Thank you to Arts Council England!

A huge thank you to Arts Council England for choosing to support us – their grant will make a great difference to our project Dark Veil.

DARK VEIL

For centuries, artists, authors and alchemists have gazed into the void and extracted new ways of seeing and thinking about our place in the universe.

What has been happening to humankind during the last decade has pointed out how we as a species have been progressively dissecting our natural and cultural roots?

A continuous flooding of incontrollable noise has been emerging and flooding all forms of art, philosophy, culture and spirituality. We have been facing a tsunami of dirt, rust and powder able to blind each one of us visually while infecting our minds thanks to the digital contagious pandemic.

Dark Veil is an act of artistic resistance, and it has been inspired by many different cultural and scientific seeds which we felt the need of feeding and fostering with the media we are more acquainted with: sound

Some of these sources of inside thinking, which will be all feature in upcoming links, blogs, interviews and workshops, have been the following:

Robert Fludd

Occult philosopher, physician, mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and his Utriusque Cosmi. Fludd believed in three generative principles: darkness, light and water, from which emerged the element that constituted matter. His image of nothingness, and boundless darkness is both revolutionary and prescient

Isaac Asimov

and his novel Nightfall where an eclipse occurs, night falls for the first time in thousands of years, the sky goes dark, the stars come out, and a technologically advanced civilised society, destroys itself. The people in this story sets everything on fire, and destroy their civilisation just as every previous one had done because they are not used to darkness, the experience of it is quite terrifying

The Nasa Black Marble collection

In the last few years, NASA has released a series of images which they call the black marble images. In contrast to the famous “blue marble” images, this is the Earth by night. You can now see human influence on our planet – the lights of all of our cities

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square on white ground

In 1916, Malevich declared the square to be ‘the face of the new art, the first step of pure creation’, later adding that — trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world — he took refuge in the form of the square. His Black Square on white ground was displayed as a secular equivalent to Russian icons when it was first displayed in 1915, displayed in the corner of the room, high up, as you would have in a Russian home for icons.

Paul Nash – The Void, 1924

This is the first of his illustrations of the book of Genesis. Nash had served in the First World War, and he’d suffered a severe breakdown which led him to be diagnosed what was then called war strain, and what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. During his emotional recovery he began to incorporate abstraction into his work. In The Void of creation, the black, empty square of Genesis, pre-humanity’s form from Eden, is perhaps a way that the First World War had been seen by people who had participated in it. This void has got this kind of reassuring clean slate, unspoiled feel.

Ad Reinhardt’s Black paintings 1953 - 1967

where the all-consuming purity of blackness representing the ultimate point in abstraction. Interestingly, none of these paintings of darkness are actually black — they’re different shades at the very edge of darkness, which, together, pretend to be what they are not. Reinhardt reveals that our relationship to darkness is one of perception. Peering into his paintings is like peering into the cosmos - a universe of multitudes of colours which our eyes are not equipped to see.

Katie Paterson - The History of Darkness

an ongoing project that she began in 2010, and she envisages carrying it on indefinitely. Katie collects astronomical images that show nothing. They’re images of the dark, empty parts of the sky. It reminds us how much of the cosmos is dark, at least to our eyes or the limits of our technology.

Pierre Soulages – Outrenoir

where the artis tries to go beyond black, Soulages would make darkness in its ineffable depth and beauty by building up, carving, gouging, scraping, pressing and muddling all the sculptural layers of darkness on the surface of his canvas. He proclaimed: ‘My instrument is not black, but the light reflected from the black.’

