MICHAEL DUCH, JEREMY WELSH

REITERATE, RERUN, REPEAT

Repetition plays a central role in many musical styles and genres. Repetition, rhythm and patterns also play an important part in the visual arts. Here we will show, examine and discuss repetition as a method and main musical element, as well as their correlation with moving images, in a series of audio-visual works we have been working on together since 2016.

Accumulator is one such project and will be the main focus here, where not only repetition, rhythm and patterns appear as musical and visual elements, but is used as an artistic method in itself when repeating performances of a similar material, documenting each one of them and adding the individual performances as layers creating a dense audio-visual orchestral solo performance.

As well as temporal repetition, Accumulator repeats in the spatial dimension, where the staging of a performance features the live performer multiplied, as he is accompanied by pre-recorded video images of himself. According to the spatial characteristics of the given performance space, this repetition of the performer may be frontal / two dimensional, or may extend across several surfaces, creating a surround projection in which the live performer is contained.

Biography

Michael Francis Duch is a professor of double bass, jazz and experimental music at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, where he currently holds the position as Deputy Head of Research. He is a former member of the Young Academy of Norway. Duch was a research fellow at NTNU in 2007-2010 with the project Free Improvisation – Genre and Method, doing artistic research on free improvisation and experimental music. He has been involved in more than 70 recordings in various formats, and has collaborated with John Tilbury, Pauline Oliveros, Mats Gustafsson, AMM, Christian Wolff, Tony Conrad and Joëlle Léandre, among others.

Jeremy Welsh is an artist based in Bergen. He was formerly a professor of Fine Art at Trondheim Academy of Art, NTNU, and at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, where he was also program leader for the MA in Fine Art, and for a two year period, Dean of the Fine Art Department. Welsh has been active within video art and multimedia since the late seventies, and has often worked in collaboration with composers and contemporary musicians. During the eighties he was exhibition and project manager at London Video Arts, the director of The Film and Video Umbrella. He has curated numerous exhibitions and has exhibited throughout the world since the early eighties.