The ISM Hexadome is an immersive 360° audiovisual exhibition combining art and technology and features nine audiovisual performances and installations from international artists curated by ISM and Norient. The project is the first step in the Institute for Sound & Music’s initiative to build a museum in recognition of sound, immersive arts, and electronic music culture. Norient curated two artists into the project: Lara Sarkissian and CAO. The events featuring Brian Eno, Thom Yorke, and others, are taking place between March 29 and April 22, 2018, at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Germany.

The ISM Hexadome is comprised of a visual projection architecture designed by Berlin digital media studio, Pfadfinderei, and the «Klangdom», an advanced multi-channel speaker configuration created by ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics Karlsruhe. The Klangdom is controlled by the software Zirkonium developed by ZKM and 3D audio mixing software Panoramix developed by IRCAM’s STMS Research Lab.

---

Performances and Installations: Schedule

April 13, 20h/22h, Live Performance
Lara Sarkissian & Jemma Woolmore | Frank Bretschneider & Pierce Warnecke

April 14-15, 10-22h, Installation
Lara Sarkissian & Jemma Woolmore | Frank Bretschneider & Pierce Warnecke

April 20, 20h/22h, Live Performance
Peter van Hoesen & Heleen Blanken | CAO & Michael Tan

April 21-22, 10-(19)22h, Installation
Ben Frost & MFO | Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst | CAO & Michael Tan | Peter van Hoesen & Heleen Blanken

For all dates of the following artists check ISM Hexadome website: Brian Eno | Tarik Barri & Thom Yorke | Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst | Ben Frost & MFO | Pfadfinderei & René Löwe

---

Norient Artist Selection for ISM Hexadome

Lara Sarkissian

Read an article about Lara Sarkissian on Norient.com

Lara Sarkissian is a sound artist, DJ (FOOZOOL) and filmmaker based in San Francisco, CA. She is co-founder of Club Chai; a music label, radio show, and curatorial project that artistically hybridizes non western sounds and visuals with contemporary western culture. Lara Sarkissian’s electronic music focuses on ambient/experimental productions with Armenian influences and scores films and installations. Follow Sarkissian on her Website, Bandcamp, Facebook, Mixcloud, and SoundCloud.

Hexadome Installation Piece with Jemma Woolmore:

Thresholds

Thresholds creates a transsensorial space for storytelling on topics of territory, recognition and memory. Together musician Lara Sarkissian and artist Jemma Woolmore craft an immersive experience from aural and physical architectures; playing with disorientation, stability, unrest, familiarity and recollection.

The piece is an ambient electronic landscape referencing Armenian music, field recordings and churches (both in its sonic and physical form); as the architecture of churches have often been designed with the intentions of acoustic ecology and spatial experiences in mind. The score collages elements of voices, hymns, instruments; holding space for modern day Armenian narratives tied to uprooted ancestral pasts [and present].

The hexadome screens become a landscape to be navigated and divided, creating symbolic borders that are enforced, blurred or dissolved throughout the work. Patterns emerge that appear to both isolate and encompass, generating complex and unfamiliar territories, exploring the fragile boundary between Utopia and Dystopia.

CAO

Read an article about CAO on Norient.com

Constanza Bizraelli aka CAO is a Peruvian electronic music composer and producer, artist, and theorist. She is the director and editor-in-chief of Cyclops Journal, an academic publication dedicated to contemporary theory, theory of religion, and experimental theory. Follow CAO on her Website, Facebook, SoundCloud, and Twitter.

Hexadome Installation Piece with Michael Tan:

The Burial Theme: Trans-Matter Port and Objects

Inspired by ancient Moche iconography and cosmology, the work explores the dualities of life/death, generation/destruction, and cohesion/dispersion cycles and how they appear as two planes constantly transposed onto one another. The Moche cosmology envisioned certain gates that render the intersections of both planes as a space for events. One of these might be considered the ceremonial or ritual space, a realm in which the distance and division between both worlds would blur.

The work aims to explore the ceremonial object both in its native context and as an «unearthed object», expressing its connection with both ancient narratives and the transience and decay that operate in the natural world. This object, usually presented as a recipient, acts as a gate or a threshold, a geometrical key, and signifies generative space and the readiness preparatory to a transfer between worlds (living/dead, vision/blindness, sacred/profane, etc.).

---

The Poster