Barry Schrader: Lost Analog

Abstract

artists, etc.).” Initially, Suchánek wanted this new group to meet weekly, exploring the territory of new media art, and creating new works for the Planetarium. Overall, he views meetings like this as a process of social interaction, and a vehicle for building new forms of cooperation, whose role is to encourage recovery from the effects of the Covid pandemic. Suchánek suggests one can think of trychtýř (funnel) as denoting a total process of working with a range of artistic approaches and their results intended for presentation at SONDA. As such, Suchánek views his own role of mediator of this project as minimal, where no specific creative outcome or pattern of development for selected participants to follow has been designed or managed. Many artists contributed either a collaborative performance or an installation to the festival. As one scans the online program, collaborations are a core element of producing SONDA, overall. At times, for those who were on location, this aspect of the festival was manifested in natural divisions of pairs and trios. Suchánek has observed this process of “pairing, routing, and connecting of people.” For him, the set with Tomoko Sauvage, Anna Stepanova, and Matuš Stenko is such an example. Suchánek observed this collaboration develop in a logical manner, stemming from each artist’s creative strengths. Starting with Anna Stepanova, she “works with glitch phenomenon in high-resolution scanned objects.” Matuš Stenko, a motion graphic designer, could bring “her images into life—nonstop ultraslow zoom through super-detailed strange and amazingly beautiful objects.” These contributions, alongside Sauvage’s performance, led to a distinctive result. An interesting contribution called ROJ (meaning cluster or swarm) is detailed in the program as an intervention of students from the Department of Art at Masaryk University. ROJ was originally Suchánek’s audiovisual installation. It was initially presented on the facade of the Faculty of Education building in 2012, consisting of 969 RGB LEDs, and mediated using the Max programming environment. For SONDA, this system was made available for the students of Jana Pavla Francová, allowing them to create their own patterns, which were then mapped onto the building. Although the main artists during SONDA constructed works that were shaped in a manner, enabling them to improvise their respective sets, it is important to note that David Granström and Tadej Droljc both managed “prepared sets with predefined structure.” Suchánek has stated the following regarding Sauvage’s set as well: “Tomoko is an experienced performer with her water sound system, she had compositional structure too but she must also deal with unexpected behavior of the complex, sensitive system of hydrophones and feedback.” In contrast, Tomáš Vtípil merged the sounds of preparing kimchi, alongside the performance of a taped dancer—the performer’s movements were affected by having been “stuck to the floor” with tape. At the core of Suchánek’s performance was a mixture of “precomposed layers and structures.” He used the Max environment, intending to trigger “synthesizers after amplitude threshold detection—organic electronics.” The visuals in his work stem from the use of a laser. SONDA, which is the Czech word for probe, can be viewed as “the space for different connections.” This definition accurately describes the festival’s inclusion of established international artists, while also drawing from the local scene in Brno. Important for Suchánek is forming a link between traditional and academic electroacoustic compositional approaches using experimental, electronic producers and performers. He wants to “break the borders and explore . . . (in order to) learn from each other.” Casting forward, Suchánek writes, “in the future we want to bring to the audience the most advanced (but still musically meaningful) explorers of the sound territory. In the future I hope the festival will include not just performances, but also relevant sound installations and all other new hybrid sound forms.” I look forward to seeing and hearing what the future holds for the SONDA Festival.