day 3 . thu . 17.12

Electricity flows through a fluorescent lamp, becomes light, and is absorbed by a solar panel. By attaching broken, unpredictable objects to my musical instrument it is possible to see electricity and hear light. Bar’s work provides a continuation and deepening of her graduation project made at the Department of New Music, Musrara School. Produced by Musrara school and Organuz studio

The immersive audiovisual performance centers around a control station that Gershoni has built with studio equipment used to synthesize live video and audio signals transmitted to an audience. Gershoni mixes together YouTube videos, covers of Mizrahi songs, original video and audio clips, karaoke and more to create a mix edited by scenes and follows an exact partiture. Shifting between realism and abstraction and between the improvised and the edited, the performance becomes an “initiation ritual” for the participating audience. The work’s title Leehoro is a portmanteau of the Hebrew words “Lee” and “Horu,” meaning, “I was instructed,” introducing the question: Who is in control? Gershoni as the devices’ operator or does the equipment in fact control Gershoni? Produced by Musrara school and Organuz studio

The group started work on an Ambisonic based studio and performance space for spatial composition to serve local artists, but then, in early March, they had to stop all activities due to Covid-19. As the country was going into lockdown, one member of the group, Amir Meir, decided to spend his isolation period in one of the many caves in the Judean Desert near Jerusalem, the very caves that were inhabited by various isolated ascetic cults, thousands of years ago. Amir set off and cut all communication since. Other members of the group have decided to travel to the desert, find Amir and look into the connection between his insights from this experience and the field of 3D sound. The trip is documented in a short film enhanced by binaural audio recordings and compositions. With the aid of space and sound illusions practices, the film Finding Amir touches on profound questions about the imagined realities that lie behind the walls of digital and symbolic representation. **The use of headphones is recommended The members of the Musrara Sonic Art Research Group: Amir Meir, Eran Sachs, Yogev Frilichman, Dana Tkatch, Eyal Biton, Lior Pinsky The work premiered in Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria 2020. The project was produced as part of the Jerusalem Greenhouse for Artists and supported by Matanel Foundation.

The Toy Orchestra is a unique project, the brainchild of composer Igor Krutogolov – a multi-instrumentalist phenomenon and one of the prominent figures in the Israeli avant-garde scene – who has set out to bring together the two meanings of the word “Play”. The orchestra members play rich, deep and emotional pieces using only various toy instruments – from plastic guitars, through a toy clarinet to a set of drums for toddlers. With these unique instruments, the orchestra produce sounds that are far from childish, creating innovative and complex arrangements of songs from any genre you can think of – from window-rattling rock, through traditional folk and romantic tango, to jazz classics and gargantuan metal pieces. The Band: Toy Guitars, Toy Singing, Toy Noises, Toy Composer- Igor Krutogolov Toy Drums- Roy Chen Toy Keyboards-  Neal Kalman Toy Clarinet, Toy Trumpet-  Cernea Mihai Toy Clarinet-  Naomi Rosin Toy Clarinet-  Amir Buksbaum Toy Clarinet- Victor Levin Toy Clarinet- Yana Miri Levin Toy Glockenspiel, Toy Xylophone, Toy Pig- Niv Majar Toy Singing- Mia Beatrice Gerol Toy Singing-  Yam Umi Sound- Nitzan Levi lighting – Omer Sheizaf Photo: Igor Krutogolov Produced by Musrara school and Organuz studio

Nocturnal Gardening portrays a group of women living by alternative norms and who have each, on their own, established communities. The women stand for sensitivity, connection, and communication with other communities, plants, animals, and elements. The film Nocturnal Gardening is a conversion of human psychic content into an imagery that enhances our moral landscape for our own decision making, both in terms of ecology and interdependent values, as well as in the care for ourselves, our neighbors, and our earth.  

Through the use of text and field recordings, the video etude Making a Great Leap Forward! is an attempt to engage an “inner voice”. The video explores the discrepancy between hearing and imagining, and reflects on movement through time and space as a physical, psychological, and spiritual process.

The first-place winner in the student competition is Danielle Alhasid with “The Song of the Stones.” In her work, Alhasid produces a unique language consisting of stop motion animation and sound. The work draws delicate and precise, and at the same time mysterious lines between the geographical and the physical and the digital and the fabricated, and between nature and human constructs. The protagonists of the video animation are stones that mumble a recurring mantra, trying to transmit a hidden secret. The magic of stop motion animation gives a voice to the stones, which hold hidden memories of the city. The work focuses on the ritualistic experience of the encounter with the stones, the “eyes of the oracle,” which reveal fragments missing from collective memory. Old maps emerge from beneath the stones, only to be swallowed once again by a new grid. The video was created as part of a series of short animation films that explore the past of Tel Aviv.