Dr Nigel Helyer (aka DrSonique) is an independent sculptor and sound-artist with an international reputation for large scale sound-sculptures, environmental artworks and inter-active projects for museums. His interdisciplinary approach links a broad platform of creative practice with scientific research in a complex meeting of Poetics and Technics that prompt the community to engage with their cultural histories, identity and sense of place
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and remix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro- and micro-scale structures arrayed at physical loci to create topologies which function as keys to the mapping of memory.
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and re-mix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro and the micro scale structures arrayed as physical loci and topologies that function as keys to the mapping of memory. The author’s attraction to this ongoing series of sound-works that combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy that substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance that carries with it the additional complications of nuanced ...
Under the Ice Cap, Video representation of data visualisation and musical performance from southe... more Under the Ice Cap, Video representation of data visualisation and musical performance from southern elephant seal CTD data score. Lynchpin project mentor, Lisa Roberts of Living Data, and Lynchpin Patron, Nigel Helyer, the wonderful Dr Sonique, along with artist Christine McMillan and others, feature in this important exhibition during the Ultimo Science Festival at The Muse, Ultimo TAFE, 16 – 26 August . These artists have been working with climate change scientists, exploring creative articulation of their research work. Data and modelling have been innovatively reinterpreted through artworks, offering imaginative ways to engage with climate change science.
Vox on the Rox is the first of a series of experimental sonic works to come out of an Art + Scien... more Vox on the Rox is the first of a series of experimental sonic works to come out of an Art + Science collaboration between Dr. Nigel Helyer of SonicObjects; SonicArchitecture, Dr. Mary Anne Lea of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, and musicians at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music,
This article describes the website Culturescape: An Environmental Portrait of Bundanon. This onli... more This article describes the website Culturescape: An Environmental Portrait of Bundanon. This online portrait, a collaboration combining environmental science and art, includes an interactive environmental map of the Bundanon region in New South Wales, Australia, and documentation of environmental artworks by Nigel Helyer, all initially installed at Bundanon. The interactive map displays soil quality data at Bundanon in sonified and visualized form. The user hears a sonification of environmental data, represented as a musical piece, and sees a visualization of mineral data as a graphic display.
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and remix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro- and micro-scale structures arrayed at physical loci to create topologies which function as keys to the mapping of memory.
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and re-mix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro and the micro scale structures arrayed as physical loci and topologies that function as keys to the mapping of memory. The author’s attraction to this ongoing series of sound-works that combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy that substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance that carries with it the additional complications of nuanced ...
Under the Ice Cap, Video representation of data visualisation and musical performance from southe... more Under the Ice Cap, Video representation of data visualisation and musical performance from southern elephant seal CTD data score. Lynchpin project mentor, Lisa Roberts of Living Data, and Lynchpin Patron, Nigel Helyer, the wonderful Dr Sonique, along with artist Christine McMillan and others, feature in this important exhibition during the Ultimo Science Festival at The Muse, Ultimo TAFE, 16 – 26 August . These artists have been working with climate change scientists, exploring creative articulation of their research work. Data and modelling have been innovatively reinterpreted through artworks, offering imaginative ways to engage with climate change science.
Vox on the Rox is the first of a series of experimental sonic works to come out of an Art + Scien... more Vox on the Rox is the first of a series of experimental sonic works to come out of an Art + Science collaboration between Dr. Nigel Helyer of SonicObjects; SonicArchitecture, Dr. Mary Anne Lea of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, and musicians at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music,
This article describes the website Culturescape: An Environmental Portrait of Bundanon. This onli... more This article describes the website Culturescape: An Environmental Portrait of Bundanon. This online portrait, a collaboration combining environmental science and art, includes an interactive environmental map of the Bundanon region in New South Wales, Australia, and documentation of environmental artworks by Nigel Helyer, all initially installed at Bundanon. The interactive map displays soil quality data at Bundanon in sonified and visualized form. The user hears a sonification of environmental data, represented as a musical piece, and sees a visualization of mineral data as a graphic display.
