COLLECTING PEOPLE
Turin – June 29, 2016 at 6:30 pm,
at the Diogene Tram
A Talk with Nicola Ratti (Artist, Milan) and Vincenzo Santarcangelo (Ph.d in Philosophy, University of Turin).
Curated by Clara Madaro
Sound Worlds
Sound has strong emotional, cognitive, communicative, interactive, and social significance, such that is very difficult for us to imagine our life as a silent film. Not only is music one of the art forms with which we prefer to surround ourselves, but sounds and noises accompany us constantly, offering us multiple possibilities of contact with the world.
A actual sound environment emerges from artifacts, animals, matter, and the relationships between them. We manage to interact with a part of the sound objects that constitute this ecology in a way that is more or less comparable to how we grasp any type of object or scrutinize certain visible traces to orient ourselves in space. Nevertheless, it is not exactly obvious just what kind of objects sounds or noises are, and what it means to grasp them, understand them, and move around within the sound environments they produce.
Sound Worlds, the second meeting of Collecting People -The Art of Thinking 2016, will be an opportunity to explore these nodes, beginning with the research conducted by Nicola Ratti and Vincenzo Santarcangelo: artistic, musical, and philosophical research comparing sound through the discussion of an ecological approach to auditory perception. What kinds of things can we do with sounds? What skills and knowledge do we need to develop to be able to grasp their potential of interaction?
Nicola Ratti’s research stems from musical composition, highlighting its potential to create sound environments that interact with video or plastic worlds, thereby opening up possible scenarios.
Vincenzo Santarcangelo explores the nature of sound in the philosophical and experimental theories of perception in relation to everyday life, the world of music, and the visual arts. By talking about this research which touches on many artistic and social spheres of knowledge, we will develop a mode to investigate our relationship with sound more deeply through the interweaving of a relationship between music and theory. It will be possible to view a work by Nicola Ratti inside the Diogene Tram at the end of the meeting.
Nicola Ratti is a multi-talented musician and sound designer who has been working for years in various experimental fields. His live performances have been held in Europe, North America, and Russia, and he has recorded albums with Anticipate, Preservation, Die Schachtel, Entr’acte, Where To Now?, Senufo Editions, Boomkat Editions, Holidays Records, Megaplomb, Musica Moderna, Boring Machines, Coriolis Sounds, Zymogen. He has worked with Giuseppe Ielasi, with whom he started a project called Bellows, and with Tilde, a trio with Enrico Malatesta and Attila Faravelli. He played guitar in the group Ronin from 2007 to 2013. He has collaborated with visual artists, including Nicola Marini, Alessandro Roma, Riccardo Arena, Ferruccio Ascari, Blisterzine/NastyNasty, and Sara Enrico. From September to December 2014, he curated The Variable Series, a series of events regarding sound and performance hosted by O’ in Milan, and since May 2015, he has also curated a series of events relating to sound at Standards, an experimental gallery of sound research in Milan. He has been one of the promoters of an electronic music festival, Auna, conceived as a moment of exchange and research among Italian artists, since its first edition in 2012.
Vincenzo Santarcangelo has a PhD in philosophy and is member of the LabOnt research team at the University of Turin. He was a visiting PhD student at the Institute of Cognition at Plymouth University. He translated The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by J.J. Gibson (Mimesis 2014) and was the editor of Have Your Trip: The music of Fausto Romitelli (Auditorium 2014). He has taught courses in Aesthetics at the University of Genoa, the Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Rivoli Castle) and MADRE, DonnaRegina Museum of Contemporary Art (Naples). He has collaborated with the newspaper Corriere della Sera (Reading) and Rai Culture, and edits the columns “Octave Chronics” and “Dialogues of Aesthetics” in Artribune. He is the artistic director of the music festival From Sign to Sound (Dal Segno al Suono) at MUSMA, Museum of Contemporary Sculpture (Matera), and a consultant for “Florence Contemporary Sounds” (Firenze Suona Contemporanea) and “EastWest Festival” (EstOvest Festival).
