Thursday 26 December
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Another milestone: Agnes is closed to the public as we prepare for Agnes Reimagined. Stay tuned for plans for off-site programming!
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Installation view of From the vibe out: Neven Lochhead.
Vibe Check is a radio art project made in relation to Neven Lochhead’s solo exhibition From the vibe out at Agnes, as well as its attendant learning experiment involving a group of local artists. Over the span of four half-hour, bi-weekly episodes, Lochhead will transpose the compositional tactics and languages of his exhibition’s two-channel video installation to CFRC’s left-right stereo signal. Panning between a blend of synthetic voice, midi-instruments, field recordings and guest interviews, Vibe Check conjures a set of real and imagined polyvocal exchanges as sonic scaffolding for an institute to come.
Listen to the broadcast Wednesdays bi-weekly 21 April–2 June, 4:30–5 pm on CFRC 101.9 fm. After airing, it will be transcribed and archived on Digital Agnes.
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Tap or click on “Transcript” under each track to read or download the full transcript of each audio commentary.
In Episode 1 of Vibe Check, a gently building soundscape introduces listeners to Neven Lochhead’s process of ‘sonic scaffolding’ and its effects. An interview with the artist about his currently closed solo exhibition From the vibe out becomes a base for auditory renovation, as the approaches driving the two-channel video installation gradually adjust to CFRC Radio’s immersive stereo habitat.
Episode 2 of Neven Lochhead’s Vibe Check radio art series delves into the dynamics of an ongoing, informal learning experiment Fabricating Vibe, which Lochhead is constructing with and through the Dark Matter Playgroup: a nomadic mentorship-based program initiated by Agnes supporting adaptive forms of collectivity and artmaking under the conditions of a global pandemic. Lochhead’s contribution as a mentor to the program has been taking shape as a modular, assignment-driven, peer-to-peer learning habitat – a heavily modified remix of an open educational resource (OER) designed by Neil Mulholland at Edinburgh College of Art called Contemporary Art and Open Learning. This poly-vocal episode features an asynchronous exchange with Mulholland as the project’s distal mobiliser, before a cascade of workshop scores transforms the broadcast into an OER itself, landing the listener in the thick of an interwoven and itinerant site of study, featuring activity reports and other sonic artefacts from the Dark Matter Playgroup.
In Episode 3 of his ongoing Vibe Check radio art project, Neven Lochhead presents a mix of an album of songs titled We consent to maintain this feeling in us, written and recorded by the artist over a two-week period in summer 2020 in Tamworth, Ontario. As a series of ‘sonic sketches,’ this exploratory recording project acted as a mobiliser for Lochhead’s solo exhibition at Agnes, From the vibe out, uncovering through its creation various strategies for the video work’s attitude, spatial architecture and modes of address. Here, music-making is presented and taken up as a diagrammatic medium – a malleable and projective tool in which to test out a scalable poetics. The episode also features a promotional interlude and provisional performance scores for the artist’s upcoming closing event, Fieldnotes, to be streamed online on May 29th.
In this fourth and final episode of Neven Lochhead’s Vibe Check radio art series, the artist translates to the airwaves a performance work called Fieldnotes, which was video-streamed live from his studio on Saturday, May 29th, 2021 as a closing gesture for his exhibition From the vibe out. The camera directions and image descriptions that are heard as part of this episode’s audio mix were delivered as a central and integral part of the original performance, where they functioned as a score propelling a collaborative and responsive act of image-making.
Neven Lochhead is an artist and curator working with video, sound, music, performance and installation. His own artistic work draws from traditions of durational moving image and performance practices, the employment and conventions of text-on-screen in video art and cinema, and compositional strategies of minimal music. From 2017–2019, Lochhead developed his exhibition-making practice as curator of Knot Project Space, a venue in Ottawa he established as part of his role as Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre. Through this discursively operated space, Lochhead produced exhibitions and performances while working closely with local, national and international artists, as well as a series of lectures, learning contexts, residency platforms and off-site public art projects. Residencies as an artist include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2015) the Artist Research Laboratory in Como, Italy (2014). He received an MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University in 2016.