What is it to know a place, and how is it that we know? Do we slowly
accumulate intimate details ... more What is it to know a place, and how is it that we know? Do we slowly accumulate intimate details gathered during repeated visits to a familiar terrain, or are we perhaps transfixed and transformed by an encounter with a solitary natural phenomenon? As with most complex questions, the answer is almost certainly the interplay between approaches— resulting in the formation of a third way that hybridises the familiar with the exceptional. Do we analyse the landscape, or experience it, perhaps through walking? Does our knowledge of the place’s history colour our experience of that place in the present? Do we study the environment, including its history, or do we live inside that environment? Does imagination shape our perception of place? Can we appreciate a place through artworks created there, including paintings of the landscape? The place in question is Bundanon, in the Shoalhaven River Valley, NSW: a vast property of 1100 hectares overseen by the Bundanon Trust since 1993. We have contributed to the Trust’s annual Siteworks festival as a means of manifesting our reflections upon and relationships to the landscape. We hope to act not as distant and impartial observers but situated within the terrain, moving through it and working with it. There are many paths to Bundanon, and we take them all in the process of making this book. We consider the history of Bundanon— its natural and cultural history—describing the many factors that have shaped the environment of this place. We conduct a scientific analysis of the soil in the Shoalhaven River Valley, analysing this environmental data to reveal the impact of decades of human habitation. We use the same technique of environmental science to examine the paint used in an unfinished Arthur Boyd painting, on display in the Artist’s Studio at Bundanon. We survey the terrain of Bundanon with drone footage, tracing the Shoalhaven River and paths across the property. We walk across some of those paths, describing the landscape and some of its history. We glean differing perspectives on Bundanon through its depiction in the landscape paintings of Arthur Boyd, and through a series of artworks by Nigel Helyer, all initially exhibited at Bundanon.
"Freeze Frame" is a creative writing project that imagines a world in which cinema and the afterl... more "Freeze Frame" is a creative writing project that imagines a world in which cinema and the afterlife are inextricably linked. The world's last remaining cinema is attended by a group of curious youths and run by environmental refugees, who closely resemble unemployed Greek Deities.
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and re-mix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro and the micro scale structures arrayed as physical loci and topologies which function as keys to the mapping of memory.
The author’s attraction to this on-going series of sound-works which combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores, is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy which substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance which carries with it the additional complications of nuanced interpretation and virtuosity, all of which combine to create a fluid matrix of cultural, social and biological exchange that act to flesh-out life-forms (as forms of life) across temporal and spatial barriers.
The on-going GeneMusiK project is related to associated works such as Under the IceCap and the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot, which again rely upon biological agents that operate within a broad combinatory framework of cultural, social and biological pathways. These works share overlapping creative methodologies, but each has been developed in varied geographic, biological and cultural contexts. Each work relies upon a co-creative relationship with living organisms to generate the basis for musical structures, for example; the collection of deep ocean data by southern elephant seals in Under the IceCap; and the related vignette piece of data re-interpretation, BioLogging Retrofit. Other works function to create structural modifications of existing musical scores as in the gradual erosion by Gastropods of a well known work by Messiaen to create the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot.
GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphol... more GeneMusiK is an artistic project that puts into play ideas about the capacity of physical morphologies to act as mnemonic systems by using DNA to transcode and re-mix musical structures. The project suggests that both biological and cultural information can function as both macro and the micro scale structures arrayed as physical loci and topologies which function as keys to the mapping of memory.
The author’s attraction to this on-going series of sound-works which combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores, is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy which substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance which carries with it the additional complications of nuanced interpretation and virtuosity, all of which combine to create a fluid matrix of cultural, social and biological exchange that act to flesh-out life-forms (as forms of life) across temporal and spatial barriers.
The on-going GeneMusiK project is related to associated works such as Under the IceCap and the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot, which again rely upon biological agents that operate within a broad combinatory framework of cultural, social and biological pathways. These works share overlapping creative methodologies, but each has been developed in varied geographic, biological and cultural contexts. Each work relies upon a co-creative relationship with living organisms to generate the basis for musical structures, for example; the collection of deep ocean data by southern elephant seals in Under the IceCap; and the related vignette piece of data re-interpretation, BioLogging Retrofit. Other works function to create structural modifications of existing musical scores as in the gradual erosion by Gastropods of a well known work by Messiaen to create the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot.
