Ars Electronica Archive
Prix
Prix Map
Pictures
Videos
Publications
Special Projects
Women in Media Art
Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Wordless
Yannis Kyriakides
Wordless is a suite of 12 sound portraits based on interviews with and by residents of Brussels from the BNA-BBOT archives. Words from the interviews are edited to leave only the hesitations, breathing emotional reactions and environmental sounds. An aspect of the personality of the interviewee somehow comes across in these inbetween sounds, as if when stripped of language another layer of communication comes into focus, more emotional, more revealing than what is expressed in words. The soundtrack of the edited interviews is then re-sampled and set in musical structures with wave-based electronic sounds, resonances, pulses and noise. The pieces themselves take the form of wordless narratives creating a portrait in sounds of an aspect of the personality of the interviewee.
The piece was conceived for a 4 channel system where two channels were played back through headphones and the other two through a PA, creating a sense of inside and outside sound worlds, the voices always coming through binaurally on the headphones while the electronic sounds create a sense of spatiality and physicality and awareness of the listening space.
Texts describing the interviewees and their stories are projected on a video screen so that an idea of the person described in the sound portraits can color how we listen.
The piece was conceived for a 4 channel system where two channels were played back through headphones and the other two through a PA, creating a sense of inside and outside sound worlds, the voices always coming through binaurally on the headphones while the electronic sounds create a sense of spatiality and physicality and awareness of the listening space.
Texts describing the interviewees and their stories are projected on a video screen so that an idea of the person described in the sound portraits can color how we listen.
Yannis Kyriakides (CY / NL), born in1969, studied musicology at York University, later being drawn to move to the Netherlands by the music of Louis Andriessen, under whom he studied at the Hague Conservatory. He regularly composes works for ensembles such as ASKO (NL), Icebreaker Ensemble (UK), Ensemble Integrales (DE), and MAE (NL), of which he is the artistic director. As an improviser he is involved in the Amsterdam electronic improv scene, he has a regular duo with Andy Moor (the Ex) called Red v Green, and is a member of the dance-music improvisation group Magpie. Current teaching activities include visiting lecturer at Birmingham Conservatory (UK) and composer in residence at HKU, Utrecht School of the Arts (NL).