Shortly after the release of “Fissures”, we started thinking about doing something new. Inspired by live performances that we had been doing and the desire to find new places to present our music, we decided to branch out and plan an installation-type presentation that could be held in a gallery space. Using everything that we had learned making musical, visual, and conceptual work, we decided to put together a show that would bring all of those elements together at once. We just needed to find a place to present it.
As luck would have it, around that same time we learned that proposals were being accepted for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche event for the Fall of 2011. If you aren’t already familiar with it, Nuit Blanche is an all night art event that happens annually in a number of different cities around the world, and Toronto has been hosting an edition since 2006. Over the course of a full evening from dusk until dawn, people wander the city experiencing art in any number of forms. It truly is an incredible night out, and it seemed to us like it would be a perfect place to try something different.
And that’s when we came up with the idea for “The Sound is Watching You”, an installation art piece where participant movements were tracked using echolocation technology to create a light, video, and multi-dimensional audio environment for exploration. Using computer vision software, generative sounds, and graphic theory, a visitor could enter into the staging space and create their own artistic experience. Based on this idea we put together a proposal and submitted it for consideration, and were thrilled to find that we were accepted to present the installation in October 2011.
All we needed to do was figure out a way to make it work…
What followed was a pretty intense few months of planning, programming, coordination, and trial and error. We had to think of ways to make things work, we had to source materials, we had to consider crowd dynamics, and we had to come up with a musical accompaniment for it all. It was a lot of work and at times it seemed a little bit daunting, but we were up to the task.
One of our earliest challenges revolved around how we wanted to represent the audio element of the installation. Up to that point, the music we had made as Kalte had been abstract, ambient, and a little bit scary, but knowing that Nuit Blanche was a family event we wanted to make our sound more accessible to a wider audience. So we started working with a different kind of sound palette that retained some of the Kalte aesthetic but also traveled along a brighter and more inviting path, opting for quirky instead of abstract, and melodic instead of ambient. It was quite a process but in the end we were able to come up with music that remained both true to the Kalte vision and a little more friendly. We were pretty happy with the end result.
In keeping with the idea of making what we did more accessible to a different audience, we also decided to take on a new name for this project (and any installation work that we did in the future) so we could distinguish it from what we were doing with Kalte. We wanted to give our installation work a name that connected with our musical ideals and concepts while simultaneously setting it apart, and after careful consideration we came up with SubZeroArts, which we thought had an ideological through line with Kalte, but still retained it’s own identity.
In addition to working on the technical elements of the installation, we also spent a lot of time considering the theory behind what we wanted to do with SubZeroArts. Much like we had when we were first starting Kalte, we came up with a vision and a vocabulary of sorts that we could apply to this new project, largely based around an idea that we dubbed “You Are Art”. We wanted to make art where participants were actively involved in the creation process. Rather than passively looking at art from a distance, we wanted to add an interactive element where participants could make something happen, which would in turn define their own unique art experience.
We felt the idea that “You Are Art” was fully demonstrated in “The Sound is Watching You”. By entering the performance area, each participant would appear as a video projection on a screen at the head of the room, and as they moved they would leave a trail of visual artifacts that would create a pattern on the screen. Walking around the room would also trigger a multi-point sound element providing a soundtrack that would evolve depending on where you found yourself in the room. Ultimately each participant’s movement would result in a unique aural and visual display, thus fulfilling the idea that participants were defining their own art experience.
“The Sound is Watching You” made it’s debut at the AWOL Gallery on October 1st 2011, and we’re pleased to say that it was a success in terms of both audience participation and in terms of starting a new stage of our work. In 2012, we successfully pitched a variation on “The Sound is Watching You” called “LightSoundPlay!” which was staged at SAW Gallery as part of the inaugural Nuit Blanche event in Ottawa, giving us our first out of town performance experience. We followed that up in January 2013 with a month long residency of the original “Sound is Watching You” installation at the New Adventures in Sound Arts performance space in Toronto. With these installations we had expanded the scope of what we were doing artistically and SubZeroArts had become it’s own distinct project that allowed us to explore our interests in different directions than we had previously been doing with Kalte.
The years to follow would see us alternating between Kalte and SubZeroArts projects and learning from the experiences of each to further develop the other. Over the next few days we’ll tell you about some of those experiences…
For the entire month of October while we celebrate #10yearsofKalte, if you buy a copy of “The Lanthanide Series” through Bandcamp you can send us your email at info@kaltemusic.com and we’ll send you a free copy of our latest release, “Covalencies“!
Having established SubZeroArts in Fall 2011, we spent a large part of 2012 planning new work for that project which meant that we took a year off from recording new Kalte material. But despite being busy with new installation work, Kalte was never very far from our thoughts and when we had the opportunity to play an opening set for one of our musical heroes we jumped at the chance.
