Tina Pearson PROJECTS (selected)

 

Root, Blood, Fractal, Breath was made with the Contact ensemble for performance at the Allen Gardens Conservatory in Toronto in July 2017 and took its form and content from the context (migration, transplanted and invasive species), and the specific flora housed in the gardens as well as the immigrant ancestries of the musicians. The score comprises text instruction, text imagery, aural cues from the setting, and graphic imagery. Made with the assistance of the SOCAN Foundation.

Weighting A 3-movement work for live dance and music with 2-screen video. Collaboration with choreographer Lori Hamar, for dancer, amplified flute, recorded soundtrack, amplified wood. Music commissioned through the Canada Council for the Arts. Premiered August 17, 2017 at UCC, Victoria, BC.

Absorb Audio visual installation of 5 scores: Tree Sing (video with audio, dancer and vocalist), Carried on Your Winds and Flowing on Your Tongues (audio, breath and voice from solicited performances); Disturbances on Water (silent video) and Absorbed (an installation in the networked 3D platform Second Life). Commissioned by MediaNet through the BC Arts Council. October 7-15, 2016, Flux Gallery, Victoria, BC.

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Songs For Glass Island A full-length performance project situated in the world of glass – its sounds, textures, and contexts – and referencing Robert Smithson’s unrealized land art work, Island of Broken Glass. With Paul Walde, George Tzanetakis and USA/Norway artist Camille Norment. April 2016 Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

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Biospheric Art Practice (ongoing) Regular gathering of music, dance, video and other artists in changing locations to find listening and sensing responses in the moment to specific biospheric elements in Greater Victoria.

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Music For Natural History (2016) Part tragic love song for the wilderness, part experimental sound art, Music for Natural History is a live performance that gives voice to the taxidermied birds and mammals, human-made trees and painted landscapes of the exhibitions in the Natural History Gallery of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. Composed by Tina Pearson and Paul Walde, produced by LaSaM Music.

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Breathing With PwRHm Variations and developments of the 2008 virtual reality composition PwRHm, for live networked performers playing unique spectral instruments; featuring virtual helicopters (performed by concept artist Leif Inge), a continuous virtual animation sculpture by code artist Gazira Babelli and giant Tesla towers. Network Music Festival, Birmingham UK 2015; Vektor Game and Art Convergence Festival, Toronto 2014; Deep Listening Art and Science Conference, EMPAC, Troy New York 2013, MediaNet Flux Gallery, Victoria, 2010.

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 This is For  You  (2014, 2015) A location-specific installation that reimagines a presentation space as a three- dimensional score for personal listening within an activated acoustic space. 2014 at Open Space Victoria, BC, Audiospace 10: Not All There; August 2015 and August / September 2016 at ohrenhoch Gallery, Berlin, Germany (Archive at ohrenhoch)

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A Year of 4’33” November 2012 through December 1, 2013; weekly unnanounced performances of John Cage’s 4’33” in outdoor locations, documented with audio recordings, photographs and journal entries. Victoria and Vancouver, BC; Toronto, Brampton and Meaford, Ontario; Troy, Kingston and New York, NY.

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Measure for a Mayfly 2013  workshop and performance at Electric Eclectics Festival, Funny Farm, Meaford, Ontario, previously at PKOLS Mountain, Victoria, BC, and locations in Southern Ontario. Using listening exercises and relational games Measure for a Mayfly gives participants a glimpse into a world in times past when humans also embodied a perpetually acute, alive and nuanced awareness of sound to survive and to thrive.

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Voicing the Widow Jane Mine 2013, with Viv Corringham and Lisa B Kelly, Rosendale, New York. Part of a residency at the Deep Listening Institute. Experiments with vocalizing in this abandoned dolomite mine near the Hudson River in upstate New York, including new vocal scanning composition (listen here.) Performance in the Widow Jane Mine the evening of July 23, 2013.    

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Breathe Listen Absorb, a witness role by Tina Pearson, included in a button blanket dance, a river and a courthouse 2012, a large scale multidisciplinary project directed by Peter Morin, centring voices of Indigenous youth and elders within a audiovisual environment at the historic courthouse in Victoria, BC.

