A poem and drawings by Chang are soldered onto the leather of a cow. The poem reflects on life and death in a moment when one seeks refuge from the pain of love and loss, longing to reunite with the lover who helped spark her inner self, against the backdrop of wind, ocean, and cliff. Under the dystopian circumstances today, the work feels more realistic than ever. The drawings in the work explore the artist’s natural instincts such as sense, taste, emotion, and sexual orientation that are untamed and uncontrolled by conventions. Each element is drawn with a smoldering iron, reeking the burning smell of skin of an animal that was once alive. At first, the leather attempts to protect the flesh that is no longer underneath, but ultimately gives in to the heat as it shrivels. The skin is then filled with fragile and delicate stories that cannot be easily shared with others, only revealed onto the surface through a closer look.

Red Drawings-Project sends postcards to those who continue to live in isolation during the pandemic. The artist draws her everyday life on a small piece of paper like an illustrated diary, and shares the changes in her life and emotional state with others through this analogue medium. Those who receive the postcards can respond in their own manner, whether in one-on-one communication with the artist or in open conversation with the general public. This organic form of communication not only overcomes the physical limitations of a conventional art space, but also allows the viewers to experience the slow and intimate connection between people in an age saturated by digital media. The majority of participants in the project live overseas, and the work hopes to provide an opportunity to deeply reflect on the meaning of life through the act of empathy and care.

Because she is not skillful with audio, many of Chang’s previous projects simply ended up as noise. The artist understood how such noise may not appeal to the audience, and therefore, for this work, she only collected sounds that may evoke positive memories. The sounds in this work would have been considered familiar, everyday noise even a year ago, but feel rather distant now in the age of the pandemic. The sounds were edited from video footages filmed by the artist in the past. From the bells chiming from a cathedral in a small Italian village, music from a jazz club, the sound of making a wooden sculpture, a hungry stray cat licking on food, to the tuning sound of an orchestra – the once mundane but beautiful sounds of everyday life remind us of the precious and valuable moments from the past.

Through my relationship with the black ink fish (octopus), I imagine the emergence of a new language, for a new kind of existence that disrupts the narrow-minded ideologies of our anthropocentric world. Humans have continued to ignore the language of the Earth and have forgotten what they needed to be. The language that centered around humans now seems like the stale nostalgia of last century. The language of this new existence is a tainted and hybrid language, which is only made possible through failure, and by escaping the perfect language.

Practicing this hybrid language, the performers shift away from the space of humans to sing a song for the octopus in the water. This song is an altered form of communication that is difficult to comprehend, and physically unsustainable in a new space. It is without a beginning or end, and escapes the structures of the past, present, and future. It is a language without boundaries between the self and others, subject and object.

This project had to be modified from its original filming plan due to the unexpected conditions of COVID-19. I decided to proactively acknowledge this situation. I stayed in my place while the performers also performed from their respective places. I communicated the basic instructions to my performers in two places, Korea and Indonesia, and asked them to perform as they interpreted them. I accepted any element of chance that emerged from these two places, and after reviewing the video clips, allowed my own intentions to naturally diverge from the original plan. The process of this work involved many layers of change, but was ultimately a journey towards the freedom of language through failure and the chaos of change.

Eunji Cho's sound work Octopus was produced in collaboration with two Indonesian sound artists DJ Danger Dope and MC Eloops. Octopus is a sound work re-arranged based on the beat of songs in the underwater in the artist's video work Song for My Twin Octo-8 (2020).

Producer: Eunji Cho

Arrangement & Beats, scratch: Danger Dope

Sound Recordist: Tomo & shutdub

Underwater Singing: Eloops

Bamboo Flute: Santo Klingon

Special thanks to Ressa Rizky Mutiara, Hong Cheolki

Shiva honoured as one of the most innovative composers of her generation. Vapour is part of her on-going engagement with cutting-edge electronic music culture – including the cut and paste sampling of drum’n’bass and jungle and other de-constructions coming out of London and Berlin’s music culture. Shiva's music is the outcome of a unique system of thought, which treats acoustic space and time as her sculptor’s material to be shaped, creating an intense tactile feel to works coaxed from her turntable technique. The sampling and replaying of her previous work using dub plates adds another meta-layer of meaning, the compositions in a perpetual state of re-manipulation. “The piece is called Vapour because the whole thing is processed through my analogue space echo and sounds like thick, electronically produced vapour” says Shiva.

