Outer Ear Festival of Sound is an annual presentation of sonic arts, including performances, installations, and broadcasts. It is the only comprehensive sonic arts festival in the Chicago region.
Outer Ear Festival of Sound, 2008
9th annual Outer Ear Festival of Sound
October 26 – December 7, 2008
Sunday, October 26 - January 2009
Mark Booth: Spanish Still Life
Sound and image installation incorporating multi-channel text, music, video projection, and wall-mounted text-image panels.
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell.
Co-presented with Hyde Park Art Center.
Free.
Performances in the installation by Mark Booth and invited artists:
Saturday, November 15 at 2 PM, and Saturday, December 6 at 2PM.
Monday, October 27, Thursday, October 30, and Friday, October 31
Fereshteh Toosi: Red Crystal Palace
A radio piece based on a live public performance investigating political involvement, malaise, and optimism.
To be broadcast in installments on air at 89.5 FM and vocalo.org
Co-presented with by Vocalo.
Saturdays & Sundays, November 1 & 2, 8 & 9
Olivia Block, Shawn Decker, Ryan Ingebritsen, Lou Mallozzi: Train Time
A stunning sound portrait incorporating the clank of wheels over rail ties, the hiss of boilers, the roar of diesels, the call of train whistles, the whoosh of tomorrow’s super-fast trains–a rhythmic reminder that today’s downtown lakefront park was once a huge rail yard extending to the water’s edge.
Presented at the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park
10 AM - 10 PM.
Free.
Commissioned by and co-presented with the 2008 Chicago Humanities Festival.
Monday, November 3 – Sunday, December 7
Missing in Action: Sounds of Silence, Interruption, and Displacement
An on-line exhibition from the ESS Collection of the Creative Audio Archive
Presented on Vocalo.org
Friday, November 5 - Sunday, November 30
Harold Mendez: So long as we can say this is the worst, this is not the worst
A haunting four-channel sound work presents a manipulated recording of crows cawing and the resonant frequencies of the landscape in the Utah desert. Conflicting notions of openness, confinement, power and property are explored. The installation seeks to engulf the viewer in a reflection on the landscape of the past and present political narratives.
Opening reception Friday, November 7, 6-10pm. Artist Talk Tuesday, Novermber 18, 6:30pm.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E Chicago.
Co-presented with the UBS 12×12 New Artists/New Work exhibition series at the MCA.
Sunday, November 9
Hal Rammel and Olivia Block: electro-acoustic improvisations.
the Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph.
3pm.
Free admission.
Thursday, November 13
Deborah Stratman: O’er the Land
A new 16mm film
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N State Street.
6pm
Co-presented with Conversations at the Edge, a series organized by the Department of Film, Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
$9 / $7 students / $4 AIC students, faculty, and staff / $5 Film Center members.
Friday, November 14 - Sunday, December 14
Hal Rammel: Regional Light: Both Near and Far
exhibition of pinhole photograms made with multiple exposures.
Opening reception: Friday, November 14, 6 PM - 9 PM
with a special performance by Hal Rammel, John Corbett and Lou Mallozzi at 7pm.
Audible at ESS, 5925 N Ravenswood.
Saturdays and Sundays, 1 - 5pm, or by appointment.
Free admission.
Friday, December 5
Seth Nehil: Flock and Tumble
a multimedia performance incorporating multi-channel sound, multiple video projection, and twelve movement/sound performers.
Heaven gallery, 1550 N Milwaukee.
8pm
Co-presented with the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
$10/$8 students and ESS members.
Sunday, December 7, 2008 - February 2009
Jenny Gräf Sheppard: Osmosymbiotic Echo
Sound installation for the Florasonic sound installation series at Lincoln Park Conservatory.
the Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton Drive.
Open daily, 9:00am - 5:00pm
Free admission
Presenting partners:
- Sound Department, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Conversations at the Edge, Department of Film, Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- The Chicago Park District
- The Chicago Humanities Festival
- Vocalo/WBEZ-FM
- The Chicago Cultural Center
- The Hyde Park Art Center
- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
- The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation
- The Argosy Foundation
- The National Endowment for the Arts
- The Illinois Arts Council
Olivia Block (Chicago) is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound in works for recorded media, chamber ensembles, video, and site-specific installation. She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours and festivals, and she has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the library at Wesleyan University, the Lincoln Park Conservatory Fern Room in Chicago, and at the “Echoes Through the Mountains” exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
Mark Booth (Chicago) is an interdisciplinary language artist who works in
writing, visual art, sound art, and music, often in overlapping combinations.
