HACK THE PANKE Festival

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to the HACK THE PANKE Festival with various events like workshops, film screenings and walks on art, science and sound in Berlin-Wedding. In context of his solo exhibition Radyo Somatodelia: Experiments in Sonic Animism at Art Laboratory Berlin Philippine artist Tad Ermitaño will realize this workshop.

From Here to Ear is a sound art creation activity designed to encourage participants to listen to their environment with intention. The workshop reframes listening as a way of thinking towards an act of reflection, both in the sense of thinking, and in the sense of what a mirror does. Sonification is a way of experiencing data and the world anew. How can the act of listening reflect the world, to be the place where the world is heard, simultaneously where the world hears itself? Using sound to investigate and empathize with the other beings in our environment, it entwines with the idea of exploring the unfamiliar with the practice of entanglement, with the potential to widen the scope and definition of empathy. Listening as presence. Listening as absence.

Workshop | Details

The workshop is divided into three unique parts and will begin at Art Laboratory Berlin, which involves an “art walk” along the Panke river and its surrounding area, and finally culminate at Uferstudios AnaConda Café.

The workshop begins with a brief artist and curator walk at the gallery before heading outdoors for an “art walk” or a walking lecture performance. Taking inspiration from the concepts behind Indonesian activity Jalan-jalan (to go out for a walk) and the Filipino tambay (to hang out), workshop participants are encouraged to hang around while actively engaged through a listening and sonic intervention within themselves and the environment. Participants will make “sonic sketches” or stylized renderings of their listening experience with the sounds of objects and equipment found and provided. At the end of the workshop, the participants will jam their sketches in a participatory group sound performance reproducing a stylized Panke in a network of sound and entangled intentions.

To Bring

Mobile telephone, headphones, sound recorders, tabletop synths, electro acoustic devices.

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

From Here to Ear: Sound Exploration, workshop with Tad Ermitaño, 2022

Tad Ermitaño is a key figure in new media art in the Philippines and South East Asia, with a history reaching as far back as the late 80s, when he co-founded the media collective Children of Cathode Ray. Considered to be one of the seminal pioneers of sound art in the country as well as an explorer of experimental film, his artistic practice has since grown into an examination of the processes, semiotics and structures surrounding man’s relationship with machinery. His projects often involve the manipulation of sound and images interacting with spatial structures. Ermitaño works with a range of technologies, from digital video (Sex2Speech, 2017) and mechanical instruments (Hasa, 2015), to analog circuitry (Bell, 2011), electromechanical mechanisms (Orasyonador, 2022), and computer programming (Sammy and the Sandworms, 2013).

Ermitaño has had no formal training in the arts or in music. He was a science major, and attended the Philippine Science High School, and studied Biology at Japan’s University of Hiroshima, and Philosophy at the University of the Philippines. He trained in film and video at the Mowelfund Film Institute, and currently teaches the Philippines’ first academic sound art course at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts. Ermitaño has participated in numerous group shows in spaces that include the Laforet Museum in Japan, the Palazzo Mora in Italy, and the Singapore Art Museum. In 2016 his work Gillages formed part of Muhon, the Philippine Pavilion’s exhibit at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.