AURA SATZ
TURNTABLE TABLEAU, a film performance, Sun 9 May, 5pm
ICA - Live Weekend 1 - Performance etc (produced by David Gryn)

Consortium teaching fellow Aura Satz presents a talking book ventriloquist act, followed by a live soundtrack to her recent film ‘Sound Seam’, performed Alex Baker, Frances Scott and and Consortium students Lina Hakim, Roger Orwell.

‘Sound Seam’ is a film featuring abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, giving voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The hypnotic film uses microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves, wax and acetate shavings, phonograph cylinder recording and erasing technology, as well as footage of the anatomy of the ear, where inner ear hair cells have been animated to look like a sound groove, and a gold-plated cochlea spirals like a shellac disc. Presented at the ICA as a silent film, accompanied only by the surface noise of crackle, the performers enact a live sculptural sound-track, a spiraling multivocal counterpart, a cornocupia of voices recounting a tale of mourning and technology, a forensic love-story of sorts in which the voices overlap, echo and pre-empt each other. The layers of voice-overs narrate a tale which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a phonograph needle. The cinematic stage is animated by a voice-over carousel, a spinning tableau vivant, a canon of voices amplified by horns set on a rotating stage.

‘Sound Seam’ premiered at the AV festival in Newcastle in March 2010 as a complex filmic multi-channel sound installation in collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski, featuring 20 original phonograph and gramophone horns, a number of hearing trumpets, and an 8ft auxetophone horn on loan from the Discovery museum in Newcastle. The installation will tour to the Wellcome Collection in London in December 2010. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was produced during an artist residency at the Ear Institute, UCL.

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