Soundwave ((6)) Water
The Latest Update
Soundwave ((6)) Water Highlights!
It’s been a busy year producing SonicLabs 7 Architecture, but we were finally able to compile our reel from last year’s successful Soundwave 6! Thanks to SF-based filmmaker and editor Nomi Talisman for helping us put this together!
To new beginnings!
What a ride this summer has been! We can hardly believe Soundwave ((6)) Water has come to an end – it has been by far MEDIATE’s largest production of the festival yet: with ~ 100 artists and 37 artworks presented to the public in the framework of 18 shows happening between July 10 – September 28, 2014. We are so happy about Soundwave’s very successful turnout with over 6000 visitors. Thank you, San Francisco, we had a blast!
We also want to express our tremendous gratitude to New Music USA’s generous financial aid. With it, we were able to up the scale of the whole festival and include more local, American and international artists to collaborate within a diverse field of cultural production in the San Francisco Bay Area. Soundwave ((6)) Water included a truly diverse group of artists, composers, scientists and filmmakers, many of them young and emerging, who were interested in creating new work based on the festivals theme, Water, and its tonal qualities.
The 2014 installation of the Soundwave Biennial connected more artists than ever before with each other and also with a greater number of – sometimes surprising – partners within the Bay Area’s cultural landscape. We programmed shows in museums and galleries (SOMArts, Alter Space, de Young Museum, California Acadamy of Sciences) but also on the boats of Red and White Fleet (AudioBoat), in parks and beaches (Ocean Beach and Battery Townsley in the Marin Headlands), in a print studio (3 Fish Studios) and held conferences at the California College of the Arts. The partnership with such diverse organizations enables activation of art in unexpected spaces not traditionally thought of as performance or exhibiting venues and brings compelling art experiences into various communities and neighborhoods.
Soundwave’s multidisciplinary approach to the sound experience surprises and engages audiences but it also actively encourages and inspires the creation of new work. For Soundwave ((6)) Water, contemporary musicians and artists created 19 original compositions, not counting many more new artworks of media other than sound.
Our time of rest will be short: we can’t wait to start the production for Soundwave ((7)) and inspire new sonic, visual and performative explorations of San Francisco and beyond.
How it all began this summer
We can’t believe Soundwave ((6)) Water is already over. Time really flew by!
Take a look back at our launch of the festival at the California Academy of Science’s Nightlife LIVE: WATER and indulge in good memories.
Soundwave ((6)) Flooded August 16 2014
Musician and composer Chuck Johnson creates a meditative performance with a string ensemble featuring Chuck on pedal steel guitar, Marielle Jakobsons and Christina Stanley on violin, Jason Hoopes on electric bass and Ben Bracken on electronics and analog instruments.
Soundwave’s Love Letter to San Francisco
Our last full performance was also our love letter to San Francisco: a commissioned performance on the Red and White Fleet by Berkeley-based musician Yalls. Our audiences were treated to his unique musical style while sailing under the equally unique Bay Lights. Three San Francisco institutions came together with love and art!
FINAL 6 WEEKS OF SOUNDWAVE!
It’s been a busy, watery summer! We’ve just finished producing 9 events since we started, including site-specific immersive performances (Music for a Changing Tide with Nat Evans and the Infinite Swell at Battery Townsley with Chris Duncan, Travis Johns, and Chris Haynes), artist talks for our month-long exhibit Water World, and events with our partners California Academy of Sciences, SOMArts Cultural Center, and Intersection for the Arts. Upcoming highlights include this weekend’s Aquaphonic and Water Storied shows at SOMArts, the AudioBoat (with Berkeley-based musician/producer Yalls serenading us under the glow of the Bay Lights), and our closing In Solution Symposium at the California College of Arts.
Get out your calendars: Soundwave ((6)) Water program ready to check out!
We are so excited to share our festival trailer and the program to all Soundwave ((6)) Water shows! Check out the video to feel refreshed and get a preview of the incredible locations and find out exactly how and where MEDIATE sets to drench San Francisco in WATER this Summer on our brand new website.
