Philip Samartzis is a sound artist and curator with a specific interest in the social and environmental conditions informing remote wilderness regions and their communities. Philip is an Associate Professor within RMIT School of Art, and the artistic director of the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture.
Philip’s art practice is based on deep fieldwork where he deploys complex sound recording technology to capture natural, anthropogenic and geophysical forces. He is particularly interested in concepts of perception, immersion and embodiment in order to provide audiences with sophisticated encounters of space and place.
Philip’s Sounds Unheard masterclass series, “Environmental Sound”, takes us into the world of field recordings and sound art. We’ll be looking at how everyday and natural sounds from different environments can be used in compositions and collaborations, and hearing some of the stories behind Philip’s works created in remote areas including Antarctica, the Swiss and Australian Alps, and the Kimberley region of northern Western Australian.
In the final episode of this series, “Collaboration & Complication”, Philip discusses sound art as an extension of avant-garde musical practices and a rich field for for collaboration. Sound artists can work with musicians, composers, visual artists, photographers, film makers, architects and artists from vastly different areas. Through collaboration with others, we can feed unexpected new ideas and approaches into our artistic works.
In this episode Philip discusses his collaboration on ‘Polar Force’ with Speak Percussion, which emerged from Philip’s initial field work in Antarctica. We also look at how Philip’s collaborations can recreate parts of the experience of being in the field for audiences – through architecture, volume, and deliberately creating a certain level of discomfort.
