Iris Garrelfs
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Iris Garrelfs is a sound artist and researcher working across improvised performance, installation and mixed media at the intersection of music, art and sociology. Her practice explores how listening, voice, and technologically mediated sound shape experiences of presence, place and interaction. Working through site-responsive and relational approaches, her projects emerge from specific encounters and collaborations, where knowledge emerges through embodied engagement rather than fixed conceptual frameworks. In doing so, they open speculative spaces in which understandings of self and context are continually co-constituted and playfully unsettled. Building on a long-standing engagement with improvisation, voice and experimental technologies, her recent work explores lo-fi wearable systems in site-responsive improvisation, examining how layered sonic and spatial interactions articulate relationships between bodies, environments and shared acts of listening. Her work has been presented at venues including Tate Britain, the Barbican Centre, the National Gallery, Café OTO (London), the Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Musikkens Hus (Aalborg), Visiones Sonoras Festival and Fonoteca Nacional (Mexico), MC Gallery (New York), fRUITYSPACE (Beijing) and Blindside (Melbourne). She holds a PhD in Sound Art from the University of the Arts London and is based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she directs the Sound Practice Research Unit and leads the Goldsmiths Improvisers Collective. |
| https://irisgarrelfs.com/embodied-dialogues |
Embodied Dialogues: Space, Site and Spatiality Embodied Dialogues was developed as a collaboration between Jenn Kirby and Iris Garrelfs. The project brings together body movement, wearable technology, and extended vocal improvisation, and can be performed as a solo or as a duo. This solo iteration with Iris Garrelfs features Kirby’s Sensor Dress, equipped with capacitive touch sensors and motion tracking, which enables real-time interaction between body, movement, sound, and surrounding space. As Garrelfs moves among the audience, her movements activate the dress’s sensors, triggering an array of pre-recorded site-responsive sounds, which are amplified via a single handheld speaker. Her voice remains unprocessed and unamplified. Through this unfolding exchange, the performance creates a shifting sonic environment shaped by the movements and proximity of performer, audience, and technology. For this performance, previously recorded materials from different locations and different performances are brought together and reactivated. Rather than being anchored in one specific site, the work re-situates sounds across contexts, allowing traces of different locations to occupy the same perceptual field. These traces do not form a single coherent whole, but remain distinct, pointing back to their different origins while coexisting in the same space. This shifts attention away from site as a fixed reference toward sound as a material through which spatial experience is produced in the act of listening, movement, and technological mediation. The presentation accompanying this performance of Embodied Dialogues examines the relationship between space (physical location), spatiality (how sound shapes and is shaped by our experience of space), and site (the specific context and conditions of a location). For example, by using a single speaker in relation to the performing body, spatial experience is not pre-given but unfolds through proximity, orientation, and the listener’s position in the space. The body becomes a mediator that carries and repositions sound, producing a continuously shifting spatial condition. The recordings themselves (mono documents of particular sites) raise questions around encoding and recognition: what, if anything, of a location remains legible once it is displaced, layered, and recomposed? Listening becomes an act shaped by inference and imagination, as much as by the material itself. Field recordings function as sonic markers of environments, extending the dialogue beyond the immediate performance setting. From this perspective, site-responsiveness does not refer to a single fixed location, but to the negotiation of overlapping and sometimes conflicting spatial configurations. Performance becomes a way of staging these relations, while improvisation allows them to shift and be reworked in real time. At the same time, site and space become compositional materials shaped through technological mediation. The technologies used in the work are not neutral. They influence how places are recorded, represented, and experienced. Working with field recordings and performance space therefore involves decisions about selection, framing, and re-presentation. These decisions carry ethical implications, particularly when sounds are removed from their original contexts and placed into new ones. The work acknowledges that places are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions, and it asks how sound, technology, and performance take part in shaping how those places are heard and understood. |
Marco Barotti
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Marco Barotti is a media artist. After music studies at the Siena Jazz Academy, he began merging sound with visual art. His work is driven by a desire to invent an artistic language in which a fictional post-futurist era is expressed through kinetic sound interventions in natural and urban environments. His installations merge audio technology, consumer objects, waste and natural materials into moving sculptures triggered entirely by sound. The primary focus of his work is to create a “tech ecosystem” that plays with resemblances to animals and plants. These artworks serve as a metaphor for the anthropogenic impact on the planet and aim to make people aware of environmental and social issues. |
