SMALL MOVEMENTSADAM BASANTA

The Museum as Performance

Performance

Library

5 NOV | 3.30PM

SMALL MOVEMENTS (2016 - ), 40'

'Small Movements' is a physical sound performance using tuned microphone feedback, modified amplification techniques, and kinetic elements. All sounds are created through the physical interaction of handheld microphones, speaker cones, custom software, and physical filters.

The performance relies on small movements, small changes in the relationship between performer and technologies, and technologies to one another, creating a sense of mystery and wonder as to how the musical results are achieved.

Presented with the support of Canada Council for the Arts.

Adam Basanta

Adam Basanta (b.1985, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Montreal. He holds a BFA in Music composition from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver BC CAN) and an interdisciplinary Research-Creation MA in Fine Arts (Concordia University, Montreal QC CAN)

Basanta’s work has been exhibited in various international galleries and institutions, such as Carrol / Fletcher Gallery, London, UK; Fotomuseum Winterthur; National Art Centre Tokyo; American Medium Gallery, New York; New Media Gallery, New Westminster; Moscow Biennale for Young Art; Serralves Museum, Porto; Edith- Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg; and The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. Basanta has been awarded several international prizes, including the Japan Media Arts Prize (2016), the Aesthetica Art Prize (2017) and Prix Pierre Ayot (2019).

As an experimental composer and performer, his concert music, live performances, and sound recordings are presented worldwide, including appearances in events such as the MATA Festival (NYC), Gaudeamus Musicweek (NL), CTM Festival (GER), Akousma Festival (CAN), and Mutek Festival (CAN).

My work investigates technology - a continuous spectrum spanning from mud-brick to machine learning - as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping systems; a nexus of cultural, computational, biological, and economic forces. In uncovering, augmenting, and creating systems of entanglement, I am trying to uncover a sense of “liveness” or dynamism resulting from the unpredictable performances of various actants pulling independently in collective balance. The works are visual, but equally, choreographic and performative.

Through a variety of media - installation, kinetic sculpture, sound, and computational image-making - I often employ commercial technological readymades as a core vocabulary, displacing them into an artistic context. Placing technological processes and artifacts in unconventional and absurd relationships to one another, I aim to create a fissure in their normative functions, reflecting on their roles as contemporary prosthetics with which we co-exist in a hybrid ecology.

My research and creation processes involve a balance of qualitative and quantitative approaches. I am particularly interested in the interplay between the two seemingly polar-opposite, binary viewpoints, and strive towards a cross-pollination in which one feeds and complicates the other, and vice versa.

— Adam Basanta