My artistic interests have always been plural and my investigative approach is open to a wide sphere of critical discourses and influences, which I know as crucial to creating innovative artworks. As a practicing artist, my aim is to create original work that reflects on the condition of humanity and the planet: socio-political and ecological concerns are predominant themes in my artwork.

To convey ideas, information and experiences through time-based media, I create interactive, immersive multimedia installation art environments. My artistic investigations into spatialized audio, soundscapes and sound mapping are major aspects of how I configure these artworks; I have been expanding my research into the visual aspects of immersion, as well. Concurrently, I am developing software systems appropriate to these continuously interactive multimedia environments, capable of immersing and merging the viewer with the various media.

Content is triggered through inquiry: recently, I have investigated the structure of animal language, the realm of memory for institutionalized psychiatric patients and the emotional tension that is the subtext of our hyperindustrialised world. The works offered to the AIS2 audience will include an eight channel soundscape, titled “Sixty”, dedicated to the people of Hiroshima upon the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing, a series of multichannel environmental recordings and the recent composition “Polysemy”, to be presented as a 3 dimensional soundscape.

Steve Heimbecker has been a multi discipline artist and audio art composer since the beginning of his career in the early 1980's. His work represents a constant exploration of spatial architectures through pattern, repetition, and form, light and sound, time and space.

Steve will present examples of his career works which exemplify his cross modal explorations in fine arts, media arts, installation, multi channel sound and data mapping. In recent years, this extended body of work has been critically framed as the work of an artist synesthete. Steve will discuss this possibility and some of it's implications within a broader discussion of his creative process.

During the evening, in addition to presenting documentation of recent installations including the Wind Array Cascade Machine series, Steve will present several multi-channel audio compositions including:

The Long Walk - VSM (2007) 10:14
One of 8 works produced as part of the collective Matière Sonore, a group of 8 sound artists (Canada, Québec, USA, Spain) who create compositions from field recordings they take from the environs surrounding the concert location of the presenter / commissioner. In this case, the commission was from the 24 edition (May, 2007) of the Festival International musique actuelle Victoriaville (FIMAV), QC.

Songs of Place Kitchener (2007) 30:34
This is the 6th surround sound audio and video mapping portrait of Heimbecker's Songs of Place series with previous works from: Halifax, Montréal, Springwater (SK), Vancouver, and Vienna (Austria). It was produced while he was artist in residence for the 2007 Open Ears Festival in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.

Road Child Dreaming Swing Child Dreams (2004) 26:00 Created during the first "Art of Immersive Soundscapes" at the U of R in 2004. This piece presents a selection of surround recordings taken from the interior of Heimbecker's van as he drove from Montréal to Regina over 3 days in 2004, and is juxtaposed with the familiar and haunting sounds of a playground swing set for children.

Moffat will present U(T), an interactive multi-channel sound box/instrument that uses phonemes from four data banks as linguistic note events and controllers to experiment with the acoustics and physicality of sound, space, composition and authorship. The composition, generated in Max/MSP, teases with meaning and vocalization referencing the phonetic poetry of the Viennese Dadaist sound poets. It was developed during a residency at Oboro (Montreal) in May 2007.

Darren Copeland performs three works with live and automated multichannel spatialization. The works represent different approaches to spatialization and to thinking about the soundscape.

Night Camera (1993/96) 24:41
in three scenes: Maritime Vision; Prairie Dream; Vanishing At Sea

A ‘night camera’ is an imaginary listening aid that like an infrared scanner allows one to probe regions lying beyond the common, everyday frame of experience. Each scene of the composition Night Camera is situated in its own identifiable, and rather ordinary, environmental setting. The listener’s journey is a quest for worlds existing within the territory of the ordinary. As Don Ihde puts it in Listening and Voice, “listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately working its way into what is as yet unheard.”

Each scene is based on a recording from the World Soundscape Collection housed at Simon Fraser University. Night Camera premiered at the Western Front in Vancouver during Journées Électro-Radio Days (JERD) in December 1993. Special thanks to the individuals who made the recordings for the World Soundscape Collection, and to Barry Truax for his critical and technical support through the compositional process.

Lapse in Perception (1998-99) 7:45

Lapse in Perception is a text-sound composition about the challenge of understanding complex sensory phenomena in the everyday world.

