Somerset House Studios

Vicki Bennett explores the processes of making audiovisual content, working with archives and found footage. Using collage as a compositional tool opens up endless opportunities to create and experience results that are more than the sum of their parts, opening doors (and windows) to let light in and move beyond limited and repetitive ways of creative thinking.    In this Somerset House Studios podcast, we revisit Vicki Bennett’s talk as part of The Wire magazine’s Music By Any Means series, which was part of Grounding Practice, a rolling programme shaped by and for creative practitioners and critical thinkers. About Vicky Bennett Under the name People Like Us, Vicki Bennett has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, concert appearances, gallery exhibits and online streaming and distribution since 1992. Bennett has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty tak

Studios resident Joe Namy presents sound work Sound Clash from the Eighth Automobile LDN as part of Somerset House Studios' new Gallery 31 exhibition Temporary Compositions, available to listen to online for the duration of the show.  Comprising of audio documentation from Namy’s ongoing performance piece Automobile (2012-2021) for cars with souped up sound systems - so far performed over eight iterations in Beirut (2012 and 2013), Mannheim (2014), Gwangju (2016), Montreal (2016), Toronto (2017), Abu Dhabi (2019), and London (2019) - the sound piece was recorded during the Eighth Automobile in 2019 as part of Art Night, on top of a Sainsbury's car park and later in the basement of the Mall car park in Walthamstow. Exhibition visitors are encouraged to listen to Namy's sound work within the gallery space as an accompaniment to Bass Stance (Automobile), a printed voile curtain installation piece included as part of the Temporary Compositions show. SOUND CREDITS: Recorded by Joe Namy and Reduced Listening

As part of Ilona Sagar's Soft Addictions works for Gallery 31's third season Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise, visitors are encouraged to listen to Sagar's looped sound work within the gallery space as an accompaniment to her print and text pieces.   Soft Addictions is a generative series of works that analyze the interface between people and computers and the science of responsive design through sound, digital imagery, performance and text. Using gesture and inference the work abstracts the alternating lines between function and dysfunction as a bodily state, playing with the paradigms of power between technology and the body. Voice and sound acts as both a dislocation and a connecting element within the series, working with the scales of speech, from the bureaucratic and instructional to the emotionally intimate and physical. Device culture has now made the human body evermore remote and co-dependent on technology. Pioneering advances in user-driven technologies threaten to shift our social interaction

Shenece Oretha takes an experimental approach to the podcast format for Somerset House Studios’ Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy series.   The multidisciplinary artist choreographs a DJ lecture mix that explores the theme of the body, using sonic forms that range from instruments and speech, to musicians, conductors, and listeners.  Oretha journeys through improvisational musical practices, audience culture, Black literature and emotional responses, layering music, speech and sound.  Listen as Oretha composes this sonic terrain, and bear witness to sound’s ability to move us emotionally, physically and socially, connecting us even when we are apart.   ABOUT THE ARTIST Shenece Oretha is a London based artist who interrogates the emotional, physical and relational sonic material of Blackness. In sharp contrast to the stark technological hardware often present in her installations, her work builds on the mobilising effects of Black oral traditions, celebrating the exchange and participation of intimate

A new artist-led podcast from Timur Si-Qin exploring how our health is intimately tied to the health of the natural world, as part of Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy. Drawing from religious history, contrasting western and Indigenous cultural relationships with nature, and the desired shift towards a spirituality of symbiosis, artist Timur Si-Qin unpacks the ideas at the centre of his upcoming essay Heaven Is Sick as well as New Peace - Si-Qin’s artwork, brand and ‘protocol’ developed in the wake of climate change. Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy is a dynamic programme of new commissions, films, workshops, and conversations considering both our individual health and collective wellbeing by exploring societal and ecological issues that affect both people and planet.    About the artist  Artist Timur Si-Qin’s interests in contemporary philosophy, the evolution of culture, and the dynamics of cognition take form in branded ecosystems and installations of 3D printed sculptures, light-boxes, and VR.    Si-

