sonic arts network – People Like Us

June 1, 2017October 22, 2024

List of Residencies, Commissions & Collaborations

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Khroma surround av work for a new RML CineChamber module [2025]
Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave of William Blake video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
Elusive Butterfly video for Marc Almond [2024]
Linoleum Smooth video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love video for Soft Cell live show [2024]
Cognitive Dissident video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
A Man Could Get Lost video for Soft Cell live show [2024]
Mise En Abyme multiscreen/multispeaker installation for Aveiro 2024, Capital Portuguesa Da Cultura [2024]
PhD Studentship – Northern Bridge [2023+]
Live AV performance collaboration with Ergo Phizmiz and Gwilly Edmondez, Cafe OTO / Arts Council England [2023]
Artist support from Lakes of Wada [2023]
Solo live AV performance “The Library of Babel“, IndieGoGo crowdfunded [2023]
CuratorSpace Artist Bursary [2022]
“Changing Your Mind” radio commission for Deutschlandradio [2022/2023]
108 radio commission for Radio Art Zone [2022]
Mind Maps: The Art of Vicki Bennett Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, USA | [2022]
Global Eyes video for THE THE [2022]
PRSF Open Fund For Music Creators recipient [2021]
Gone, Gone Beyond Commissioned by SPILL Festival of Performance, presented in partnership with Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) and Barbican. Supported by Recombinant Media Labs (RML), DanceEast, nyMusikk, Gulbenkian, TouchDesigner, PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund and Arts Council England. Developed as part of Sound and Music’s New Voices Programme. [2021]
a-n Artist Bursaries 2019 recipient [2019]
I Can Fly new radio work for WDR3 [2019]
Hallwalls Artist in Residence Project (HARP) artist [2019-2020]
Sound and Music New Voices award recipient [2018-2020]
New live AV performance “The Mirror” ACE Grants for the Arts [2018-2019]
8 speaker / 10 screen audiovisual installation “Gone, Gone Beyond” with Recombinant Media Labs and Cinechamber [2016++]
Video editing/production for The The Comeback Special [Spring 2018]
Can’t Stop What’s Coming video for THE THE [2017]
Curation of radio station and artist residency (with John Kilduff) Optimized! on WFMU funded by National Endowment for the Arts [June 2016]
No One Is An Island radio commission for WDR to be broadcast 9 April 2016 on WDR 3 [Summer 2015-Winter 2015]
Curation of films for Concert of Collage, Watershed, Bristol [September 2015]
Nothing Can Turn Into A Void, editing a feature length doc film by Carl Abrahamsson about Vicki Bennett/People Like Us [Spring 2015]
Arts Council England award creating a new live AV performance Citation City and new short films with artist soundtracks pdf [Spring 2014-Spring 2015]
Book collaboration with Gregor Weichbrodt The Fundamental Questions [Summer 2014]
Those Who Do Not T Shirt Commission [Summer 2014]
Printed in a light blue and white on an electric blue T-shirt with The Wire logo and Vicki Bennett Those Who Do Not printed in light blue on the back of the neck. Limited edition of 100 shirts.
Solo gallery show Shutter at Leeds College of Art pdf [Winter-Spring 2014]
Touring award from Sound and Music for Notations [Autumn/Winter 2013]
Two short animation films for Animate Projects/Channel 4 television, UK as part of their Random Acts Series [March 2013-July 2013] broadcast on national television in Autumn 2013 pdf
Creation of online film with 7 artist soundtracks Gesture Piece, commissioned by Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema pdf [Spring/Summer 2013]
Creating a new live AV performance Consequences (One Things Leads To Another, commissioned by Arts Council England [August 2012-January 2013], supported by transmediale [January 2013]
Music for live performance piece Lost and Found by Anne Juren [Summer 2012]
Archiving Radio Boredcast on WFMU, commissioned by AV Festival wfmu.org/playlists/ZZ [May-June 2012]
Curating an online-radio station Radio Boredcast for AV Festival 12pdf [Sept 2011-March 2012]
