SoundImageCulture

SoundImageCulture

SoundImageCulture / SIC is a group of artist-anthropologists committed to artful storytelling through real human encounters that challenge documentary conventions, and opens up to sound and image installations. SIC offers a nine-month master class to assist professional filmmakers, social scientists and artists in the realization of their personal project. The course involves a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives and practical workshops so as to link formal and ethical questions during the production process as each creator develops their original, personal point of view.

Informed by developments in cultural theory, social sciences, and the visual arts (_Laura Marks_, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Rouch, Trinh Minh-ha en Jonas Mekas) we question the relation between artist, subject and viewer. How can you represent somebody in sound and image when you don’t know his or her background? The answer is not to eschew representation; rather, SIC proposes an ethical reflection on how ‘the other’ is presented in contemporary media: we believe this to be an urgency of the multicultural society we live in. The SIC master class involves nine months of artistic coaching through collective seminars, individual advising, group critiques, and inter-artist dialogue. For additional perspectives, we occasionally host visiting artists and critics.

Selection

Interested candidates in SIC should submit their application before the 6th of March 2009. The SIC team will review the applications and then invite finalists to interview. Each year SIC selects a maximum of 10 participants. SIC is especially interested in project proposals that reflect upon the intercultural encounter and reveal a genuine and personal relation to the subject.

Participants

SIC is open to people with experience in the arts and/or social sciences. Generally SIC prefers candidates who posses a Master degree. If you haven’t had artistic training, you should emphasize which media you hope to use and why. If you don’t have a Master degree, we request a portfolio of your best work in the visual arts. The selection is based on an audiovisual project proposal (film, video installation, sound creation,…) submitted by the candidate which contains following paragraphs: What is the subject of your project and why do you want to make it? What’s the relation between the author and his or her subject/"other": what is the type of interaction between author and subject and how can this relation be specified? Is there a viewer involved, prefigured, abstract or concrete? What is your formal approach, what is the relation between your subject and the form you choose?

Practical info

SIC is open for participants who speak Dutch, French and/or English. The SIC team speaks and understands these 3 languages. The seminars are in the language that convenes the best to the specific group composition.

Send your application in 3 copies to our postal address Theodore Verhaegenstraat 18, 1060 Brussels, Belgium. Applications which are not selected can be collected at the SIC office at the same address. SIC is not responsible for possible damage or loss of the materials.

The application should include:

Deadline SIC 10: February 15, 2010
Interviews: March 1 - 5, 2010
Selection notification: March 5, 2010

Auto-production

*artist-as-producer

In SIC the artist is producer for his or her own work, and participants retain all copyrights to their project and materials.

SIC doesn’t offer studio space, recording equipment, or bursaries. Participants are expected to have or find their own means for filming, editing, and so on.

Cross over

SIC operates at the intersection between art and anthropology. Contemporary anthropology addresses the need to represent the world of ‘the other’ without reducing it to Eurocentric, exclusively Western, or neo-colonial categories. Arising partly from this need, we have witnessed the ‘sensory turn of anthropology’ for which video, film, and sound are crucial to recording and expressing cultural experience.

The converse has been seen in what art critic Hal Foster calls ‘the ethnographic turn of contemporary arts.’ Myriad contemporary artists now work ethnographically and share content with the field of anthropology: e.g. nationalisms, migration, and expressions of identity. SIC coach An van.Dienderen explores this interaction by postdoctoral artistic research at the KASK art academy in Ghent.

Performative documentary

We conceive the audiovisual as a performance in which the encounter will lead the process. The interaction, negotiation, or confrontation in the documentary encounter is the force that drives this artistic process.

Medium

SIC does not believe that representational media are mirrors that reflect reality, but rather systems through which different identities can be performed. We stimulate participants to understand cultural identity not in terms of authenticity, but as the way by which groups and individuals are imagined and articulated. For this reason, SIC believes that participating artists should use whichever media are appropriate for the project in question: film, video, photography, sound, etcetera.

Participants 2009