“If ‘evolution’ in the past referred to the process in which our ‘internal organs (heart, lung, and etc.)’ gradually adapt based on solar energy, the term now signifies the process of adapting to the rapid changes of the ‘external organs (cars, airplanes, etc.)’ that rely on the Earth’s low-entropy. The unequal possession of external organs, along with the unequal possession of the low-entropy reserve that produce those external organs, are the origins of social conflict in an industrial society. This is in stark contrast to the relatively equal possession of internal capital.” – Herman Daly

Unlike solar energy, which seems unlimited, fossil fuel and the greedy competition to control its limited supply have caused major socioeconomic conflicts in modern industrial society and finance. However, if this socioeconomic realm continues to expand and ultimately converge with the boundaries of the ecosystem on the outside, society can no longer exist in this exhausted world. This present moment calls for a shift in values, from external growth to internal growth that allows for coexistence.

Circular mirrors arranged in the image of an open cork, with the Korean letters for “body,” “dance” and festival” exploding with a pop.

POP ! is an installation arranged in a circular form that evokes the shape of a “hole” or a smaller “yeast” or “bubble.” Whatever it may be, the circular cork is shown as if it just exploded with the sound of “POP !” The images spilling from the work represent different forms of communicating with the world. Letters including “dance,” “body,” and “festival,” shatter the cork as they reveal images of the outside through the mirrors.

Throughout time, “what spills through an open cork” has inspired the human mind and body to celebrate joy, dance, and art. It is something that is fermented, used in rituals and ceremonies to connect the living with the dead across time and space.

Fermentation generates immense fear by perilously pushing the body and consciousness to the threshold between life and death. The reason why well-fermented and aged things smell fragrant is because they have accepted the constant feeling of death, and therefore, has no fear. Everything becomes joy when one accepts all death. Joy flows and dance follows. This is the scent of fermentation. Authentic communication with the world begins through the scent of fermentation through the body.

POP ! POP ! POP ! The cork explodes everywhere, announcing the start of an intimate festival. This is a sound that echoes beyond the mix of you, me, and the world. POP ! Let the celebration begin!

a piece about wireless energy, copper coils, magnetic induction, remote controls and Nikola Tesla.

The figure of Nikola Tesla has fascinated me since a long time. He was the person who imagined wireless communication in an era when there was hardly electricity. He was the one who invented radio controlled devices and other new technologies beyond the generally known limits of technology. Tesla had been picking up radio signals in New York since 1895 receiving them as far as thirty miles away. He was not only an inventor whose work was the basis for the development of many electrical inventions and communication techniques of today but was as well a very special person, a visionary who was unable to realize many of his ideas because of money problems and as well his “difficult” character.

I discovered his work during my studies of electronics in Milan at the end of the seventies. In that period I started to use the system of electromagnetic induction for my sound installations. Tesla had invented and patented the first telephone amplifier in 1882 in Budapest and, without knowing about its origin, I used a simple telephone amplifier with incorporated small coils to listen to the sounds in my installations. Later on my work with electromagnetic induction had developed into the series “Electrical Walks”, city walks with special headphones which make audible the usually hidden electromagnetic fields around us. In 2012 I visited the small museum of science in the city of Kosice in Slovakia. The museum had many Tesla devices in their showroom and I got a special permission to test them. I listened with my special induction headphones to the Tesla machines and was fascinated: a thunderstorm of electromagnetic sounds.This was the moment when I decided to make a piece about electrical remoteness.

Tesla grew up in a small village in Austria (now Croatia) where electricity, radio, cars, telephones, movies etc. were unknown in the time of his childhood. As a boy he loved nature more than everything else. But already at the age of 36, in 1893, his inventions made it possible that the world expo in the city of Chicago was illuminated by one hundred thousand electrical lamps.

The new technologies concerning light, radio, radar etc. were developing with an incredible speed since then just as today the components of the digital world.

I always asked myself what Tesla would have thought about internet, google, twitter, facebook, apps etc. Was this the vision he had in mind when he invented his system of wireless transmission of electrical signals? His working places were full of big heavy coils, oscillators, metal towers etc. by which he tried to transfer energy without wires. Today we almost forget that digital communication and storage is not based only on invisible remote waves in the ether but that it needs server rooms which are much bigger and heavier than Teslas equipment.

“Teslas Dream” opens with the sounds of an original glass harmonica and sounds of magnetic fields recorded in an old Austrian train station, followed by the electrical melodies of old Tatra tramways in Bratislava (now almost disappeared). The sounds of discharges and activities of Teslas devices gradually come in. During the piece the electromagnetic signals change from the sounds of analog machines to the more actual fields of light systems, security systems, power lines, banks, subways, airports, power stations etc. Various electrical signals of digital communication slowly merge in and change again the sound structure. The composition ends with the sounds of a luminous advertising, recorded in a shopping centre in Las Vegas, accompanied by the faint vibrations of other signals from the ether.

Tesla wanted to reach the most remote places of the earth with electrical energy. Nothing today is remote anymore.

The glass armonica (an original instrument from the 19th century) was recorded at the Musikinstrumentenmuseum in Berlin. All other recordings were made with electromagnetic headphones and other custom made devices developed by Christina Kubisch. The original electrical field recordings were made in Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Britain, Czech republic, New York and Las Vegas.