Sound and Music commission to make AVlive performance Horror Collage for The Sound Of Fear (later changed to The Magical Misery Tour Southbank Centre, London [September 2011]
The Doors of Perspection at Vitrine Gallery London [July/August 2011]
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival commission to create a new live AV performance The Keystone Cut Ups with Ergo Phizmiz [2010]
Curation of Nothing is New, Everything Is Permitted. as part of AV Festival 10 at the Star and Shadow, Newcastle [2010]
Edinburgh Printmakers commission to create audio and artwork for a picture disc LP “This Is Light Music”, as part of their group exhibition “Prints of Darkness” to be shown at Edinburgh Printmakers in Summer 2010 then touring venues [2010]
Grants For The Arts commission to create new AV performance Genre Collage [2008-2009]
Great North Run Moving Image Commission 2009 – The Great North Run Cultural Programme – to create a film using the archives of the Great North Run, Parade pdf [July 2008-October 2009]
Grants For The Arts commission to release Rhapsody In Glue with Ergo Phizmiz on bleep.com – an album created with audio collage sourced from the podcast Codpaste (May 2008)
Retrospective solo exhibition of People Like Us AV work, entitled We Edit Life at alt.gallery Newcastle curated by Rebecca Shatwell pdf [May 2008]
Curation of CD Smiling Through My Teeth – Sonic Arts Network [May 2008]
Forma/AV Festival commission Breaking Waves to make Bluetooth audio compositions for mobile phone [January 2008]
Lecturing Music and Other Media at Goldsmiths [2006-2008]
Wandsworth Film Awards commission to make short digital film Skew Gardens, exploring the boundaries of urban land use – [September 2007]
Lovebytes commission in association with Millennium Galleries, Sheffield to make three screen AV film Work, Rest & Play [June 2007]
Grants For The Arts commission to make podcast series Codpaste on WFMU, where People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz explore the working process of creating music from scratch [September 2007]
Radio session for BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It [February 2007]
Artist Residency at BBC Creative Archive with “access all areas” to work with their archive – Arts Council England (Interdisciplinary Arts) with BBC, White City – [March 2006]
Grants For The Arts commission to create 10″ record to be given away for free in selected international record stores Honeysuckle Boulevard [August 2006]
PRS Foundation award to create a new live performance (with artist Ergo Phizmiz) using dansette players and self-pressed vinyl compositions Boots! [June 2006]
Sonic Arts Network / Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studio (EMS) commission working with Daphne Oram’s sound archive [Summer 2005]
Grants for the Arts commission to create new live AV performance – [April 2005]
LUX commission to make digital short film sourcing the LUX archive collection Resemblage [October 2004]
Residency at FACT to make radio play Molaradio in collaboration with artist Felix Kubin and Croxteth school children [January 2004]
Sonic Arts Network commission to make short film and subsequent DVD release – Story Without End [June 2004]
Live performance with Wobbly for radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It, London Spitz [May 2004]
BBC Radio 1 session for John Peel [January 2003]
Future Physical commission to make digital short film The Remote Controller [June 2002]
Baby Zizanie (JG Thirlwell and Jim Coleman) live video for BZ performed at David Bowie’s Meltdown at QEH, London (June 2002)
Lovebytes commission to make short film We Edit Life [December 2002]
Curated line up for Humour in Music event, Ether Festival at Purcell Room, London [May 2002]
Year of the Artist Residency, Lighthouse, Brighton with Brighton & Hove Music Library, teaching sound collage [June 2001]
Year of the Artist Residency, Hull Time Based Arts, making AV collage – [January-April 2001]
Live session and BBC Radio 3 broadcast for Mixing It, Dingwalls [March 2001]
Work & Leisure International commission to make new AV live performance – [September 1999]
Ars Electronica – The Sound of Music live collaboration with Negativland and Barbed [Summer 1998]
Various radio commissions for De Avonden on VPRO, The Netherlands [early 1990s]

