Main Partner
Main Partner
A four-day experience during Artissima 2018.
An invitation to build and inhabit an experimental free school in Turin.
A stage, a workspace, a thinking place, an archive, a radio station, a recording studio, and an art space. Composed by Jan St. Werner, its coordination is based on collective learning and self-organization, open to participants of all ages and from all countries.
Artissima 2018 inaugurated “Artissima Experimental Academy”, a new educational project developed in collaboration with COMBO, an innovative hospitality concept that will open in Turin, Milan, Bologna, and Venice in 2019. “Artissima Experimental Academy” lived beyond the four days of the Fair, presenting during the year, a series of appointments and meetings for art professionals. The first appointment of “Artissima Experimental Academy”, the project DAF Struttura, premiers during the Fair from 1—4 November 2018.
DAF Struttura was composed by Jan St. Werner in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, where he teaches Interactive Media/Dynamic Acoustic Research (DAF). St. Werner was accompanied by two guest lecturers, Yael Solomonowitz and Marc Matter. There were additional robotic and light installations by Moritz Simon Geist and Matthias Singer, where the robots and lights work as musical instruments.
DAF Struttura was a light and sound installation that functions as a research and performance environment. For four days, during the Fair, Struttura was a stage, a workspace, a thinking place, an archive, a radio station, a recording studio, and an art space. Its coordination is based on collective learning and self-organization. Struttura opened at various times to members of the public. The audience had the opportunity to tune in via a short-throw radio transmission, join sonic walks, or enter within the struttura to hear lecture-performances, discussions, acoustic experiments, stagings of archival recordings, or new compositions. These was experimentally documented by the school, and a publication capturing these sound texts will be collectively conceived and launched early next year.
“I invited the electronic music pioneer and innovator, Jan St. Werner, to make a temporary school (based on a dream 4 of us had shared in 2015 to create an inclusive, experimental school for sound and art in Italy inside a lighthouse) for Artissima. He decided to compose a school as an environment—“struttura”. Jan started Mouse on Mars in 1993 with Andi Toma, and their work has remained vanguard—a witty hybridising of electronic genres, mixed sometimes with field recordings and live instrumentation. He has been combining experimentation in electronic sound, performance and recording, with experiments in pedagogy since he began directing the Institute of Electronic Music in Amsterdam in the 2000s, and in the last 5 years, taught at MIT Michigan, NYU Berlin, and at the Academy of Fine Art Nuremberg. Struttura is built by traveling students from the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts, from sine-wave recycled board, nodding to a grassroots history of experimental school structures that were first hand-built by the students and teachers themselves. Struttura draws on the archived past and present of sound experimentation, to consider complexity, as sustainable, and interconnected.” – ZASHA COLAH
“There is a profound relationship between sound, body and space. To explore these concepts, Struttura connects traditional and theoretical knowledge with hands on experimentation to transcend sound as an unstable yet sculptural art form. We diffuse and listen to sound in relation to its spatial and technical properties and learn that sound and physical space react with one another in complex ways. We will gain new perspectives on sound, vision and physics. The Struttura collective will explore idiosyncratic production techniques, examine basic principles of acousmatic & experimental research, and invent new strategies for sound presentation and perception. Struttura will host a series of sound performances as well as an experimental radio programme, and will produce a book.” – JAN ST. WERNER
Jan St. Werner: biography
Jan St. Werner is an artist and composer of electronic music based in Berlin and one part of the vanguard electronic music duo Mouse on Mars formed in 1993. St. Werner has released solo work as Lithops, Noisemashinetapes and Neuter River. Under his own name, he recorded Blaze Colour Burn (2013), the first in a series of experimental albums called Fiepblatter Catalogue with Thrill Jockey Records. He has collaborated with orchestras and groups such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Musikfabrik Köln, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop and Ensemble NeoN from Norway.
During the 2000s, St. Werner was artistic director of the Institute of Electronic Music in Amsterdam (STEIM). Werner has been a guest lecturer at the ACT Department of Arts Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/MIT, is Professor of Interactive Media / Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and has led a new field of study on the future of record production for the New York University of Berlin.
Various acts of translation (linguistic, artistic and curatorial) by Michael Akstaller, Roberto Maria Clemente, and Davide Gambaretto. Curated by Zasha Colah.
DAF Struttura is made possible thanks to the support of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT.
