Sonic Blanket // Maria Kapsali & Sunny Vowles

FRI 26/11/21 17:30-19:30

SAT 04/12/21 14:00-16:00

Sonic Blanket is a listening workshop implementing Echome software as a means of sonic interaction with objects, somatics and spatial environments. Echome is a movement sonification system utilising Arduino sensors. 

After drawing from the Deep Listening exercises of Pauline Oliveros, participants are invited to explore Huddersfield and collect their own sounds. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to input their collected sounds into the sonic blanket for immediate research.

The workshop intends to facilitate listening practice and enquiry into the experience of interaction with the Echome software. 

Book a free place on the workshop here.

Material Kinetics // Sunny Vowles

25/11/21 – 05/12/21

This is an open studio and anyone is warmly welcomed to come and visit Sunny during her residency, to contribute and collaborate with no experience necessary. 

This includes expanding her current research into solar powered kinetics and BEAM robotics by responding to the site of Dai Hall, internally and externally; to investigate the potential of these technologies and our relation to them. 

At this early stage in her research, Sunny would like to invite visitors to the space daily between 14:00 and 16:00, visits outside these hours can be booked via email or message. 

Sonic Blanket will be installed at Dai Hall for the duration of Sunny’s residency. 

Sunny Vowles is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Leeds. Working primarily with sculpture, her practice also comprises text, sound, movement, installation and collaboration. Poetry is an important undertone fuelling meaning in her work, and she has a growing interest in the potential of mechanisms as a framework for performance, feeling, memory and gesture. Current themes in her research include subverting connotations around rigidity in sculpture, the passing of agency and the act of listening to produce relations to self, others and environments. Vowles studied BA Fine Art (International) at the University of Leeds (2018), is a studio member of artist-led Serf, and has recently taken part in Yorkshire Sculpture Network 2020, DYCP Arts Council 2021/22 and UK New Artists 2021/22.

Maria Kapsali is a Leeds-based performance practitioner and academic at the University of Leeds, specialising in the combination of movement disciplines with the use and appropriation of digital technologies for purposes of creative expression, training, and wellbeing.
She has been working with movement sonification since 2014 experimenting with the affordances of different technologies and exploring the application of movement sonification in diverse cultural contexts, including museums, galleries and performance.
Alongside Sophie Alder, Nikos Stavropoulos and Kingsley Ash, she developed echome, an accessible, affordable and intuitive movement sonification system utilising mobile phones and Arduino sensors. In two single-authored, peer-reviewed articles (Kapsali 2017, Kapsali 2020), I have theorised the sensory and aesthetic experience that movement sonification renders possible.