»Electrified Voices / Stimmen unter Strom« is the theme of the 5th Anniversary Edition of the international Shift Festival of Electronic Arts, where Michael Markert will show his talking machine »Kempelen 2.0« as part of the exhibition program of the renowned arts festival. Shift turns the spotlight on musical and artistic experiments with electrified voices, in concerts, exhibitions, performances, film and video screenings, workshops and lectures from October 27–30, 2011 on the Dreispitz site in Basel/Münchenstein, Swiss.
There will be a the 3-day concert program, art exhibition and a schedule of performance and video and film screenings in the neighbouring venue Schaulager, the Festival once again provides a platform for works and discussions on the Festival theme. Newcomers on board this year are the Swiss Electronic Music network and Electron, a partner festival from Geneva, both of which have compiled a complementary concert programme; and V2 Rotterdam presents an exhibition in the framework of the 10th international conference on Mixed and Augmented Reality aka ISMAR, which takes place this year in Basel.
kII (Kempelen 2.0) is a voice-topological interface for gestural navigation in linguistic space created by Media Artist Michael Markert. The hand serves as the speech organ during the articulation process. The device is operated by means of the sensory determination of the opened state of both hands, their position in space, their relative height, and other parameters which are assigned to the jaw and tongue position in the mouth as well as to pitch and rhythm.
Phoneme production is based on phonetic laws. A spoken language is produced through the implementation of musical scales and speech rhythms whose context of meaning is not characterized by the conveyance of information but by the abstraction of the voice in tonal linguistic space.
Articulatory-topological phonetics deals with the speech process — parts of the body serve as speech organs during the articulation process. It is therefore historically linked to Kempelen’s motif of speech generation for the voiceless: voice generation for the speechless.
Trailer by Martin Sautter
Michael Markert will also give an artist talk about the history of talking machines. More informations about the exhibition and festival can be found on the festival website: http://www.shiftfestival.ch/shift-2011/programm/ausstellung.
Participating Artists
Atelier Hauert Reichmuth, Erik Bünger, Anton Bruhin, Henri Chopin, Gary Hill, Hörner / Antlfinger, Alexandre Joly, Peter Keene, Aaron Koblin & Daniel Massey, Wolfgang Müller, Jürg Lehni, Christian Marclay, Michael Markert, Bruce Nauman, Alexis O’Hara, Julian Palacz, Seth Price, Manuel Saiz, Max Philipp Schmid, Alexei Shulgin, Laurie Spiegel, José Toirac, Ignacio Uriarte, Steina Vasulka u.a.
Links
- Shift Festival 2011: Highlights (2011). Available at: https://plugin.cmail3.com/t/ViewEmail/…(Accessed: 22 February 2025).
- SHIFT Electronic Arts Festival Basel, Swiss, 27. – 30.10.2011 (k2.0) via Wayback Archive (Accessed 22 February 2025)
- Exhibition and Festival Page: http://www.shiftfestival.ch/shift-2011/programm/ausstellung
- Vimeo (2011) Shift Artist Videos
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