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accumulate intimate details gathered during repeated visits to a familiar
terrain, or are we perhaps transfixed and transformed by an encounter
with a solitary natural phenomenon? As with most complex questions,
the answer is almost certainly the interplay between approaches—
resulting in the formation of a third way that hybridises the familiar
with the exceptional.
Do we analyse the landscape, or experience it, perhaps through
walking? Does our knowledge of the place’s history colour our experience
of that place in the present? Do we study the environment, including its
history, or do we live inside that environment? Does imagination shape
our perception of place? Can we appreciate a place through artworks
created there, including paintings of the landscape?
The place in question is Bundanon, in the Shoalhaven River Valley,
NSW: a vast property of 1100 hectares overseen by the Bundanon
Trust since 1993. We have contributed to the Trust’s annual Siteworks
festival as a means of manifesting our reflections upon and relationships
to the landscape. We hope to act not as distant and impartial observers
but situated within the terrain, moving through it and working with it.
There are many paths to Bundanon, and we take them all in the
process of making this book. We consider the history of Bundanon—
its natural and cultural history—describing the many factors that have
shaped the environment of this place. We conduct a scientific analysis
of the soil in the Shoalhaven River Valley, analysing this environmental
data to reveal the impact of decades of human habitation. We use the
same technique of environmental science to examine the paint used
in an unfinished Arthur Boyd painting, on display in the Artist’s Studio
at Bundanon. We survey the terrain of Bundanon with drone footage,
tracing the Shoalhaven River and paths across the property. We walk
across some of those paths, describing the landscape and some of its
history. We glean differing perspectives on Bundanon through its depiction
in the landscape paintings of Arthur Boyd, and through a series of
artworks by Nigel Helyer, all initially exhibited at Bundanon.
The author’s attraction to this on-going series of sound-works which combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores, is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy which substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance which carries with it the additional complications of nuanced interpretation and virtuosity, all of which combine to create a fluid matrix of cultural, social and biological exchange that act to flesh-out life-forms (as forms of life) across temporal and spatial barriers.
The on-going GeneMusiK project is related to associated works such as Under the IceCap and the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot, which again rely upon biological agents that operate within a broad combinatory framework of cultural, social and biological pathways. These works share overlapping creative methodologies, but each has been developed in varied geographic, biological and cultural contexts. Each work relies upon a co-creative relationship with living organisms to generate the basis for musical structures, for example; the collection of deep ocean data by southern elephant seals in Under the IceCap; and the related vignette piece of data re-interpretation, BioLogging Retrofit. Other works function to create structural modifications of existing musical scores as in the gradual erosion by Gastropods of a well known work by Messiaen to create the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot.
The author’s attraction to this on-going series of sound-works which combine human and biological agency to re-invent musical scores, is directly proportional to the difficulty of the undertaking with its unpredictable outcomes and high failure rate. As a generative method the outcome is surrendered to the stochastic process of biological transformation, a strategy which substantially erodes the human agency and control invested in authorship. Ultimately the work is returned to the human sphere in the form of live musical performance which carries with it the additional complications of nuanced interpretation and virtuosity, all of which combine to create a fluid matrix of cultural, social and biological exchange that act to flesh-out life-forms (as forms of life) across temporal and spatial barriers.
The on-going GeneMusiK project is related to associated works such as Under the IceCap and the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot, which again rely upon biological agents that operate within a broad combinatory framework of cultural, social and biological pathways. These works share overlapping creative methodologies, but each has been developed in varied geographic, biological and cultural contexts. Each work relies upon a co-creative relationship with living organisms to generate the basis for musical structures, for example; the collection of deep ocean data by southern elephant seals in Under the IceCap; and the related vignette piece of data re-interpretation, BioLogging Retrofit. Other works function to create structural modifications of existing musical scores as in the gradual erosion by Gastropods of a well known work by Messiaen to create the Quartor pour la fin du temps à l’Escargot.