Nicolás Arnáez: Kitchen bells – curious arts


At the core of Nicolás Arnáez’s sound installation series, Composiciones Colectivas, is a driving impulse to create interactivity with music and sound.

Nicolás Arnáez

The sound artist, technician and graduate student studying composition at the U of A, has created five installations in the series to date. All the pieces demand the interaction of people in order for the sound art to become audible, experienced and performed.

The third piece of the series, Composición Colectiva III: Campanas de Cocina [Collective composition III: Kitchen bells], is comprised of kitchen bowls hanging from the ceiling in the basement of Studio 96 from July 17 to 19 as part of the C’mon Festival.

Nothing is audible until an Xbox Kinect controller detects a person moving through the space. It is the visitors and their movements through the installation that trigger and modify the sound events. When a person comes closer to one of the bowls, the sound changes in timbre, and depending the sonic activity will be higher if there are more people playing in the room together.

“It is a little bit of a game. The auditor is actually creating the piece,” explains Arnáez. “They are a kind of composer and also a performer.”

Previous presentations of Arnáez’s Composiciones Colectivas series included installations in a flower shop on Edmonton’s 124 Street as part of NextFest and in a bookstore on Whyte Avenue as a Fringe Festival BYOV.

Photo and video credits: Nicolás Arnáez

Event Title: Composición Colectiva III: Campanas de Cocina [Collective composition III: Kitchen bells] by Nicolás Arnáez at The C’mon Festival
Venue: In the basement of Studio 96 (10909 – 96 Street)
Dates: Friday, July 17 through Sunday, July 19, 2015

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