Steve Heimbecker Songs of Place
© Heimbecker
Presentation of Songs of Place Disc 1
(Halifax, Île de Montréal)
November 30, 2005, 7 pm*
Presentation of Songs of Place Disc 2
(Springwater, Vancouver)
December 1, 2005, 7 pm*
*The doors open at 6 pm
OBORO invites you to the launch of Songs of Place, which consists of a bookwork and two DVDs. The DVDs represent video and surround sound portraits of four places: Halifax N.S., Montréal, QC, Vancouver, BC, and Springwater, SK. In production since 2000, this series was re-mastered for pubication in OBORO’s New Media Lab, while Heimbecker was in residence in 2004. In the bookwork, five contributors were invited to reflect on the “portraits”: Vincent Bonin, Anna Friz, Christof Migone, F. Scott Taylor, and Barry Truax. The artist himself contributes a text, which analyzes his last ten years of research.
“The Songs of Place series is as difficult to categorize as Heimbecker himself. These are works of visual and auditory art that fully engage the senses and sensibilities of the audience. Here Heimbecker operates at the juncture of electro-acoustic composition, soundscape and acoustic ecology, video montage, and sonic sculpture. Over his lengthy career as a sound artist specializing in quad- and octaphonic surround systems, Heimbecker has developed unique framing and editing techniques that enable these intense portraits.”– A. Friz excerpt from the publication Songs of Place
Steve Heimbecker uses strategies that echo the road maps of the places he has recorded. “Communities are grown, albeit within a design structure. Maps of places are like a tree, from the roots, to the trunk, to the leaves. By using layered surround recording techniques, I create intense spatial compositions full of design, chance, and ambience.” – S. Heimbecker
© Heimbecker
Born in Saskatchewan with studies at the Alberta College of Art, Steve Heimbecker is recognized for his innovative role in the development of audio art sculpture, installation and multi-channel sound composition in Canada. Since the late 1980s he has exhibited and performed across Canada and abroad. In 2001 he moved to Montréal, and has since received multiple residencies and arts grant awards, most recently from the Daniel Langlois Foundation, for his research and production in new media and audio. For the last three years Heimbecker has worked on two concurrent bodies of work: “Songs of Place,” a series of experimental audio art Dolby 5.1 DVD projects, and the ambitious 64-channel environmental network data system, “Wind Array Cascade Machine,” and its wind-based telematic installations. Steve Heimbecker lives and works in Montréal.
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