Keyword: collaboration

dúo

Champlin & Niklas Reppel performing as dúo at es365 in Dusseldorf, DE, November 2, 2024. Image from A/V documentation contributed by Maik Hester, Niklas Reppel, and TOPLAP Dusseldorf.
Champlin & Niklas Reppel performing as dúo at es365 in Dusseldorf, DE, November 2, 2024. Image from A/V documentation contributed to by Maik Hester, Niklas Reppel, and TOPLAP Dusseldorf.

dúo, a collaboration between Champlin & Niklas Reppel, is an improvisation for bow chime (sometimes also called a steel cello , even though there are subtle differences) and live coding on an multi-channel setup. In play, the broad acoustic vocabulary of the bow chime is picked up with a single microphone in the room, to then be manipulated, layered and spatialized on the multi-channel setup through live coding, blending the two in a dialog between pure vibration and processed sound.

The performance is inspired both by cymbal baths, a kind of sound bath with a more meditative focus, as well as performances involving room resonance and feedback loops, such as the concepts by the late, great Alvin Lucier. Feedback from the loudspeakers, room resonances and background noise, including noises and utterances by the audience, are invariably picked up by the microphone. This augments and blends with the deeply resonant sound of the bow chime, creating a grand, sometimes unpredictable but beautiful feedback loop between performers, space and audience.

Using live coding (in Mégra, an abstract, high-level language) to manipulate the sound allows to interact and improvise through concise code gestures, while sharing the thought process with the audience through projecting the code. The language embraces a certain degree of non-determinism, and also allows the performers to lean back and listen to the sound unfolding.

Four instances of the project have been performed so far:

  • Düsseldorf 2024 (video)
  • Karlsruhe 2023
  • Barcelona (/*VIU*/) 2023 (video)
  • Barcelona (Antic Forn de Vallcarca) 2022 (video)

Interested in booking? Please write hello@studiocazimi.com.

algorithmically generated interference waves

La Obra Invisible (Incorpórea)

‘The Invisible Work’

La Obra Invisible is a collaboration under the collective name Incorpórea. Quoted from the collective’s website:

algorithmically generated interference waves overlaid with the text "Incorpórea"

Incorporéa is a collective of two artists, Yalili Mora and Alicia Champlin, who have both worked extensively in the task of manifesting the invisible of our inner human worlds.

Yalili uses painting / portrait as a metaphor, with concerns about a deeper exploration of technological interfaces. Alicia has a history of using technological interventions as a mediator between creativity and data.

In collaboration between these two multimedia practices, “The Invisible Work” aims to reconcile the emotional and empirical realms, reaffirming our physical agency within our environments while simultaneously exploring the implications of our most ephemeral traces. In this mapping process, what we hope to emphasize is the balance between individual sovereignty over this psychological landscape, and its vulnerability to environmental and interpersonal forces, as well as the limits of our agency as these traces spread throughout the world in general.

The piece is an interactive installation featuring a Chladni plate as a visualization of the sonified brainwaves of both artists, signal-mixed together by visitors in real-time using a custom application built by Champlin, and presented along with the artists’ painted portraits (part of Mora’s series “Retratos sin rostros aparentes”, or “Portraits without apparent faces”).

This work was installed as part of Recorreguts Sonors: Accions i Mutacions Sonores at the Convent de Sant Agustí in Barcelona, 19-23 November of 2019.

portrait by Yali Mora of Alicia Champlin
Bearing the Light 17

Bearing the Light

In May, 2017, Champlin participated in a collaborative installation event at Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine. The collaboration involved 9 artists over 2 days, in a format that allowed a one-time 24 hour window to design and install a transformative experience within the depths of the Fort. The results took the form of a sort of pilgrimage of light and sound, leading an audience through a series of vignettes that responded to the visual and acoustic topology of the existing structure, playing with light and shadow, reflection and reverberation.

Susan Smith, coordinator of the event, spoke of the effort as a way to “come together – as artists and collaborators – to work with this site, and communicate to a need, especially now, to reflect upon our relationship to self and others, and to the world. We invite participants to experience this place, get lost in it, and unsettle our notions of where and who we are.”

Participating artists: Alicia Champlin, Eleanor Kipping, Stasiu Levitsky, Jim Winters, David Allen, Nathan Dumis, Michelle Bezik, Derek Smith, and Susan Smith.

Collaborators exploring the space at Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine. Photo credit: Jim Winters