Infinite Times Zero is a composition that addresses sound as a tangible and intangible manifestation, with its own temporality, space, and reality, which transcend human perception and location.
In it, Atoui creates sound that moves uninterrupted from one city to another taking different shapes and manifestations over very long time durations.
 
Made entirely of digital and abstract sound transcending socio-cultural references, and provided with special software, this work is composed of hundreds of digital signals and tone generators offering infinite possibilities of composition and improvisation, and synthesizing complex soundscapes free of any loop effects or repetitiveness. The mutating sound will continue to transform through the intervention of a performer, presence as a multi-channel installation, or transmitted through a simple speaker.
 
Infinite times zero is a radical translation of physical performances and sound installations that prolong each other through the technologies of the internet, annihilating distance and transcending concrete space, borders and geography.
A phase 0 of try-out and experimentation started in April 2011 and is currently taking place until August 2011 as part of the Meeting Points 6 exhibition.
The project will start in September 2011 and will travel to Brussels, Berlin, Athens and Paris in the frames of Meeting Points 6 and La Triennale of Paris.

Curated by Okwui Enwezor
Commissioned by Meeting Points 6
Supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation

Download full project description

Examples of phase 0:

Flash Point 1

Indoor Sound Perfomance @ Beirut Art Center

Start: April the 27th 20011 a 8:53pm

Duration: 29 min 45 s

Space: main exhibition space of Beirut Art Center (6x12m)

End: April the 27th 2011 at 9:23pm

 
 

 
 
 
 

Flash Point 2 / A

Indoor 6-channel Sound Installation @ Makan Art Space

Start: April the 27th 20011 at 9:23pm

Space: house room @ Makan Art
Space (size 5.5x5m)

Duration: 8 days

End: May the 4th 2011 at 6:30pm

 
 

[Show as slideshow]

 
 



 
 

Flash Point 2 / B

Outdoor Sound Performance @ Jordan National Gallery’s Sculpture Park

Start: May the 4th 2011 at 6:30pm

Space: public garden (15x40m)

Duration: 30 minutes

End: May the 4th 2011 at 7:00pm

 
 

 
 
 
 

Flash Point 3

Indoor 1-channel Sound Installation @ Young Arab Theatre Fund office

Start: May the 4th 2011 at 7:00pm

Space: office room

Duration: 4/5 months

End: to be determined

There is no word in English that accurately translates the word
Tarab from Arabic to English, which makes it very diffi cult to defi ne.
Tarab is used in Arab culture to describe the emotional effect of music,
but it is also associated with a traditional form of art-music. The
word ‘Tarab’ … refers to an older repertoire, which is rooted in the pre
World War 1 musical practice of Egypt and the East- Mediterra- nean
Arab world and is directly associated with emotional evocation.
Tarab sessions are known to last hours where both enchantment and
ecstasy play an important rule within the Tarab performance. Tarab
is a musically induced state of Ecstasy, an enchantment roused by of
music, whereas Spanish Duende depicts the state the musician may
experience during his performance – it is called in Arabic Saltana-,
Tarab describes the enchantment of the audience.
The starting point of this project is the private music collection of
Kamal Kassar who owns the biggest library of Tarab and classical
Arab music in the world.
His collection is constituted of old 78 rpm shellac discs and studio
tapes of music between 1903 and 1950, largely covering the Arab
renaissance period that started early in the nineteenth century and
continued through the 30th of the twentieth century.
This collection contains around 5500 discs and more than 6000 to
6500 hours of tape recordings we fi nd for instance, the fi rst Arab
music discs ever recorded in the Middle East representing the
prolifi c and genuine golden era of the renaissance, as well as Arab
music that is uninfl uenced by western instruments, arrangements
and scales.
The library is now in Lebanon, but a lot of its material was found
in old record shops and old private collections in Cairo Lebanon
and Syria. Some of it was in very bad condition. For the last 2 years
Kamal Kassar has been digitizing and preserving this collection
through the Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research
(AMAR), that he recently founded.
A lot of the material has been digitized and noise reduced, but
original versions with very particular noise grains and signal
distortions are available.
The project for Performa is about revisiting Tarab as musical genre
and form as well as looking at it from a sound & performative
perspectives.

