Dr Andy Birtwistle, Reader in Film and Sound, has had a new article published in FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur.
TAG: Andy Birtwistle
Andy Birtwistle on Electroacoustic Composition
Reader in Film and Sound, Dr Andy Birtwistle, has published a new chapter on sound in a book on sound design and music in screen media
Research Seminar 5 October 2016: Andy Birtwistle
Dr Andy Birtwistle will give the first of the School of Media Art and Design research seminars for 2016-17, on the materiality of recording media.
Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2016-2017
5 October 2016
1.00pm-2.15pm
Noise, Agency and the Art of the Audio Cassette
Speaker: Dr Andy Birtwistle (CCCU)
In a recently published collection on materiality in art, Petra Lange-Berndt asks, “what does it mean to give agency to the material, to follow the material and to act with the material?” Andy Birtwistle’s presentation aims to consider this question, focusing on the creative use of sounds produced by obsolete – or near obsolete – technologies of sound recording and reproduction.
Every sound technology has the capacity to generate as well reproduce sound: that is, the sounds usually referred to as “noise”. In the case of the cassette tape, noise is created by the oxides that coat the tape’s surface and which encode the magnetic patterns constituting the recording itself. Similarly, the distinctive surface noise of vinyl is produced by an encounter between two materials, as the needle scrapes along the walls of the recording groove. We might think of these sounds as the sound of technology itself – a sounding of the medium’s material and technological bases.
Andy Birtwistle’s presentation explores what the political potential of the sound of (obsolete) technology might be, explored through a discussion of material agentiality in his own creative work with audio cassettes.
Andy is Reader in Film and Sound in the School of Media, Art and Design at Canterbury Christ Church University and is the author of Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video (Manchester University Press, 2010).
Powell Building – Pf06
Canterbury Christ Church University
North Holmes Road Campus
Canterbury
CT1 1QU
Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details
— All welcome —
Feel free to bring your lunch!
Salute to Vinyl
Dr Andy Birtwistle has launched the Start Here audio cassette label to bring listeners the finest in magnetic tape-based media archaeological art.
The cassettes released on the Start Here label attempt to work with the form and materiality of the cassette tape as a medium, foregrounding and celebrating its unique qualities. Start Here is all about clearing away, stripping back and emptying out, so that these qualities can be perceived and appreciated more clearly.
The label’s first release is Salute to Vinyl, which features the surface noise recorded from both sides of a blank long-playing vinyl disc. This sound is generated by physical contact between the turntable stylus and the moving surface of a vinyl record. The continuous sound that results from the friction between these two surfaces is interspersed with intermittent sounds produced when the stylus encounters the damaged wall of a recording groove or particles of dirt. This is the sound of vinyl, brought to you through the medium of magnetic tape.
Copies of Salute to Vinyl are available from Chimpsonic and will make ideal summer listening on your Walkman.
Andy is Reader in Film and Sound in the School of Media, Art and Design at Canterbury Christ Church University and is the author of Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video (Manchester University Press, 2010).
Glitch 2015
Powell Building, North Holmes Road Campus, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent CT1 1QU, UK.
On Monday 14th December the Centre for Practice Based Research in the Arts will be hosting a one-day interdisciplinary conference entitled Glitch 2015 – the politics of failure, error, disorder and noise.