound installation for the piece, which has some flexibility to adapt to each new space in which we show the work.

Road Movie is at the Gutschow-haus, Friedrichstraße 17, Berlin from 9. – 19. February, 2012, 11-20h daily.

Vernissage on 9. February at 17h.

Road Movie was also voted best Toronto art show of 2011 by NOW Magazine!

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© Tom Blanchard 2011, Road Movie installation at O’Born Contemporary @ 51 Wolseley

I’ve been working like mad composing and designing the sound for Road Movie, a new multi-film installation by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky, aka Public Studio, which opens today in Toronto as part of the official selection for the Toronto International Film Festival. Three large double-sided screens show 12 short films about the segregated road system in the West Bank, to the accompanying soundscape which I’ve composed from field recordings, and my odd little stack of instruments, including some nice little mbira beats and harmonica drones. Near the door a small mobile of horn loudspeakers emits the various perspectives of Palestinians and Jewish settlers with whom Elle and Tamira drove the different roads. Watch the trailer here.

Public Studio explains what it’s all about:

In 2009, we went to live in Palestine for a year in order to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground. Flanders, who was raised in Jerusalem, felt that in order to really connect with people and daily life, she needed to live inside Palestine, not just visit. Sawatzky had become interested in the architectural aspects of life under Occupation and together they decided to make a film that looked from the inside out. While much work exists about all aspects of this particular conflict, we approached this from another dimension– we take you, the viewer, into the landscape, into the land in meticulous detail, and allow you to move around in an installation, to give you an immersive and contemplative experience. We shot our films in stop-motion animation, a technique that allowed us to capture, frame by frame, the minutia of this often over-exposed place. Like surveyors, we track the land step by step, taking you with us into each frame.

The piece is produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and O’born Contemporary Gallery, Toronto. Those of you in Toronto can experience it for yourselves at 51 Wolseley Street, 5th floor (across the street from Theatre Passe-Maraille, near Bathurst and Queen W), September 8-18, 2011. Hours: Sun-Thurs, 12-6PM, Fri-Sat, 12-9PM.

© Tom Blanchard 2011, Road Movie installation at O’Born Contemporary @ 51 Wolseley

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