Typically attention paid to everyday situations is quite superficial. While walking down the street one is quite happy to know that there are a row of shops on the right, vehicle traffic to the left, and the odd pedestrian passing by. Any more information begins to take the mind away from apparently more important matters. I wonder how much relationship there is between tuning out the external information in this way and our general neglect of the natural environment.

There is an element in this work that portrays what happens to something when its presence is neglected. This element is represented by the word "lap" and repeats frequently followed by a number that increases sequentially from one to fourteen. Each time the phrase appears it loses more of its intelligibility and assumes a strident pure-tone character. This process of textual obliteration illustrates the recession of clarity in our acoustic environment due to indifference and actions guided by self-interest.

The physical environment is a complex phenomenon, as is the make up of human personalities. The many layers that make up a person or a physical environment are combined every moment in a day through a complex network of interconnecting and contradictory patterns. Ignoring this complexity is to walk away from the beautiful contradictions and intricacies of life and reduce experience to mere surface impressions.

Lapse in Perception was composed in 1998-99 for the radio program Out Front on CBC Radio One. Special thanks to Judy McAlpine for her feedback and support throughout the process, to the Geneva Centre in Toronto for their assistance with research into the topic of autism, and to Mike Ladd for his invaluable recording contributions on Ward's Island in Toronto.

"Let Me Out" (2006) 35:02

Going about everyday business is sometimes harder then we like to acknowledge. This is a piece for the subconscious. For the delusions that drift through our thoughts as we move from one place to the next... from a hallway to a subway platform, to the subway turnstiles to the street outside. This is a piece for all those crazy urges that we get when we feel smothered by a small space or overwhelmed by a large space. Sometimes we want to scream "Let me Out... Now!! " This piece should not give anyone nightmares of these rather ordinary spaces and places that invite delusion. It is a celebration of the artist, the madman, or the dreamer, within us all.

Special thanks to Charlie Fox for the recording of the empty corridors of the University of Regina during the Immersive Soundscape Residency in 2004 and for Barry Prophet recording with me similar spaces at the University of Toronto in February 2006. Also a special mention is in order to Sebastian Schafer whose wonderful vocal recordings made for the companion piece to this work "i dont want to be inside me anymore" and for use in this piece as source material and to Birger Sellin's great insight into the autistic mind, an influential book to this work and to other works I have made in the past. Finally, a gracious thanks to Elisabeth Zimmerman and everyone at the fabulous Kunstradio program in Vienna, Austria for making this piece possible as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, media division.

With his radio-documentary-composition "The Idea of Canada" as a focus point, composer Christos Hatzis explores his personal, artistic and spiritual approach to soundscape composition, particularly his own area of interest which he calls "human soundscape". His own approach to all things through the lens of religion and spirituality is argued here in the context of a probable theory that reconciles the human psyche (and psychology) with the physical world around us. From philosophical pondering to the development of specific compositional techniques that accommodate the convergence of music and speech, this is Christos Hatzis at his most personal.

In a fusion of flutes, voice and electronics Ellen Waterman whispers, twitters, shrieks, growls and sings a theatre of intriguing soundscapes from nocturnal forests to rushing rivers, and a weird side trip into radio space.

The program will consist of a cycle of four multi-channel works, collectively called Spirit Journeys, which will be released later this year on a CD of that name. The specific pieces in order are:

TEMPLE (2002), a soundscape composition for eight digital soundtracks

PROSPERO'S VOYAGE (2004), a soundscape composition for eight digital soundtracks

THE SHAMAN ASCENDING (2004-2005), for eight digital soundtracks

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT (2005-2006), for ichigenkin, shakuhachi and eight digital soundtracks

Each of these works represents a journey through acoustic space and time, based on different cultural contexts: spiritual, secular, aboriginal, Asian.

Temple is composed of choral voices and takes place in the reverberant cathedral of San Bartolomeo, in Busetto, Italy. Prospero's Voyage returns to the mythical island of the composer’s piece Island, except that this time it is Prospero's island from Shakespeare's The Tempest and the piece asks what happens when Prospero leaves. The Shaman Ascending evokes the imagery of a traditional shaman figure chanting in the quest for spiritual ecstasy. The Way of the Spirit is the latest collaboration between world music specialist Randy Raine-Reusch and the composer where Randy plays the Japanese ichigenkin and shakuhachi.