Defrag was a series of talks curated by Jake Charles Rees for Somerset House Studios between 2017-2019, exploring how technology is changing the world we live in, including the way we produce and consume art and culture. This podcast revisits the live recordings in the form of an audio montage, meshing together a range of fragmented thoughts from guest speakers. It delves into the practices of the people using and critiquing some of the latest technologies and how these shape and augment our realities. Contributors Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch  Anne Duffau Bill Posters Libby Heaney  Shannen SP Kode9 Keiken  Elliot Burns, Offsite Project Raffaella Moreira, Multimedia Anthropology Lab Sophie Dyer of Airwars Hanna Rullman of Airwars Milena Marin, Amnesty International  Gabriela Ivens of WITNESS  Adbulwahab Tahhan James Stringer, Werkflow  The White Pube Charlotte Webb, Feminist Internet  Travis Alabanza  Seyi Akiwowo  Helen Brewer, Feminist Internet Clara Finnigan, Feminist Internet Caroline Sinders Rhian

An hour long segment of reflections and music from Beatrice Dillon alongside the artists she invited to contribute to AGM – DeForrest Brown, Jr., Rian Treanor and Sarra Wild. Somerset House Studios celebrated four years of its dynamic resident artist community with the first online edition of its annual building takeover series AGM. Featuring performances broadcast live from Somerset House, as well as from across the UK and beyond, AGM 2020 premiered five new commissions from a specially curated line-up of artists and writers, including Aida Amoako, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Josiane M.H Pozi, Rian Treanor, Tyreis Holder, plus a performance from Sarra Wild; a line-up selected by a panel of existing and alumni resident artists: Beatrice Dillon, Jesse Darling, Klein and Larry Achiampong.  

Part of Mutant Promise's online series for progressive music-making, including introduction courses to coding and sound software, digital field recording, interior soundscape composition, and remote hardware workshops for DIY synth building at home.   ABOUT THE ARTISTS Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots. One of six composers chosen as collaborators by Natascha Süder Happelman for her installation at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019, her d

Revisit Open Your Palm, Feel The Dust Settling There, an audio work by artist and Savage Messiah author Laura Grace Ford, generated by psychogeographic walks – drifts – through the Latimer Road, Hammersmith and White City areas of West London. Originally comprised of three parts, the work is now available as a feature length podcast. Comprised of a conflation of spoken text and sound collage, Open Your Palm is an audio work responding to the psychic and emotional contours of the city,  Made from field recordings and fragments of found music, the spectral sectors of the city permeate across the work. The channelling of voices based on real encounters allows for an intersubjective relationship with the terrain, an approach to sound and text as a form of psychic ventriloquy. 00.00 Episode 1 14.28 Episode 2 27.41 Episode 3

The word ‘climatotherapy’ refers to a type of physical and mental treatment which utilizes the influence of climate on the human body, exemplified by treatments in the Dead Sea or at hot springs. Climatotherapy was an installation presented by Nozomu Matsumoto & Nile Koetting at ASSEMBLY in 2018, comprised of sound, light, smell, ikebana and virtual assistant Alexa is a key component, repurposed to generate live and enunciate various suggestions and tips throughout, what we should do, how we should live.   With these elements in dialogue, the installation became its own microclimate. Populated by household audio technologies, corporate messages weave through musical reproductions to create an ever-changing soundtrack for our relationship with ever-changing technologies. As our preference settings hack, repurpose and adapt our technological world into new causes, these devices become an aesthetic, a physical manifestation of the dialogue between mass industry and human environment. Climatotherapy questions