The fest starts on July 10 at NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences till Sept 28 at California College of the Arts and includes over 100 performances and works and features over 40 artists.
www.soundwavesf.com
Thank You New Music USA!
We want to thank New Music USA for their support of Soundwave ((6)) Water happening all over San Francisco this summer! This festival is two years in the making and we can’t wait to announce all our locations and full artist lineup and productions. Please stay tuned!
Overview
Soundwave is San Francisco’s acclaimed biennial festival of innovative sound, art and music. Each season, MEDIATE investigates a new idea through sound and launches a summer-long, multi-venue experiential event series all over San Francisco. Soundwave invites diverse multidisciplinary artists, composers and musicians to create new works that explore the season’s theme in unique and innovative directions.
This season, Soundwave explores sonic connections to our most important and threatened natural resource. Soundwave ((6)) Water commissions over 100 daring artists, composers and musicians to present more than 30 extraordinary performances and works with accompanying conferences and panels that investigate the ecologies, stories and properties of water through sound.
Happening July through Septemeber 2014, Soundwave ((6)) Water occurs in many unexpected and site-specific places all over San Francisco including performances and works at the California Academy of Sciences and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, the historic Battery Townsley, a WWII battery fortification overlooking the Pacific Ocean, along SF’s Embarcadero waterfront with The Bay Lights, an iconic light sculpture on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, around the Maritime Museum, and commissions at beaches, piers, parks and local art galleries, colleges and performance spaces.
The festival actively inspires artists to take time to develop entirely new works, often using emerging technologies that bring new dimensions to their practice. Instead of presenting artists’ previously realized works, Soundwave’s curatorial committee, comprised of Bay Area art/music/science professionals, carefully selects artists to respond to environments, audiences and communities according to the season’s theme to discover new connections through sound making and the sound experience.
Local, national and international artists will converge to explore ice and steam acoustics and instrumentation; SF Bay Area waterways and bodies of water; seashores and life at sea; water mythologies and folklore; wave phenomena and patterns; weather; currents and tides; human impact on water; conservation, accessibility, clean water and health concerns; economic, energy, and environmental issues; and many other artists imaginations.
Select artist projects will include new works by composer/musician Cheryl Leonard and artist Oona Stern exploring the polar oceans and global warming, instrument builder and sound artist Jay Kreimer examining water conservation, artist/musician Jeff Ray imagining life in a future post-apocalyptic water world, artistic duo IN/S interpreting fishing life and life at sea, musician Chuck Johnson investigating the effects of California rivers and dams, and artist Daniel Blomquist exploring floods and the memories of victims through audio tapes and machines damaged by water.
MEDIATE enables vibrant experiences of sound and urban space that activate people, communities and neighborhoods and reveal possibilities implicit to the San Francisco Bay Area that transform public space and our experiences of art in a very tangible and creative way. With this sixth season theme, Soundwave aims to engage artists, communities and audiences with a new awareness of water and the importance it plays in our lives. The festival will spark thought and action while showcasing sound’s inherent connection to this important element and the innovative artistic voices investigating the future of this life-force of our living planet.
Project Media
Montage of season 5 of the Soundwave Biennial, San Francisco’s Innovative Art and Music Festival, that happened July 5 through Sept 30, 2012 in galleries, museums, parks, streets, churches, zen center, art institutes all over the city. This fifth season’s theme of HUMANITIES commissioned over 30 performances and works to investigate our human experience, and examine the future of our human constructs, cultures and rituals through sound.
“Iceline” is a collaborative piece from composer Cheryl E. Leonard and visual artist Oona Stern. Inspired by their 2011 residency in Svalbard, a remote archipelago above the Arctic Circle,”Iceline” depicts the Arctic Ocean from the perspective of floating glacial ice. Investigating the boundary between above and below water, “Iceline” provides a portal into the sonic and visual details of this chaotic, yet beautiful, environment and touches on effects of global climate change, including the melting of polar ice caps and rising sea levels.
Start and End Dates
07/10/2014 — 09/28/2014
Location
San Francisco, California
Project Created By
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