INIRE blend traditional composing with reproducing, improvisation, recording and mastering. Their music is sonic exploration situated somewhere between sound art, field recording, noise and references to contemporary music. Analogue modular systems play an important role in INIRE’s compositions – their use emphasizes the blurred line between new and old media.
Pawlik and Dancewicz
Krzysztof Pawlik is a composer, a video artist and a creator of multimedia presentations, audiovisual scenic realizations and experimental radio programmes. He also creates theatre music and videos used in plays. In theatre, he has collaborated with Lech Raczak, Krzysztof Kopka, Jacek Głomb and Paweł Kamza, amongst others. Pawlik’s solo compositions and installations have been presented at festivals in Poland and Europe (for instance at the Audio Art Festival in Kraków, the WRO Media Art Biennale in Wrocław, Generative Design Lab in Rome, and the Wrocław Industrial Art Festival) and in the framework of individual artistic events organized in Poland and abroad.
Małgorzata Dancewicz is a curator of performative projects who writes texts and scripts for performances and also conducts research. She learnt to sing under Olga Szwajger, amongst others. Dancewicz’s creative interests revolve around the links between performance art and new technologies and the influence of the audiovisual on the development of performative arts. She has presented her scientific and scenic projects at the Wrocław Industrial Festival, the Gender Music Voice conference which was held at the Vinniese Institut für Musikwissenschaft and at many other events.
Hermetism and Alchemy
The visual sphere of their first performance, Hermetic Garden (2001), was inspired by a series of hermetic drawings by Daniel Stolcius. A continuation of the group’s alchemic fascination was the performance Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (2004) based on CG Jung’s text of the same name, which interpreted the psychology of alchemy using the language of new media. The series of audiovisual realizations referring to hermetism was completed by Atalanta Fugiens (2009) which was based on an emblematic book by the alchemist and composer Michael Maier, the court alchemist of Rudolf II. Maier’s Atalanta includes a collection of 50 drawings which contain symbolic images, text and the score of a fugue or canon. That is why this book is considered one of the first multimedia works in art history. The duo’s project is an experiment situated somewhere between sound, image and word, which draws directly on the archaeology of multimedia art. Words and forms word usage play an important part in this project.
The spoken text and the vocal lines are constantly modified here through the use of sound processors that enrich the sound with delays, cuts, loops, vocal pitch-shifting and numerous vertical duplications and repetitions of the melodic lines. The processing of the vocal lines is a way to give a dramatic quality to the melodic recitations and chants. The procedure of changing a female voice into a male one is frequently used and could be considered characteristic of feminist art, but actually serves to emphasize a reflection drawn from the fascination with alchemy. This reflection considers transgression, boundaries and the crossing of boundaries, separating and combining opposites such as acoustic – electronic, digital – analogue, illustrative – abstract, female – male, referring to the past – to the future and so forth.
Yourcenar, Blake and Field Recordings
INIRE’s activity can be described as a kind of audiovisual archaeology referring to the widely discussed issue of documentation in performance. The collection of experiences and fascinations and turning them into an audiovisual account of a journey – such a character marks the project Traces (2007), which was inspired by William Blake’s and Marguerite Yourcenar’s texts referring to the myth of the journey into one’s consciousness and fears. Photographs from trips to such large cities as New York and Shanghai and to such desolate places as the islands of Magerøy and Vesterålen served as material for the video part of this project. In this way the landscapes of the illuminated cities were combined with the cold of the waters of the northern seas. Field-recorded materials were used here as a base for structuring sounds and images. However, these materials have nothing to do with field recordings conveying the atmospheres of places.