A Performa 2011 commission with the Sharjah Art Foundation
in partnership with Amar Foundation.

Date: to be announced between the 3rd and the 20th of Nov 2011
Download Full Project Presentation

[Show as slideshow]

Below 160 continues Tarek Atoui’s work in sound performance and music composition. His recent performances in the Un-drum series were intense physical performances that articulated music composition, body movement, and software and hardware engineering in personal and original ways as a result of Atoui’s work and experimentation in these fields over the last ten years. While the Un-drum series offered a combination of aural, visual, and physical experiences to the audience, this new work removes the most basic element of a sound performance–sound itself–in order to explore other forms of communication and relationships.

Each human organ has its resonating frequency to which it is responds and vibrates. And the way sound impacts the human body is the same regardless of age and size. In this performance, sound approached as vibrations that travel through air becomes the compositional element of a concrete and universal form of discourse that goes beyond language, music, and audible forms of communication. In fact, this composition addresses more the sense of touch than that of the aural. It is meant to be felt by the body rather than to be heard. This is achieved by using mainly bass and infra bass frequencies. Removing the sonic element of this performance is achieved by reducing the sound spectrum and sound palette to bass frequencies below 160 Hz and using this as compositional material to generate very precise air and space vibrations.

Currently under preparation for Salzburg’s Sommerszene festival
1ere scheduled on the 25th of June at 00:00.

Download Full Project Presentation

[Show as slideshow]

For Un-drum 3/Semantic Scanning Electron Microscope, Atoui has developed an audio library of tens of thousands of microsamples to explore semantics through a system analogous to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Like a SEM, which magnifies things on a fine scale, the tools of Un-drum 3 allow live exploration of long audio tracks at a very small scale. Through a system of pressure sensors that engage the physical strength of the artist’s body, Atoui scans tracks at a high speed to instantly select and edit microsamples based on the Fast Fourier Transform analysis technique. FFT is a complex sound analysis protocol that determines the spectrum of a sound, its constituting frequencies, and their density according to the law of Fourier. Systems of infrared modules respond to Atoui’s movements to select microsamples according to mathematical serial algorithms that create elaborate rhythmical structures of hundreds of microsamples played simultaneously.

Produced by the Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Darat Al Funun (Amman), La Maison Rouge (Paris).
 
Download Full Project Presentation
 

[Show as slideshow]

The Chinese connection looks back at the cultural shift that China went through during the Maoist revolution. At this time, all traditional and modern art forms got radically affected and altered by the new communist ideology that purged music, theatre and arts from traditional and occidental influences, promoting new esthetics aiming to raise a new popular myth.

The sound material is taken from demonstrations and trials of opera, music and art masters judged by the youth of the communist party.
On the cultural level, the Maoist and the Pan-Arabist movements applied the same totalinarist mentality, and even after the fall of the Pan-Arabist ideology, many national and popular movements in the Arab world today follow the same strategies in creating new mythes and sectarian identities.

One of the compositional principals of this piece is creating a struggle between the concrete sounds of trials and of propaganda hails with a sea of very harsh, dense and agitated electronic sounds and rough distorted textures.
It is a constant subversion between compositional elements and their scale in a conflicted way that reflects the condition of these painful and hard times of forced cultural and social change.

Produced by the Shrajah Art Foundation in the frame of the exhibition Disorientation II
 

[Show as slideshow]

Next festival – Bratislava

This work is an intense and physical electronic sound performance.  It draws upon the 3 days of arrest and torture I experienced during the July 2006 war on Lebanon, during which I permanently lost partial hearing in my left ear after receiving a beating to the head.

‘Un-drum / strategies of surviving noise’ draws parallels between attempts to break states of physical and psychological detention and siege and the collapsing of musical performance boundries, laptop art and electronic music.

 
Produced by the Shrajah Biennial 9 – 2009
 

[Show as slideshow]