Jasna Veličković – “Bubbling with Braun’s demon”
CCA Theatre, from 7pm Thursday 31st August.
Tickets: Pay what you can from the CCA Box Office
A performance based on capturing the moments of an unpredictable yet organised flow in which the performer, in real time, shapes the sound of interferences that emerge from electronic objects and magnets specifically displayed in space.
The performance amplifies and focuses on listening, empathy, mirroring, dialogue, changeability, the unknown and instability.
Jasna Veličković (b. 1974) is the Belgrade-born Dutch composer and performer based in Amsterdam. Her „being in love with the sound“ coupled with an enduring interest in an intricate encounter between music and technology and her strong inclination toward sound experimentation represent the key elements of her artistic development.
Her work gradually evolved into an ongoing research project dubbed „The Art of Coil“: an investigation into the musical capacities of the (electro)magnetic field, both as the source of sound and the compositional material. Her years-long explorations included animating traditional instruments with electromagnetic waves and consequently playing these instruments without touching them, the construction of a new instrument—the Velicon—an electronic system consisting of a changeable configuration of magnets and metal objects animated by coils and, quite recently, the reintroduction of the traditional instruments into the creative process.
The sound research and experimentation opened the way for the transformations of Veličković’s compositional method from creating the traditionally conceived definite sound, through provoking the change of sound by virtue of activating interference between the electromagnetic field of the sound sources, to uniting the two procedures. Her pieces VrisKrik.EXE (1997/99) – concerto for electronics and orchestra, Last Song (2009–10) for percussion quartet and coils, sUn (2014)—the first written work for the Velicon, Remote Me (2018) for two remote controls and three coils, Opera of Things (2019), Underneath (2021) for hyper-organ and coils —awarded with the Stevan Mokrajac Prize of the Composers’ Association of Serbia, and Adapting (2022) for adapters and ensemble are the most representative of her artistic development.