Produced in Studio Hoppegarten and Visby International composer centre Sweden in 2014/2015

Sound engineering and mastering: Ecki Güther

People sing a song while sitting on 9 Korean jars of “Cheonggyecheon water” collected around the beginning of the first snowfall in Seoul in winter in December 2020.

There is a small island that can only be reached at low tide from Penvénan, a region on the northern coast of Bretagne, France. It is “l’ÎLE AUX FEMMES,” which resembles the shape of a male penis. There, the artist listened to a song in the 1950s with obscene lyrics sung by women in Nantes, Bretagne. It was recorded by ethnic musicologist Patrice Coirault. It was the song that was in a dialect strong enough not to be recognized in French. The artist began to study the obscene songs sung by women which are no longer oral, and made new songs based on the lyrics. The video work shows two young women singing while traveling around the “The Island of Women.” They sing while feeling nature away from computer screens and boring labor. People sing. Amusement is also the essence of people.

Sound - Anne Laure Vincent, Clémence Mimault

Video recorder - Pierre-Philippe Toufektchan

Production Support - La Criée Centre d’art contemporain de Rennes

Tania León composed Horizons for the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, and it was conducted by Peter Ruzicka at the Hammoniale Festival in July 1999. In August 2000, the song premiered in the United States at the Tanglewood Music Festival, conducted by Stefan Asbury.

The artist creates compositions that combine various genres, including Latin American music, jazz and gospel music, with contemporary technology. Born in Cuba, León's music incorporates Cuban culture, dancing is a daily routine. She compares the development of her song to riding a bike, and says that movement, not rhythm, is a major component of her composition. In her music, rhythm and development are linked to physical movement. León's composition is completed in the way with contemporary grammar, technical perfection, elaborate vocabulary, and dense rhythm layering.

León is a composer and conductor based in New York. She says she always had to face prejudices about her gender and race. “It's not uncommon for a woman of my skin color to conduct serious music. I had to be twice as good as the male conductor, to be recognized.”

Transmitted by word of mouth through generations, folk songs can only continue to pass down if it sparks “empathy” among the contemporary generation. Folk songs are like the stories of life, and the sounds of life. With the changing times, however, the traditional folk song genre of labor song is on the verge of vanishing into history. Could Is This Right continue to pass on as a folk song? In order to expand the voice into the realm of others, the song delivers the sound through the voice of others, rather than the self.

What would it mean to compose the lyrics as a question? The dictionary defines a “question” as an “interrogative expression used to find out about something,” but in Is This Right, the question is not aimed to elicit an answer. The question cannot be answered, since there is no certainty in the answer, nor any obligation to answer. The question itself is whether it should be answered at all. The questioning must go on. The question has been continuously asked, continues to ask, and will continue to be asked. Perhaps, through the question, each of us can at least get a sense of the direction to which we should or should not be headed.

Is This Right adds new lyrics to the sound of Saseol Nanbongga, a traditional folk song from the northwestern region of Korea. The sound is performed by students of the National Middle School of Traditional Korean Arts.

Producer: Ye-eun Min

Composer: Unknown (Saseol Nanbongga, Hwanghae-do Folk Song/Minyo)

Lyrics: Ye-eun Min, Geon Choi

Sound instructor: Sejeong Oh

Sound: Students of the National Middle School of Traditional Korean Arts (Kyuri Kim, Yeowon Kim, Yeju Noh, Eunbi Sung, Jiwoo Ahn, Hyeonseo Yoon)

Sound recorder and editor: GROOVE N BALANCE

Video Editor: Nara Shin

Éliane Radigue recorded the movements of fetus when she was pregnant with her son and when her daughter was pregnant with her first grandchild. She recorded the pulse and heartbeat as a material and composed Biogenesis, using only a stethoscope, a microphone, and an ARP synthesizer. The work considered the gradual change of high-frequency notes and the way the musical narrative develops. The title of the work Biogenesis refers to “Biogenesis,” the theory that living creatures must come from living things. This concept is contrary to the “Spontaneous Generation” theory that God created living things.

Radigue converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the 1970s and practiced with Pawo Rinpoche Guru for three years. She discovered that there was a lot of potential in the way ARP synthesizers interpreted notes as if they meditated on them. She created the sound by slightly changing parameters such as frequency and modulation, up to 40. It was Radigue’s own composition method, contrary to the twelve-tone technique of the male composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who were the masters of concrete music. Radig says, “My composition has always avoided dramatic changes, and this is still the rule. All notes change very slowly. They develop so slowly that you do not even notice that they are changing.”

Produced by Eliane Radigue in Paris in 1973

Digital mastering: Luke Martinez, CIRM