June 5, 2009November 20, 2020

People Like Us “Story Without End” DVD

Released Autumn 2005
4 Short Films by People Like Us
Design by Joerg Hartmannsgruber & People Like Us

Buy on our bandcamp page

Region Free

Contains:
We Edit Life
The Remote Controller
Resemblage
Story Without End

June 30, 2008May 23, 2017

Daphne Oram

In January 2005, Sonic Arts Network, the leading UK body for electronic music and sound art, was asked by Daphne’s descendants to care for her collected papers, recordings and other items. It was with the benefit of experimental electronic music practice in mind that Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studio (EMS) collaborated with the Sonic Arts Network (SAN) to bring this collection into the academic community where it could be properly studied and developed. To this end, a grant was awarded to Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to catalogue the collection, digitise the audio tapes and initiate related research.
In June 2008 People Like Us were invited into the archives of electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram, to rework them into new compositions, to be presented as part of a day-long symposium at London’s Southbank. Here are the results.
01. Daphne Speaks
02. Daphne Inuit Song
03. Daphne Bird In A Teacup
04. Daphne Everybody’s Calling
05. Daphne Reggae Lady
06. Daphne Waltz
Mirrored here:

And on UbuWeb

Sonic Arts Network/Oramics at the Southbank left website
Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths website
Daphne Oram website
Thanks to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog and UbuWeb

Continue reading “Daphne Oram”

May 20, 2008November 28, 2019

Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery

Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery
alt.gallery (entry via alt.vinyl) 61/62 Thornton Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4AW.
http://www.altgallery.org/
16 May-12 July 2008

alt.gallery is pleased to announce the first retrospective exhibition of work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett).
ARTIST INFO
For the past seventeen years British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. The exhibition will focus on the concept of collage, showing an edited selection of her work, including twenty album releases, numerous singles and remixes, live sets, seven films and over a hundred and fifty radio shows. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Center and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘Do or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
MEMORY STICKS

Every week during the exhibition a different collection of special downloads from the People Like Us archive will be available from the gallery, bring your memory stick along for a free take away!
ESSAY BY DR DREW DANIEL
A specially commissioned essay by Dr. Drew Daniel of Matmos accompanies the exhibition. Download pdf here. Drew’s essay can also be linked to here

Download a larger version of this flyer here
Download the poster (featured top right) here
The exhibition also included a framed essay by Rick Prelinger on The Virtues of Preexisting Material. Here is an excerpt:
On the Virtues of Preexisting Material
© Rick Prelinger 2007
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License
1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement
Download a pdf of the full text here, or link to the essay here.

The exhibition will also launch a new CD curated by Vicki Bennett for Sonic Arts Network called ‘Smiling Through My Teeth’, a compilation of humorous music and sound art.

SPECIAL EVENTS
People Like Us Special on WFMU
Thursday 15 May, 11pm-midnight (UK time) www.wfmu.org/playlists/ER – To celebrate the exhibition opening Ergo Phizmiz hosts a People Like Us Special on his show ‘Phuj Phactory’ on WFMU, both on terrestrial radio and live internet stream.
People Like Us Talk and Screening
Friday 16 May, 7:30pm
Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Newcastle
Vicki Bennett presents a selection of films by People Like Us.
The Late Shows: Smiling Through My Teeth CD Launch
Saturday 17 May, 7pm-11pm
alt.gallery
www.altgallery.org

The Late Shows form part of NewcastleGateshead’s world-class festivals and events programme. www.thelateshows.org.uk

Many thanks to Rebecca Shatwell for inviting us to do this retrospective, it was great fun to work together. Rebecca is now director of AV Festival.

Continue reading “Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery”

June 10, 2005October 1, 2012

Story Without End – DVD

Sonic Arts Network proudly presents a collection of short films by leading British A/V artist People Like Us, a true champion of a particularly English sense of humour. The DVD shows a journey though a multi-layered 20th Century, represented by bright eyed and enthusiastic images of the modern world, concluding with the new Sonic Arts Network commission ‘Story Without End”. Each of these films are available on this page, through UbuWeb, for free download in mp4 format. However, if you would also like the DVD, which has beautiful fold-out packaging, go to our shop. All prices include postage and packing

Story Without End (and three other Films) – review

Music videos for mash-ups are rarely as enjoyable as the audio originals – the pleasure of the sound collage is the simultaneity of clashing spaces, where visual montage makes us choose between one space or another through sequence. The web is awash in video cut-ups today; giddy editors take advantage of bountiful source material in online archives, easy desktop editing software and mostly free distribution through video.google or youtube.com. Surrealist film technique is the stuff of late-night television comedy, as each day’s presidential speeches are cut up and re-arranged for comedic effect.
This explosion of montage only highlights the differences between sound collage and video pastiche. Multi-track recorders, turntables, samplers and sequencers gave us densities no film editor could dream of. Yet sometimes film collage carries a more obviously political impact – visual juxtapositions seem to jar more directly.

Into this dynamic steps the singular art of PEOPLE LIKE US. At the controls is artist Vicki Bennett, a masterful and prolific sound-collagist whose works in video have been recently released by the Sonic Arts Network as a DVD. Where traditional montage makes us choose between one cut or another, Bennett’s meticulous work relies on compositing, masks, and mattes to create a visual simultaneity every bit as dense as what we hear in her music.

Through four works, completed between 2002 and 2005, Bennett has extracted various subjects from their backgrounds, and backgrounds from their contexts. Recombined, these artifacts occasionally grow synchronous with sound, but always stand out in contrast to each other. As in some of the more jarring mash-ups one might encounter on Bennett’s radio shows for WFMU, the seams are far from hidden. A boy sets a toy house down upon a giant circuit board – later we see him again laying out his little town on a pumpkin patch.