The audiovisual performance Shipwreck Score, a project inseparably linked to space, is kind of a deconstruction of found sounds. The recordings that served as an audio and visual base were made during the group’s stay in Iceland. The duo’s idea was inspired by the specific atmosphere of the Djúpalónssandur bay, where an English fishing ship sank in 1948. At that time sixty boats worked in this bay. Today all that remains is what’s left of the wreck that was cast ashore by the sea. The remains of the shipwreck organize the empty space abandoned by men, a territory in which there is no division between nature and culture. The line between nature and culture ceases to exist because no one is determining this line. Fragments of the metal parts of the ship which were cast ashore were used in the recording of sounds and images. Because of this the duo’s field recordings from the Djúpalónssandur bay have the feel of industrial music.
The audio and visual materials recorded at the Icelandic bay were deconstructed by analogue modular systems in both the aural and visual spheres. Certain prefabricated images and sounds created by the duo in the framework of the Shipwreck Score project later served as a basis for on-stage improvisation. Shipwreck Score is made complete by Icelandic songs and lullabies – from their completely natural, live forms, to alterations making it impossible to qualify these pieces of music as vocal compositions.
INIRE: Małgorzata Dancewicz and Krzysztof Pawlik, photo courtesy of the artists The project Subsensorial Transmission initiated in 2013 has the character of an experiment situated between science, art and subjective aesthetic experience. This project consists in using analogue modular synthesis of an audio and video signal obtained by means of an electroencephalograph. The EEG data collected by the device is sent to modular systems and transformed live. This creates two kinds of feedback: an objective neuro-feedback that is provided to a BCI system and a subjective feedback loop, in which the reaction of the artist to his or her improvisation and the audience’s reception are changed into a form of expression and vice versa.
Scenic Realizations:
- 2013 Subsensorial Transmission
- 2013 Mémoire obsolète
- 2012 Shipwreck Score
- 2011 re-membering re-called
- 2011 Dante's Songs 2.011
- 2010 chopintimacy
- 2010 Dante's Songs
- 2009 Atalanta Fugiens
- 2007 Traces
- 2004 Septem Sermones ad Mortuos
- 2001 Hermetic Garden
Releases:
- 2007, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, DVD
- 2008, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, DVD, limited edition
- 2010, Chopintimacy, DVD
- 2011, Atalanta Fugiens, DVD
Selected Performaces:
- 2014 - DRHA2014, London, UK
- 2014 - Spaziomusica Festival, Cagliari, Italy
- 2014 – Opole Contemporary Art Gallery, Opole, Poland
- 2014 - BWA Art Gallery, Olsztyn, Poland
- 2014 - BWA, Zielona Góra, Poland
- 2013 - Generative Art, Milan, Italy
- 2013 - ArtFest, Tarnów, Poland
- 2013 - Audio Art Festival, Kraków, Poland
- 2013 – Arsenał Municipal Gallery, Poznań, Poland
- 2013 - Brick-5, Vienna, Austria
- 2013 - Kinetica Art Fair, London, UK
- 2013 – Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland
- 2012 - Generative ArtLab, Lucca, Italy
- 2012 - Intermediale Festival, Legnica, Poland
- 2012 - Nordic House, Reykjavík, Iceland
- 2011 - Generative Art Conference, Rome, Italy
- 2011 - Teatro di Sacco, Perugia, Italy
- 2011 - Ulisse Barnum, Florence, Italy
- 2011 - Intermediale Festival, Legnica, Poland
- 2011 - Chopin Museum, Warsaw, Poland
- 2010 - Cultural Center, Zielona Góra, Poland
- 2010 - Modjeska Theatre, Legnica, Poland
- 2010 - Videoformes Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, France
- 2009 - Art Of Livin Festival, KC Zahrada, Prague, the Czech Republic
- 2009 - Art Of Livin Festival, Modjeska Theatre, Legnica, Poland
- 2009 - Art Of Livin Festival, Tuzrakter Theatre, Budapest, Hungary
- 2009 - Art Of Livin Festival, Klub za Zrkadlom, Bratislava, Slovakia
- 2004 - Intermediale Festival, Legnica, Poland
The duo’s website: http://www.inire.net/
Sources: materials courtesy of the band, edited by FL
Transl. MK