The first in our new Pause series, THE UN-NOW NOW is a new commission by Studios artist Vivienne Griffin. Our programme I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now takes its title from another of Vivienne’s works.    This sound work is the culmination of a group workshop hosted by the artist in January, exploring dissonance, vocal fry, polyphonic harmonies, speaking in tongues and drone. Working with The Seer on vocals, accordion and electronic noise, Anya Palamartschuk, vocals and cornet and Joshua Fay electronic samples and vocals, Vivienne brings together their contributions in post-production for this collaborative composition. The voiceover lists the 59 slogans of Lojong, a Tibetan Buddhist mind training practice from the 12th century.   The original script for the workshop was taken from Dharma Punx NYC; a secular Buddhist podcast by Josh Kordan. Lyrics from songs by Bjork and Madonna and 12 step fellowship addiction recovery acronyms. AA  ACA  CA  CLA  CMA  CoDA COSA  COSLAA DA EA  FA FA  FAA  GA  HA 

A performance by Jacob Samuel and Samir Kennedy featuring a collage of interviews with Beatrice Dillon, Coby Sey, Ines Camara, Scott Pattinson, Tadej Vindis and Vanessa Omoregie (Camgirls Project). The piece looks into the existence of infinity in the present moment, the relationship of tech and the image of the body, the future of prophecies between them. Originally performed live for RADIO ASSEMBLY, part of ASSEMBLY in 2018, five days of sound and performance at Somerset House Studios. - Deep Listen is a new series for Somerset House Studios in which we share  long-form audio content, new or archive, featuring interviews, discussions and creative responses to ideas of connection and commonality. 

Are you feeling Hyper Functional? Vivienne Griffin, Florence Peake, Rowdy SS & Rebecca Bellantoni respond to the idea of wellness, described as the optimization of mental and physical wellbeing. Time and again we find we cannot measure up to impossible demands, frustrating ourselves. Those who do not or cannot conform to wellness culture risk the contempt of those on its tyrannical treadmill. Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy took place during January and February 2020 at Somerset House Studios with a programme that asked us to reconsider well-being in new and unexpected ways, a refreshing antidote to the vast wellness industry that has fuelled societal pressures to conform, often creating an unrealistic and anxiety-inducing desire to be healthy, happy and productive. UN–NOW is a group workshop by Vivienne Griffin where voices were digitally modified in unison to explore dissonance, vocal fry, polyphonic harmonies, speaking in tongues, drone, noise and fake laughter.  Florence Peake presents

For ASSEMBLY, Karen Gwyer approached the street noises as drums. Building over the course of the performance, Karen will use and process the ambient sounds to create a multilayer, polyrhythmic piece created from the more punchy and identifiable sounds as well as distorting the general hum. The mood and intensity will shift as the performance progresses. On top of the rhythmic street sounds, layers of synths will build to create a moving yet sobering composition that draws on Karen’s own emotions around her 12 years as a Londoner, both the pain and relief of leaving, and the conflict of looking at it now from afar. Pedestrians, traffic, roadworks, protest; the corner of Somerset House where Waterloo Bridge meets Embankment is a hive of often unpredictable activity and noise. Acknowledging and working with this to define a compositional framework, Marclay invited a series of guests to collaborate in bringing the outdoors inside for an evolving series of electro-acoustic performances. Karen Gwyer was born in

Pedestrians, traffic, roadworks, protest; the corner of Somerset House where Waterloo Bridge meets Embankment is a hive of often unpredictable activity and noise. Acknowledging and working with this to define a compositional framework, Marclay invited a series of guests to collaborate in bringing the outdoors inside for an evolving series of electro-acoustic performances. Studios resident Lawrence Lek is an artist, filmmaker and musician whose virtual worlds and animated films create alternate versions of real places. For ASSEMBLY he invited collaborators Seth Scott and Robin Simpson to present a site-specific simulation that acts as an uncanny virtual and sonic double of the performance space. Their performance, Doom, reflects the atmosphere during the Extinction Rebellion protests when Waterloo Bridge – which the Lancaster Rooms overlook – was closed to traffic and filled with warning signs of the coming apocalypse. Christian Marclay’s ambitious and accomplished practice explores the juxtaposition betw