Opacities and edges blur to give way to various cohabiting characters – a man peers into a screen to reveal another composited world, even as he’s oblivious to the third one above him, or the beetles crawling over the screen on yet a fourth layer. Narrators stand above it all, promising all sorts of things to come. Bennett introduces each new element as she would a new loop in her sonic compositions, and lets us hold it all in our head for a moment (or sometimes far longer – she loves repetition) before moving on to something else. It’s a happy marriage of pastiche in sound and video that helps demonstrate the musicality of vision – the work is more Vertov than Eisenstein.

All of this makes STORY WITHOUT END a welcome and rare addition to the lively world of the cut-up. Bennett’s films offer much more than this, however. After all, as the narrator of THE REMOTE CONTROLLER tells us, “mixing is so simple, a child could do it.”
Directing Bennett’s deft and patient hand at the mouse is a very specific sort of curiosity, and a particular approach to human creation and action. These films are the result of countless hours of sifting through the archives of various digital and physical collections. Specifically named in the credits are the collections of Rick Prelinger at The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), Skip Elsheimer’s avgeeks.com, and London’s Lux collection of avant-garde film. Except for some footage of Bennett’s own screen desktop in WE EDIT LIFE, none of Bennett’s source material appears to be self-generated. She even borrows from herself, recycling audio or video from old works in new.

The result is a very specific kind of collection. Though individual elements within a frame are composited to remain estranged from one another, the ingredients add up to a whole that’s from a particular palette, a specific time and place. In all four of these works, we see and hear hopeful proponents of techno-marvels from modernity’s golden age. Men and women hunch over vintage screens and typewriters, monitoring, tweaking and enjoying newfound power through perfect analog connections. Telephone operators, orchestra conductors, audio engineers, and city planners listen to the spaces on the other side of an edit, command our attention, or carry out plans via remote operation.

We see an artist and an engineer negotiate a new collaboration; we get transferred by a series of attractive switchboard operators from Chicago to Wabash. Maps and radar, puppet strings and monitors mediate the relations between distant actors. Throughout it all, Bennett plays an equally magical role, creating new seamless spaces through edits, as her subjects create spaces through telepresent connections. These hopeful operators and technicians are people like us, twiddling knobs at a remote, if enamored, distance. By revealing her own hand, Bennett identifies herself with the films’ optimistic subjects, who according to their narrators “merely push a button and let something else do the work.” Another narrator adds, “the result is breathtaking beauty, and lasting good taste.”

Like Craig Baldwin in SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM, Bennett tells a story of hope about technology, using the artifacts of a more hopeful age. Her films marry medium to message to reveal the folly of such hope, yet without resorting to irony. Refreshingly gentle and humble, the work relies on humor, awkwardness, and empathy to produce skepticism without cynicism. If through her reliance on found materials Bennett lacks the faith of scientist-magicians who create something from nothing, she shares their joy at seeing pushbuttons produce results.

In the tradition of modernist reflexivity, Bennett relies on the stutter, the scratch or pause to call attention to her own hand. Importantly though, she reminds us that stutters and burps are also human, and funny. Laughter is likely to be one’s first and lasting reaction to Bennett’s work in sound and video – so much so that perhaps this act of analysis might seem absurd. Close examination of the works on STORY WITHOUT END yield rich results, however, and make me grateful for Bennett’s generous and labored marriage of humor and criticism.

Kevin Hamilton
February 13, 2006
http://www.kevinhamilton.org

April 15, 2005October 1, 2012

Story Without End – short film

Made using footage from the Prelinger Archives and A/V Geeks, this film explores how technology enables us to communicate faster. Despite advances in communication technology the film shows that the story of progress will never end; and that it leads to both connection and disconnection. The narrative is from a public domain film of the same name made in 1950 about the development of microwave radio transmission and the transistor.

Download at UbuWeb
story without end

September 10, 2004April 7, 2018

A Call For Silence curated by Nicolas Collins

Curated by Nicolas Collins – 2004
Design by Joerg Hartmannsgruber (white-card)

acallforsilence

As in the old Roué’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are the three best things in life,” sometimes the most important moments of our lives lie in an unspoken ellipse. The same is true of some of our most beautiful sounds.

On this CD 34 artists provide personal views into that sonic ellipse, suggestions for listening to that which might otherwise pass you by: count-offs, groove grit, tape hiss, breaths, rests, CD glitch, guitar hum, audience anticipation, reverb tails, room tones, minutes of silence, the calm before a storm.