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In August 2019, Catch teamed up with Laura Beloff and Morten Søndergaard from the IT University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University to create a week-long summer camp exploring artistic and curatorial practices in the age of Technogenesis, with a specific focus on sound art.
The camp was targeted at master students, PhD-students, artists, curators, and creatives of all sorts, and we were overwhelmed and happy to host talented and inspiring participants from all over the world – all the way from South Korea and Japan, to Mexico and USA.
During the week, the participants were asked to finish a prototype of an artwork or curatorial concept, which would explore and contextualise the main topic, accordingly to their own practices. The week resulted in an exhibition at Catch in Elsinore, where the groups presented their works to each other. The PhD students also brought a poster of their productions with them for a poster session at the RE:SOUND conference at Aalborg University in Aalborg the week after as part of the summer camp. Finally, the PhD students had to write a paper about their summer camp project.
Besides the most amazing participants, the summer camp was also accompanied by a group of excellent speakers, who lectured in the mornings to open up the subject and inspire the participants to develop their own projects. We were lucky to host: Tanya Toft Ag, Florian Weigl, Miguel Carvalhais, Magnus Kaslov, Claudia Robles, Helen Leigh and Nina Cecilie Højholdt and Frederik Tollund Juutilainen from Multivocal.
Finally, some of our partners from the Feral Labs network were also visiting us to share knowledge on how to organize and facilitate summer camps focusing on subjects within the art and tech scene. Rüdiger Wassibauer and Martin Murer were here from Schmiede and Dare Pejic from Makery. Dare also wrote an article about the camp with an extensive interview with two of the main organizers; Majken Overgaard and Laura Beloff.
The summer camp was co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union for being part of the Feral Labs Network. Furthermore, the summer camp received grants from Novo Nordisk for the PhD programme.
Click on the images below to enlarge them.
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Tanya Toft Ag, Ph.D., is a curator and researcher examining trajectories of media art(s) and change, especially focused on perceptual and technogenetic implications of urban media art and aesthetics. Ag is editor of Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect 2019) and currently a research fellow at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Magnus Kaslovis curator and head of collection and archives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and also co-runs the independent association and record label Institute for Danish Sound Archeology. The Museum of Contemporary Art has had sound and intermedia arts as a special area of focus since it was founded in 1991.
Helen Leigh is a creative technologist who specialises in music technologies, craft-based electronics and education. She is known for her playful, creative approach to technologies. Helen will spend August and September in Helsingor as Artist in Residence at Catch. During the course of her residency she will create a new music technology artwork. Helen will also hold a lecture and provide guidance and mentoring to the PhD students taking part in the summer camp.
Morten Søndergaard is Associate Professor and Curator of interactive media art at Aalborg University. Søndergaard is the co-founder and Academic Director of the Erasmus Master in Media Arts Cultures. From 1999 to 2008 he worked as curator/assisting director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, while serving as head of the Culture Denmark advisory board, the Danish Ministry of Culture in the period 2002-2006. Søndergaard has commissioned and curated more than 100 sound- and media art exhibitions.
Frederik Tollund Juutilainen and Nina Cecilie Højholdt are Copenhagen-based developers, designers and artists, who’s work is concerned with the politics and aesthetics of computational technology. They are part of the collective Multivocal, an ongoing research and art project on synthesized voices. Here they explore notions of representation, identity, personhood and will ascribed to these voices, with a feminist activist approach.
Florian Weigl (1985) is curator at V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media, an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam. V2_ presents, produces, archives and publishes research at the interface of art, technology and society. As curator and researcher Florian is interested in the intersection between art, technology, and it’s social impact as well as new ways of collaborating and producing with artists. Alongside his work at V2_, Florian works as independent curator working closely with artist as curator/producer and advisor.
Claudia Robles is an artist who specialises in new media and the digital arts, particularly concentrating on the intersection amongst visual/sound art, performance, science and new technologies. In reference to the latter, Robles specialises in the usage of biomedical-signals (e.g. brainwaves, muscle tension, etc.) combined with immersive sound and visual aspects in different types of projects, for example in interactive installations and/or in performances.
Miguel Carvalhais is a designer, musician, and assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. He studies creative practices with computational systems, having written the book “Artificial Aesthetics” on the topic. His research and practice explore how computational and procedural systems are read by humans, and how procedural discovery and interpretation are paramount for the creation of meaning and the aesthetic experience.
Laura Beloff (FI / DK) is an internationally acclaimed artist and a researcher. She has been actively producing art works and exhibiting worldwide in museums, galleries and art events since the 1990’s. She is a recipient of various grants, residencies and awards throughout the years. Her works focus on combination of technology, biology concerning human relation to the natural world. Currently she is at IT University in Copenhagen as Associate Professor and Head of PhD School