His work is rooted in an exploration of thought, language, perception, and
place. He has exhibited and performed widely, including the Overgaden Festival
in Copenhagen, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago, and Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago. He teaches in the Writing Program
of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
John Corbett (Chicago) is a writer, curator, producer, and musician. A respected music journalist and regular contributor to Downbeat, he has also been a radio producer exploring experimental broadcast formats, an improvisor on guitar and turntables, and a collaborator with many artists in live and recorded genres, including Terri Kapsalis, Davey Williams, Mats Gustafsson, and others. Corbett produces the Unheard Music Series on Atavistic Records and is co-director of the Chicago visual art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.
Shawn Decker (Chicago) is a composer and artist who creates sound and electronic media installations and writes music for live performance, film, and video. His work has been frequently performed, seen, and heard in the US and Europe at a wide variety of venues. Recent exhibitions of both solo and collaborative work have shown at Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Klosterruine in Berlin, ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, CAM Houston, and many others.
Ryan Ingebritsen (Chicago) is a composer, sound designer, and electronic performer whose music and sound art focus on the multi-dimensional aspects of sound. He spent many years studying composition, electronic music and live improvisation in the former Eastern Europe, and he has appeared on international festivals and at numerous Chicago venues. He was recently awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in music composition.
Lou Mallozzi (Chicago) is an artist who dismembers and reconstitutes language, sound, gesture, and image in a variety of media, including installations, performances, improvised music, and visual art works. He has exhibited and performed widely in Europe and the US, with recent appearances in Chicago, Winston-Salem, Zurich, and Berlin. He is executive director of Experimental Sound Studio and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Harold Mendez (Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Through a poetic manipulation, his work forms a lexis for addressing conventions of past events, acting as silent witnesses from disparate narratives. In Chicago he has exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, Western Exhibitions, Polvo, Contemporary Art Workshop, and has been included in group shows at the Commerce Street Warehouse in Houston, vuspace in Australia, the University of North Umbria in the UK and the University of Science and Technology in Ghana, West Africa.
Seth Nehil (Portland) has composed original sound scores for Hand2Mouth Theater, Linda Austin Dance and Linda K. Johnson Dance, and the Liz Gerring Dance Co. in NYC, and others. His compositions have been released on numerous experimental labels internationally. Flock and Tumble represents the merging of projects in abstract sound, installation, video and dance.
Jenny Gräf Sheppard (Baltimore) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with digital media and improvisational techniques in long-term projects that explore age, identity and gender in both fictional and experimental documentary forms. As a sound artist, she has been exploring new musical syntax with her solo work, with the band Metalux, and in collaborations with artists such as Evan Parker, Susan Alcorn, John Wiese, Spencer C. Yeh, and Alessandro Bossetti.
Hal Rammel (Milwaukee) has been involved in music and the visual arts for the past forty years. As a composer and improviser utilizing instruments of his own design and construction he has released recordings on Penumbra Music, Crouton Records, and Atavistic. His work as a visual artist encompasses drawing, sculpture and collage, cartooning, and, most actively over the past ten years, photography (pinhole and alternative cameraless processes).
Deborah Stratman (Chicago) is a Chicago based artist and filmmaker whose work plies the territory between experimental and documentary genres. Her film and frequent work in other media, including photography, sound, drawing, sculpture and small press often explore the history, uses, mythologies and control of landscape. Her recent work has focused on American constructs of freedom and contemporary locations of the supernatural. Stratman teaches in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Fereshteh Toosi (Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, sound, performance, and public intervention. Fereshteh is currently working on a sound walk about environmental justice in central New York, a project she initiated as Faculty Fellow in Arts and Civic Engagement at Syracuse University. She recently moved to Chicago to join the New Millennium Studies program at Columbia College. You may find samples of her work at http://fereshteh.net.
Past Events
Outer Ear Festival has taken place annually since 2000.
