Vocal Flame is fiery sound sculpture using a Ruben's Tube, an acoustic device which visualizes sound as a standing wave of small flames. The soundtrack that animates the flickering flames features a histrionic voice-over, exploring the various embodiments of ventriloquized voices in popular culture, particularly the female voice in film. The voiceover conjures narratives of a biblical burning bush, a self-consuming flame alphabet, the moulded vocal training of My Fair Lady and the acousmatic notion of a voice without source, hidden behind a veil or curtain. Working through Radar's theme of the performing object from the perspective of the implicit ventriloquism of making an object speak, Vocal Flame aims to expose the malleability, violence and porosity of vocal manipulation.

Devised and scripted by Aura Satz, voiceover performed by vocalist Jennifer Walshe and music composed by musician, composer, and founding Siouxie and the Banshees member Steven Severin.

Excerpt of Aura Satz - Vocal Flame from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

Screenings:

3-7 October 2013

Screened at the 51st New York Film Festival, 'Views from the Avant-garde', curated by Mark McElhatten

Our popular yearly touchstone for experimental film returns with 45 programs in glorious Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film and HD formats. Many familiar faces have returned and this year's slate feature 45 new artists as well as several mini-retrospectives of artists including, Aura Satz, Lois Patino, Sandro Aguilar, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Views will also offer special tributes to the late Stom Sogo and Anne Robertson, whose work is a testimony to the power of a cinema that is fearless, confidential and inextinguishable. Curated by Mark McElhatten.

13 May 2015

'Soundfigures: Films by Aura Satz'

A selection of films by Aura Satz, DIM Cinema, Vancouver Cinametheque, programmed by Michele Smith

(Near) extinct technologies make sound visible in this program of shorts by London-based artist Aura Satz that delve into ideas of knowledge, memory, and communication. On a Chladni Plate, a device that marked the birth of acoustics, grains of sand, moving like Busby Berkeley dancers, form intricate patterns in response to changing sound frequencies, their shapes recalling the utopian quest for a 'pure,' onomatopoeic alphabet. Wax cylinder recordings combine with modern scientific instruments to animate a text by Rainer Maria Rilke on the possibility of hearing the dead by playing their skulls with a gramophone needle. A Ruben's Tube translates a histrionic voice-over into a standing wave of small flames, provoking unexpected associations, from the biblical burning bush to various acts of ventriloquism in pop culture. Breaking its long silence, the Oramics Machine plays hand-drawn compositions by its inventor, electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram. Kaleidoscopic effects in the lamphouse of a 35mm film printer honour Natalie Kalmus, colour consultant on masterpieces of the Technicolor era. Chromatic distortions in early colour-film tests are revealed through the eyes of the George Eastman family and old Hollywood stars. In a dramatic finale, Satz and experimental filmmaker Lis Rhodes encode their voices as abstract light patterns on 16mm mono and 35mm stereo filmstrips in a collaborative exploration of sound-image synchronicity.

18 Feb 2016

'Between the Bullet and the Hole' (Plus Other Shorts) at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Aura Satz presents the UK premiere of 'Between the Bullet and the Hole', her latest short film which examines the role of women in ballistic research, early computing and pattern perception in warfare. Presented alongside her works focusing on memory, notation, encryption and gender, the event also features an in conversation with special guests Morgan Quaintance and David Alan Grier.

24 March 2016

'In and Out of Synch' an evening of films and sound with Aura Satz presented by Liquid Architecture and Gertrude Contemporary

Satz presents works that explore the relationship between esoteric technologies (Chladni plate, Rubens' tube, theremin, mechanical music machines, phonographs, dial tones, drawn/optical sound) and the human body (heightened perception, sensory disorientation, psychoacoustics) and how these are mediated by notation systems, languages and codes. Followed by Q&A with Joel Stern.

7th March 2017

'Between the Bullet and the Hole' (Plus Other Shorts) at HOME Manchester

Followed by Q&A with Chris Paul Daniels