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Techno Dream and Nightmare Choir 2012, with Black Bag Media Collective, St John’s Newfoundland. Residency. A participatory Community Art intervention challenging beliefs about networked technology and its impact on everything. A set of hybrid songs using a range of technologies – from human voices, rocks, sticks and acoustic instruments, to electronic instruments, digital instruments and virtual instruments in networked platforms. LSPU Hall Second Space Friday July 20th 2012.

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In This Far Now (A Cyber Song of Longing) 2012, with Liz Solo and Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. Mixed reality collaboration bringing field recordings from the lands of the performers interacting with custom virtual instruments  and live spoken word and song in a visually rich virtual environment where avatar gestures interact with onsite human movement. Realized through global telematic connections from Europe to North America via the 3-D online environment Second Life. Premiere July 14, 2012 at Sound Symposium in St John’s Newfoundland.

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Music for Natural History 2012, with Paul Walde (created for and premiered at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria BC April 28, 2012). Two audio installation pieces (Prelude in Ice for the Mammoth Gallery and Delta Sequence for the Delta Shoreline Gallery) and two performance installations with live musicians (Elk Concerto in Forest Gallery and Shoreline Operetta in Seashore Gallery). Audio

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Rotating Brains – Beating Heart 2009 – 2011, with Stelarc, Pauline Oliveros, Avatar Orchestra Mataverse. Global telematic performance with sounds and images of brainwaves, circulation systems, fetal heartbeats, breathing … combined with drones, sine tones and machines … played in real time through performer avatars. Premiered 2010 Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts, Brunel, UK (video); performed at NAISA Sound Play Festival, OCAD University, Toronto.

 

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 Victoria Complaints Choir 2010 Three issues-based songs (Cars and Bikes, Welcome to Canada, Homeless) created with local community members and musicians, performed on city streets, the BC Legislature and at the Open Space Voice++ Festival. (A project with Open Space, Victoria, BC).

 

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Soundwalks / Sounding Walks 1983-1988; 1995-1999; 2008-present. A series of practices and pieces developed from soudwalks in wilderness and urban environments. Including Measure for a mayfly, I Hear Here, and other works for solo and/or group with or without audience.

 

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And Beethoven Heard Nothing 2009 – 2010, with Dylan Robinson and LaSaM Music. An intimate audio-visual tale intertwining the listener’s personal experience of hearing with visual light play and sonic re-imaginings of Beethoven’s music filtered through the realities of hearing loss and tinnitus. Premiered May, 2010, Victoria BC. Audio

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 Humming Pera (2007 – present) Telepathic Listening in Virtual Space. Explorations of human-avatar telepathy in performance within the 3-D online virtual reality environment Second Life.

 

 

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Quantal Strife Sound 2007-2008, A set of six pieces (One, Vantage, Plateau, Of a Refrain, Many Trains) inspired by the visual arts installation Quantal Strife at Open Space, with Cathy Fern Lewis and Chris Reiche. An investigation of possibilities in conceptual intimacy between visual and sonic art intention and realization. Programmed with the Victoria Symphony New Currents Festival January 28, 2008, Victoria BC.

 

OLDER PROJECTS

 

Flight Through A Hole in the Wind, research and development of extended flute / voice / movement practices for performance (1995-1996)

Listening and the Sounding Body (research project with solo simultaneous sound and movement performance based on a link of contact improvisation and sonic meditation practice, Canada Council Explorations, 1988-1989)

Cree Drum – From earth to sound (research project on site on traditional territory of the Saulteaux at Moberly Lake BC. Making a Cree Drum with [Sautleaux elder] Albert Davis, including interviews and field recordings. Published in Musicworks, 1988. See Making a Cree Drum )

moon of the breaking up of the ice (solo sound-movement performances – tours with extended flute, voice, field recording and projection 1986-1996)

Counterbomb Renga by Udo Kasemets. (1984)

Oxygen Tonic breath-guided music Co-directors David Mott and Tina Pearson with New Music Co-operative (Toronto, 1982-83)

Colliding – ideas and actions in sound and movement with Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise, Paula Ravitz and Denise Fujiwara choreographers and New Music Co-operative (Toronto, 1981-82)