Rainzonances4

After its course through the Nicosia Municipal Arts Center and the Prague Quadrennial, the ongoing project RainZonanceS, founded in 2008 by composer - sound artist Antonis Antoniou, returns with its 4^th edition. Inspired by David Tudor’s milestone piece ‘Rainforest iv’, this project aims to expose the experiential attributes of unusual spaces by using primarily sound and light. Each space has its own aural aura and responds to our actions in

a specific manner; it has the inherent ability to affect our feelings and moods; it is a ‘sponge’ of past voices, gestures and utterances.‘RainZonanceS’ juggles with these realities. It brings out the texture, color, tone and emotion found in extraordinary sites. It takes their atypical characteristics to their extremes.

 

This 4th edition of RainZonanceS produced by the ‘estoudiantinos symeonides productions’, takes place outside the fence of the Nicosia Airport, an airport that has been declared as ‘abandoned’ by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and since the ceasefire between Turkish and Greek Cypriots in 1974, the site has been included in the United Nations Protected Area (UNPA). Since then, it has consequently become inaccessible to civilians leading to the creation of a puzzling void in a passerby’s mind. The ostensible silence of this ‘frozen’ site is for the passerby NOISE; the product of a subconscious urge to fill that empty frame with a hazy fictional world.

RainZonanceS functions as a platform for interdisciplinary artists to interact and co-create works following a ‘site-specific’ agenda. In this edition’s scenario 3 different artistic expressions will co-exist, to produce an installation/environment based on the idea of inaccessibility and the perceiving of this void by the locals and/or the passerby.

Composition/sound installation: Antonis Antoniou

Light installation: Karolina Spyrou

Performance: Ariana Alphas-Polyxenie Savva-Nicolas Stavropodis

Tune in to 98.6FM while you are approaching the event area with your car. This is an introduction to the work.

The signal will be increasingly stronger and clearer as you will be approaching the site.

When: Thursday, 23 February 2012. The sound installation will be functioning from 4pm, the light installation will appear at twilight and the performance will take place at 7pm.

Where: Opposite the University of Nicosia, walk about 200m towards the Tymvos Makedonitissas, on the hill between the road and the airport’s fence.

• Read an interview in Fileleftheros newspaper here 

• Read an interview in Politis newspaper here

• Feature in Parathyro newspaper here

Free Entrance

Rainzonances3

RainZonances3 is taking over the main exhibition gallery of NIMAC. The artists Antonis Antoniou and Paravan (Melita Couta and Haris Kafkarides) will collaborate to build an installation which will present three basic elements, a soundscape environment, a platform / stage area (both in the metaphorical sense and actual) and a series of parallel events with invited artists.
Interested by our experiences of urban spaces, that being their identity, history, social activity, physical boundaries, interaction systems and behaviour rules, the artists will transfer and reconstruct those experiences in the NIMAC. These urban situations will not just go through a simple documentation and reconstruction but they will be recreated in such a way that they will present a new perspective, an altered reality, a meta-situation from our established knowledge of their existence. The audience is invited to use their senses in a more balanced way and to break away from the prevailing sense of vision. As Canadian R. Murray Schafer (researcher of soundscapes and creator of the specific field of study) points out, there is a need, especially by westerners, to ‘clean’ the sense of hearing (‘clairaudience’) and to free it from the limiting monopoly of vision. Moreover, isolating the sense of hearing from that of vision is a way of defeating the mechanism that, according to composer Bill Fontana, listening is tightly correlated to visual cues.

More specifically the artists chose five public spaces with strong characteristic environments in order to transfer the sound environment that derives from those spaces into the gallery in real time. Detaching an acoustic or any other environment from its original source, and displaying it into another (i.e. arts space), produces multiple effects, perspectives and dynamics such as dislocation, a highlighted condition worth to be observed, memory engaging, major contrasts in aural architecture principles, subconscious triggerings, educational etc. The sound will "fill up" the space through a surround system/speaker matrix, thus challenging the void of the gallery's architecture by materialising in space and creating an "invisible scenography".
Rainzonances3 is aiming to be a platform, which continuously changes and transforms. Every week a special event will take place with the participation of invited artists who will be asked to interpret in their own way and react to the thematic space of the soundscape as well as to the installations in space.