Artist and producer Beatrice Dillon’s new piece for ASSEMBLY, infraordinary, combines installation and performance, in which specially composed sounds are triggered using the system’s Kinect camera, alongside a live controlled sound mix of the street. Inspired by writer Georges Perec’s concept of the ‘infra-ordinary’ - taking account of the micro events of the everyday - the performance attempts to examine and reframe the rhythmic patterns of the street outside. Pedestrians, traffic, roadworks, protest; the corner of Somerset House where Waterloo Bridge meets Embankment is a hive of often unpredictable activity and noise. Acknowledging and working with this to define a compositional framework, Marclay invited a series of guests to collaborate in bringing the outdoors inside for an evolving series of electro-acoustic performances.  Beatrice Dillon is an artist and music producer who has produced solo and collaborative releases across Boomkat Editions, Hessle Audio, The Trilogy Tapes, PAN, Timedance and Wher

Developed in residence at Somerset House Studios, visual artist Sam Williams and musician Roly Porter present Salvage Rhythms, a collaboration resulting in a performance and film drawing on systems of archaeology, mycelial networks, composting and non-human relationships to explore different possibilities of survival and connection. Sam and Roly will present a newly commissioned film Salvage Rhythms at Somerset House Studios in 2020, which collages together sound and movement from their performance of the same title at AGM, with original and found footage; animation and photography to create a dense and decaying compost of human and non-human entanglement. Salvage Rhythms features as part of I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now, the second season at Somerset House Studios' new permanent exhibition space, Gallery 31, from 23 Jan – 31 May 2020. Produced by Femi Oriogun-Williams for Reduced Listening. Commissioned by Somerset House Studios

With contributions from Annie Goh and Natalie Hyacinth (Sonic Cyberfeminisms), Emma Smith, Ziúr, Roy Claire Potter and NSDOS, we hear the artists discuss explore the idea of silence and how this can be disrupted, interjected or accepted in progressive ways, using an excerpt of Audre Lorde’s seminal text Your Silence Will Not Protect You as a jumping off point for artistic discussion. Somerset House Studios were invited to guest curate the 2019 edition of Wysing Polyphonic. Considering the legacy of Wysing Arts Centre as a place where artists meet and experiment, the programme explored connection beyond the physical: connection as a channel of communication; an incantation, returning, or heralding; the calling on an ‘other’ or unknown to understand different worlds and possibilities.  Produced by Femi Oriogun-Williams for Reduced Listening. Commissioned by Somerset House Studios

Conversations about language. Artist Nick Ryan presents an ontological adventure into voice recognition, language, semiotics, sensory experience, immersive sound and imagination. In this bumper final episode of the series, Nick Ryan continues his search into the meaning of language with Anthropologist Dr Jerome Lewis, asking why and where language began. A Reader in Social Anthropology at University College London, Jerome has 25 years of research experience working with The Bayaka hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin researching child socialisation, play and religion; egalitarian politics and gender relations; and language, music and dance. Jerome takes Nick on Journey into the forest, tracing the origins of language, as he explains ‘radical egalitarianism’, polyphonic singing, survival from predators, ‘costly signalling’ and how to call fish with your voice underwater. With thanks to the Pitt Rivers Museum and Reel to Real project for use of the Bayaka recordings used in this episode. - The series docume

Conversations about language. Artist Nick Ryan presents an ontological adventure into voice recognition, language, semiotics, sensory experience, immersive sound and imagination.  The series documents and delves into the research being undertaken by Nick Ryan and his collaborators for RE:COGNITION, an interdisciplinary project exploring the connection between the sound of spoken language) and meanings manifest in the physical world as sound or concepts otherwise capable of being represented sonically. Neil Bennun is a BAFTA winning author, actor and experimental theatre maker who has written extensively for video games and interactive and digital narrative projects. In his book, “The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People” (published by Penguin in 2005) Neil uncovered the stories of the first people of South Africa from the brink of extinction - a world of sorcerers, hunters and artists with vivid stories to tell. Nick and Neil discuss evolution, the origins of language and symbol, hacking and