TIMARA’s 50th anniversary celebration begins next weekend with the Crafting Sound Symposium. On October 4th and 5th, a group of guest artists, local artists, and students will present their work in a series of panels and workshops, culminating in a performance on Saturday evening. Crafting Sound seeks to “turn a critical eye towards the technologies of sound…[and] examine unspoken and unquestioned value systems inherent in these technologies.” The symposium will feature a variety of lo-fi and DIY alternatives to traditional musical technologies in an exploration of “how these alternatives might engage new audiences in creative sound-making practices.”
The event kicks off with a ‘Sonic Super Buffet,” in the Birenbaum on October 4th at 7:30 PM, featuring a variety of homemade instruments. The next day (October 5th) there are two workshops by guest artists at 10 AM and 1 PM in the TIMARA studios (RSVP now as space is limited). At 4 PM, there will be a panel of guest artists discussing their use of technology in creative practice in the Cinema Studies black box theater above the Apollo. Rounding out the symposium, a concert will take place at 7:30 PM in the Birenbaum.
The event, co-organized by TIMARA Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty and Instructional Technologist Kyle Hartzell, has been in the works since last spring when Aresty reached out to Hartzell about organizing the event together. As an Instructional Technologist with Oberlin’s Cinema Studies and Studio Art Departments, Hartzell has worked extensively as a Sound Designer and has “embraced the history of the form in terms of making individual devices for creating sounds.” Discussing the weekend’s events, he expressed particular enthusiasm for Saturday’s panel discussion, nothing that “it’s going to bring up a lot of interesting questions about how people see their own work and how they came to their current practice via craft… in some cases it will be a learned craft from their past in others it will be a conscious decision to embrace a different mode of creating work.”
Made possible through the generous financial support of TIMARA, the Center for Convergence (StudiOC) at Oberlin College, and by the Alumni Office at Oberlin College, each Crafting Sound event is free and open to the public. Guest artists Afroditi Psarra, Jess Rowland, Asha Tamirisa (’10), and Jimmy Kuehnle, and local artists include Kyle Hartzell, Eli Stine, Abby Aresty, Rachel Gibson, Drew Smith, Dirk Roosenburg, Max Addae, and Max Kramer will all be presenting their work.
