Mark Fell: Collaborative Spatial Sound Workshop
For our summer event, and our contribution to the Fringe Arts Bath festival programme, The Studio in Bath invites composer and artist Mark Fell to host a weekend-long workshop of collaborative spatial sound experiments and recordings.
Event Overview:
This workshop brings together electronic sound synthesis and multi-speaker systems to consider the dynamic relationships between sound, environment and self.
Conventional spatial audio systems – like Dolby Atmos and ambisonics – are designed as general-purpose frameworks that function independently of their context, offering pseudo-perfect illusions of sonic objects as they move around a spatially-fixed and centralised listener.
This workshop confronts the ideological assumptions at play in such systems, with a series of group exercises, interventions, discussions, and analysis, culminating in the creation of an immersive spatial-sonic structure. No technical expertise or training is necessary.
About Mark Fell:
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham (UK). His practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy and radical politics. Over the past 30 years Fell’s output has grown into a significant body of work – from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces, to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems, and choreographic performances.
In 2022 Fell published “Structure and Synthesis, The Anatomy of Practice”, with Urbanomic press, bringing together the various strands of his philosophical and political thinking into an analysis of creative practice.
In recent years Fell curated a major exhibition of sound art for V-A-C foundation Moscow “The Geometry of Now” (2017), and the Serralves Foundation Porto premiered “Intermetamorphosis” (2017), featuring a collection of new commissions as well as retrospective pieces. Recent commissions and projects include: “Protomusic#1” (2018) for Sage Gateshead, forming their flagship contribution to the Great Exhibition of the North; “Frameworks” (2018) at Palazzo delle Zattere, Venice; “Hominin” (2019) (Rewire, Den Haag/Bergen Kunsthall); the solo exhibition “The Concept of Time is Intrinsically Incoherent” (2019), Focal Point Gallery, South End on Sea; “Against Method” (2019) Pirelli Hanger Bicocca, Milan; “Time Diagram for the Nondimensional Listener” (2021) Wiener Festwochen; “Systemic Peripheralism (2022) Beaconsfield Gallery, London; “Finger Systems for Organ” (2022) Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, Berlin; and “Every non-empty ultra-connected compact space has a largest proper open subset” (2023) performed by explore ensemble, Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy.
The diversity and importance of Fell’s practice is reflected in the range and scale of institutions that have presented his work: VAC Foundation Palazzo delle Zattere (Venice), Hong Kong National Film Archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Barbican (London), Raven Row (London), Seville Biennale, The Australian Centre For Moving Image (Melbourne), Artists Space (NYC), Moma (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Pirelli Hanger Biccoca (Milan) among others. Fell’s work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has been recognised by ARS Electronica (Linz). He has worked with a number of artists including: Yasunao Tone, Laurie Spiegel, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Will Guthrie, Peter Gidal, Terre Thaemlitz, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff and Mat Steel (as SND).