Saturday 3 July - 14.00
Theme: “Vegetables and retail konfouzio”
Invited artist: Phanos Kyriakou

Tuesday 13 July - 21.00
Theme: “Troullos and psalm ambience”
Invited artist: George Ioannou

Tuesday 20 July - 21.00
Theme: “Auto - citizens”
Invited artists: Ariana Alphas and Pascal Caron
Performance: Saturday 24 July - 21.00

Tuesday 27 July - 21.00
Theme: “With a naked ear”
Invited artists: Constantinos Evangelides,
Colin Somervell, Lefteris Μoumtzis, Euripides Dikaios

Friday 30 July - 21.00
Theme: “Groovy party time”
Opening Hours
Tuesday - Saturday: 10:00-15:00 & 17:00-23:00

Rainzonances2

This second project by RainZonanceS took place at the old Satiriko Theatre, former ‘Adelfi Varnakidi’ cinema, a building that was scheduled to be demolished in the near future following the installation. The audience is invited to experience a last show in this full-of-energy space; to move around the building and use it in a different way, to watch and listen to the voices and shadows of the past. ‘Monologue, film, dialogue, singing, anger, black and white, coloured, tragedy, comedy, laughter, sigh, weep, surprise, sit, stand, brake, eat, pop corn, foyer, ticket, soundtrack, playback, curtain, stage, scene, script, rehearsal’…gestures, moods and actions absorbed by the walls of the building and by the people who spent time in it. When squeezed, a sponge full of multi-colour paints, releases a fusion of colour and texture. The element of time alters the quality of this amalgam even more, adding noise, grain and perhaps a sort of emotion.  This site-specific project aims to retrieve the absorbed energy that exists within the walls of the building, to squeeze the sponge of past sonic activity, to capture the ghosts and shadows, to resonate with the shaped echoes, and portray it in a somewhat abstract manner.

Some of the methods/techniques/material used for the realisation of this portrait are: random procedures, audiovisual material from past selected plays at the theatre, generative surround composition, compositions in mono format presented as sound installations, domestic lighting, projections of found objects, shadow activation of found objects, live electronics, text and utterance performance and improvisation.

 

Monday 25 January 2010, from 4pm-9pm

Old Satyrico Theatre, Athinon ke Serron corner-Strovolos

Performance at 8

Composition: Antonis Antoniou

Performance/Improvisation: Ariana Alphas

Light: Euripides Dikaios

 

Fox and Squirrel article on Rainzonances 1+2 here

Rainzonances1

This first ever Rainzonances project - Rainzonaces1 (2008), which took place in one of the buildings designed by the acclaimed Cypriot architect Neoptolemos Michaelides, seeks to draw attention to the spatial characteristics of this empty space, and particularly to the highly reverberant quality. Due to its construction materials and the materials found in the interior of the space (concrete walls, terrazzo floor tiles, glass windows, aluminium window frames, mirrors, mosaic tiles), but also to the shape of the specific room, a unique acoustic environment is produced. This acoustic environment is a significant part of the architectural structure and it is also a crucial factor towards the experience gained through moving in the space.

Using a subwoofer and 4 transducers that resonate through 4 different objects, as well as a colour/contrast-fluctuating light reflected from several mirrors, we attempted to activate the room’s distinctive attributes in order to create a stimulating atmosphere.  A Max/Msp patch controls the whole system, which is programmed both to act at random (with regards to the volume level of each audio output) as well as to assemble an interaction between the projection’s brightness and the subwoofer’s volume level.

The 1^st audiovisual installation took place in one of Neoptolemos Michaelides’ buildings in the old town of Nicosia.

Friday 6^th of November 2008, 17:00-21:00

Sapfous 6, 1^st floor, old Nicosia.

Sound: Antonis Antoniou

Light: Euripides Dikaios-Antonis Antoniou

 
See Fox and Squirrel article on Rainzonances 1+2 here

Rainzonances Description

RainZonanceS, is an ongoing project founded in 2008 by composer - sound artist Antonis Antoniou. Inspired by David Tudor’s milestone piece ‘Rainforest iv’, this project aims to expose the experiential attributes of unusual places by using primarily sound and light. Each place has its own aural aura and responds to our actions in a specific manner; it has the inherent ability to affect our feelings and moods; it is a ‘sponge’ of past voices, gestures and utterances.‘RainZonanceS’ juggles with these realities. It brings out the texture, color, tone and emotion found in extraordinary sites. It takes their atypical characteristics to their extremes.RainZonanceS functions as a platform for interdisciplinary artists to interact and co-create works following a ‘site-specific’ agenda.