HOTEL AMAZONAS

Font spirits

Stefan Fraunberger understands the character of organs worn by time as premodern synthesizers of a forgotten future. Beyond political and industrial "sound barrier contracts" of standardized modernity the baroque machinery of wooden mechanics and bundled air are context and concept for radically new ways of individual sound-making. "Quellgeister" (font spirits) are located at the boundaries of contemporary cultures’ "sonic archeology", beats in the becoming of time and condition as event horizon and physicalization of invisible forms.

Normally Fraunberger plays at abandoned church organs in Transylvania and calls the resulting series of publications "font spirits". Hotel Amazonas accordingly represents a parallel dimension on the periphery of the K & K ghosts. "Font spirits" beweep no past traditions but dance around the constancy of change.

stefan.fraunberger.at

Key/touch

Who "learns" music knows that the octave is divided into 12 semitones. These 12 steps are corresponding to 12 keys - alternating black and white - on the piano keyboard. But who tries to play for example Arabic music on a perfectly tuned piano, is bound to fail. Because this music is often composed of smaller sound steps as halftones.

Are keys like drawers which are much too small? Are synthesizers the solution? Or is this limitation an advantage? Is the image still right that a composer sits on the piano while working? Why is a keyboard black and white? Why does a grand piano normally got 88 keys and why do some (but not all) accordions have buttons? Why composers prepare keyboard instruments with screws, erasers and tapes? KEYS (TASTEN) of an instrument or palpate (erTASTEN) a sound?

manuela-kerer.bz

Michael Lahner, synthesizer melody maker at Wealth and Ventil, deals in his music with chaos and minimalism. A surreal game between early IDM-Ambient and film music creates synaesthetic moods.

Hotelbar Trans-Alpino

She meant to know the place already. The bar was appearing familiar to her. Or was it the kind of inappropriate type of combination of chairs? In any case something stirred her displeasure increasingly, which she could not get rid of inspite of several alcoholic beverages during the evening.

Although an inabilty to clearly state why, she started to hate the bar which she had entered more and more. The urge to kick the stool of her neighbor grew into a physical need. Dear hotel guests and dear visitors, don’t forget to check out our hotel bar Trans-Alpino! Chilled drinks await you.

We don't play Guitars!

Keyboards, players, hotel bar Trans-Alpino, terrace sun, snacks, later in the evening techno. These are the ingredients for the second part of FOCUS ON THE KEYBOARD. A small, off-key keyboard orchestra could arise. Come along with your instrument!

DJ B Leaf (AT)

B Leaf likes plants and Techno. In the joint project Prophet with Michael Lahner she transforms dream sequences into music. At Hotel Amazonas they will play their favorite tracks.

Hotelbar Trans-Alpino

Which witch?! The figure of the witch in the picture

Knowledgeable women who harm people with their black magic: unscrupulous temptresses, lustfully in league with the devil to cause plagues, harvest damage, child deaths or illnesses. The image of the flying witch, in her cauldron bubbling potions and eating up small children - it shapes our idea of this character still today.

Which realities have fed these ideas? Which artists have realized them since the Middle Ages in figurative ways? And to what extent do these pictorial representations of the witch reflect the belief in witchcraft in the early modern period? Which roles did the secular and ecclesiastical authorities play and which the male sex? These and many other questions will be discussed in a lecture and talk by Kero Fichter (student of art history at the University of Vienna).

Image: Hans Baldung Grien, Hexensabbat (1510)

House Ghosts - Ghost House

Each room exudes its own vibrations in the form of frequencies, which cause a subjective atmosphere and mood. With the help of contact microphones, sensors, underwater microphones and the like KOMPRIPIOTR captures these space sounds in the walls of Hotel Amazonas, manipulates them in real time and outputs them as mood mirror and emotional palette. In this sound séance he becomes the catalyst or medium between the space, the resident presences and the sound; tracking the resonances of the spatially-spiritual environment and the own inner landscape. "House Ghosts-Ghost House" is a performance that does not want to entertain; interpersonal interaction takes place as “taking part” as well as “giving part”.

KOMPRIPIOTR online

Zolf & Saturn collects noises and sounds while traveling, in the head and on his bike and mixes them with analogue and electronic instruments. His driving music sounds like longing for the faraway and excitement about the future. The artist is touring live with synthesizers, laptop, voice and slide guitar. In Amazonas Hotel Zolf & Saturn will go on its own way in search of the supernatural.

Zolf & Saturn online

Edward Chapon is a photographer who works with alternative photo print processes like Cyanotype and Bicromate printing. By ferric oxidation or by adding color pigments to emulsions he gives forms and colors to images, sometimes followed by painting and chemical interventions on the canvas.
At Hotel Amazonas he will be working on large format "Sun Print" images (Cyanotypes), that will be exposed in sunlight, developed and assembled into large format pictures, revealing the particular Prussian blue tint, only obtained by oxidation.

BODY COLLECTIONS
The week long mountain residence of two #(ambiguous life forms) romantic artists can be witnessed and revisited in their freshly installed habitat at the Knottn-Kuchl throughout the night. Combing video, found objects, handicrafts and field recordings, the artists distort our relationships to spectral forms and material presences within time and space. Their work creates reverberations with the site - the work will be presented with experiences the artists cultivated during their residency to amass their collections of the immaterial and material.

Tricia Middleton’s sculptures and architectural installations often engage notions of taste or aesthetic preference as ideological form, highly expressive of the times in which the various aesthetic strategies she works with emerged. Aesthetics can be understood as something Middleton’s work performs rather than an intrinsic value to it. Fascinated by the inevitable decline of all material towards collapse, Middleton at once collects objects from the world around her to juxtapose against repurposed relics from her studio production, amassing and grafting these items onto one another to create objects and environments that mimic natural processes of accretion and decomposition creating allegorical relationships between natural and historical proceeses in their mutual reflection of one another.
Born in 1972 in Vancouver, Tricia Middleton lives and works currently in Paris www.triciamiddleton.net

Ulrike Buck works in the expanded field of sculpture. Her practice is informed by an anthropological interest in the magic, in marginalized technologies and knowledge that aim to set the human body into direct communication with material matter. She has conducted spiritual seances between continents over skype, planted a vertically hanging magical garden to entertain an art institution and found herself channeling Robert Smithson by revisiting Hotel Palenque and later lecturing about dearchitecturalisation in the jungle. Sculptures and objects in Bucks euvre show formal similarities to new age architecture and interiors but oscillate between non-function or unknown function. Sculpture may ultimately be experienced as vehicle or tool to celebrate the unity of body and mind.
Buck was born 1983 on the swabian highland of southern germany and is now based in Berlin.
www.ulrikebuck.de

One's room-working title
Laura Lovatel and Federica Menin will improvise a narration through spoken word, sounds and intervals that will be at the same time audible in different places around Hotel Amazonas. The artists will try to understand and play with the concept of presence, along with the continuous spacial shift between them and you while being in the same place.