Hubble Deep Field One

and photo-shots taken during the observation of the distant skies, and the fact that darkness is relative. Where we see darkness with our eyes, our most powerful telescopes may see something rather different. Back in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most iconic, powerful instruments ever built, was told to stare at one patch of sky for 10 days. It was a blank patch of sky that had no visible stars in it. Hubble costs about £50,000 an hour to run, but after 10 days of staring and gathering the very faint glimmers of light that were coming from that distant reach of the universe, this is what Hubble saw

Surrey NanoSystems – Vantablack

The blacker than black pigment, developed by Surrey NanoSystems. It is allegedly the blackest thing that has ever been created, certainly by human beings. It’s hard to convey it in a photo. It is a nanosubstance. Things have colour because they reflect light off particular wavelengths. Vantablack absorbs everything. It works on a nanoscale. If you looked at it on the level of billionths of a metre, you would see that the pigment is made of little fibres — it’s furry — and the light gets stuck between the fibres and bounces around, and is completely absorbed. So Vantablack absorbs, swallows, all of the light that falls on it, and that is why it looks so intensely black.

Miroslaw Balka – How It Is

and the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2009/10. This work took me straight to the holocaust, the remembrance of Warsaw ghetto and the truck that took Jews away to death camps in Poland. Balka’s chamber of darkness taps into our instinctive fear of the dark. This immersive installation had ‘scared the wits out of me’ as, approaching the giant hole from the rear, I grasped how ugly, brooding and frightening it is — a piece from which there is no escape. As Balka puts it, slowly, step by step, you’ll have to touch darkness. It’s more about feeling fear. An overwhelming frightening sense of desolation.

Andy Goldsworthy - Coppice Room

In this experience I faced a chamber full of trees — inside, you shut the door behind you and you make your way between the tree trunks in the pitch black. As you go into the room the trees get closer and closer together until you’re squeezing between them. You lose all sense of direction; you start to lose sense of time. It’s almost like going back into the womb.

CONCERTS

MINGUET QUARTET

London

No 20 Arts

Berlin

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

Gustav Mahler
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

RD Rusconi
Umbrae - String Quartet No. 6

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
String Quartet op. 80

WORKSHOPS

Six online/in person workshops for VI and Blind people interested in co-creative experiences driven by urgency of sharing perspectives and takes on the theme of darkness and silence, loss and fear, need of rebirth and cleansing.

Join us and you will be introduced to the different thematic and facilitated to create and express yourself.

Include creative tutorials where artists with and without disabilities will receive professional guidance to develop their artistic skills.

Combine various art forms, and individual expression to obtain a deeper and richer artistic vocabulary that may help us face these questions:

When politics, economics and culture are engulfed by war how does the artist respond?

May a performance become an act of resistance, a testimonial of past crimes, acts of genocide and violence?

CO-CREATIVE EXPERIENCES

Open Call for underrepresented poets/writers

Share with us original lines, or quote major authors on the theme of war's memories and genocide!

Help us create a transgenerational testimonial on implications past humanity’s crimes may have for helping us transmitting and reflecting on the dangers and perils we constantly put ourselves, our fellow species and our life as whole.

Join us in asking why and finding solace in the awareness difference can unify us when we need it the most!

The project is now concluded, but we are constantly looking for internship and collaborations

PODCASTS

How may reports of annhihilation influence art

How may feelings and recollections of past genocides influence art

How do sound influence our equilibrium, attention, imagination & consciousness

Impact of sound on the well-being and mental health of Blind/VI people

The differences in reaction to sound, movement and proprio-perception in VI/Blind people

Legends of blind seers/oracles

Our team is dedicated to make the creative process as accessible as possible, so contact us if you have any questions.

Please get in touch if you are interested and we will be happy to give you more information.

info@intrasonus.co.uk

INTRASONUSUK

ANNIHILATION PERFORMING ARTS EXTINCTION

Thank you to Arts Council England!

DARK VEIL

Gustav Mahler
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

RD Rusconi
Umbrae - String Quartet No. 6

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
String Quartet op. 80

INTRASONUSUK

Thank you to Arts Council England!

DARK VEIL

Gustav Mahler Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

RD Rusconi Umbrae - String Quartet No. 6

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy String Quartet op. 80

Gustav Mahler
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

RD Rusconi
Umbrae - String Quartet No. 6

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
String Quartet op. 80