John Wynne [sound artist]                                                                               

 

 

 

 

 

John Wynne has a PhD in Sound Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work, which is often research-based, is made for museums, galleries and public spaces, as well as for radio.

TRANSPLANT

John was artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex, one of the world's leading facilities for heart and lung transplantation, where he worked closely with photographer Tim Wainwright. The Transplant project has various outcomes, including a video with surround sound shown at TATE Britain, an installation in Europe's oldest surviving operating theatre and a half-hour piece commissioned by BBC Radio 3. The culmination of the project will be a 24-channel photographic sound installation which opens at the Nunnery Gallery in London on September 5, 2008. The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a hardcover book, Transplant, which includes a DVD by Wainwright and Wynne and features responses to the project by David Toop, Charles Darwent (The Independent on Sunday), and others.

The Transplant project is featured in a new book, Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, edited by Angus Carlyle.

UNWANTED SPEAKERS

230 Unwanted Speakers (Walnut Grained Vinyl Veneered Particleboard Construction) was commissioned by Hull Art Lab in the UK. This piece developed from Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen (Falling tone for 207 speakers) at 2Yk Galerie, Berlin, which made use of 207 discarded (but working) hi-fi speakers collected by the artist and "sounded like Heaven... and Hell".

CLICK LANGUAGES

A research and recording trip to the Kalahari Desert provided materials for Hearing Voices, a body of work based on highly endangered 'click languages' spoken by the indigenous Khoi and San inhabitants of the region. Hearing Voices is an award-winning half-hour composed documentary commissioned by BBC Radio 3, “a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise” (Resonance Magazine).  An 8-channel photographic sound installation, also entitled Hearing Voices, has shown in Botswana, Namibia and London. The catalogue for this exhibition is an interactive CD-ROM with a Foreword by David Toop and featuring John's field recordings made with linguist Dr Andy Chebanne.  The disc is used by the Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa to assist in the struggle for rights and recognition of their languages and cultures. An article about John's work with his recordings from Africa was published in the book Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered and his conference presentation for Fieldworks:  Dialogues between art and anthropology can be viewed at the Tate Modern website. His article When is a Click not a Glitch? was commissioned for Sound Art, and Language Ecology and Photographic Sound in the McWorld was published in the journal Organised Sound.

John worked with linguist Tyler Peterson and visual artist Denise Hawrysio to record speakers of Gitxsan, an endangered indigenous language in northern British Columbia, Canada. This fieldwork, funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, will provide materials for an installation which will show at 'Ksan Gallery in northern British Columbia and at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in 2009.

He is also engaged in a series of 'sonic portraits':  the first of these was James Kamotho Kimani, which was selected by the International Society for Contemporary Music in Copenhagen, released on CD by Unknown Public and broadcast in Berlin, London, Toronto and San Francisco. The second piece, Upcountry, premiered in the Purcell Room in London and at the AGON Festival in Milan and has been widely broadcast, including on Radiotopia Kunstradio as part of Ars Electronica in Vienna.

AUDITORY WARNINGS

John designs alarm sounds, often for multi-channel installations in public spaces. He has just published an article entitled Auditory Warnings and the Assault on Silence in Issue 6 of the London Consortium's online journal, Static.

Do(n't) was originally an interactive installation for the European Group for Organisational Studies in Barcelona in 2002 and subsequently became a set of 3 pieces designed for the online journal Ephemera. Two of these pieces played at half-hour intervals on the BBC's Big Screen in Victoria Square in Hull in July 2005, but the BBC refused to allow the screening of the third piece, Orange Alert. John's first work with electronic alarms and reminders was for the SOUND/Gallery in Copenhagen's Town Hall Square, using 25 speakers hidden under the paving stones:  The Sound of Sirens was banned by the city council, which claimed that some members of the public were "frightened and confused".  The piece was later released by Underwood Audio, curated in a concert at the Goethe Institute in London and broadcast in London, Berlin and Toronto.

Cry Wolf involved an arrangement of auditory warnings using 25 computer-controlled speakers installed in a vertical grid against the 4-storey central wall of Kiasma, Helsinki's Museum of Contemporary Art.  John designed tiny interactive audio devices for the gallery installation Grasping and Clinging in collaboration with visual artist Denise Hawrysio in Bangkok, Thailand.  Response Time, a large-scale, site-specific octaphonic installation in the urban park at Toronto's Metro Hall was described in one review as "an ambient, ghost-like presence". 

 

OTHER WORK

Push comes to Shove is a video/sound installation in collaboration with Denise Hawrysio which premiered at Fieldgate Gallery in London in December 2007 during the exhibition Analogue and Digital, curated by Chris Meigh-Andrews.

Hearing Loss, an installation made using the 3 pairs of hearing aids his father left behind when he died in 2006, showed at Signal and Noise in Vancouver. An article about this piece appears in the current issue of eContact! and in the December 2007 issue of Leonardo Music Journal.

Feeding the Habit of Energy is a podcast/soundwalk recently commissioned by RADAR, a meditation on the sonic environment of the huge Brush generator factory which sprawls next to Loughborough train station. This piece has been played on Framework (Resonance FM, London) and on hr2 in Germany.

Sound CAD, a 16.1 channel site-specific installation described by Chloe Vaitsu as "a masterful experiment in controlled sound manipulation, intense and at times looming", was John's response to an experimental collaborative residency at E:vent Gallery as part of Node London. A new, site-specific version of this work will be installed at the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2009.

Work for film and TV includes soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open, the Rotterdam Film Festival and the European Media Art Festival, as well as for the documentary The Trial of Freedom, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK and on CTV in Canada.

Wynne has been visiting artist on four occasions in the Tila/Aika (Time/Space) department of the Helsinki Academy of Fine Art.  For 3 years he had his own programme on ResonanceFM in London called Upcountry, in which he "invited Tammy Wynette to have tea with Pierre Henry - in a thunderstorm" (Ed Baxter). He is a Senior Lecturer in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts London, and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice).