Russia, Music, 2019
Sergey
Kasich
sergey kasich blurs the boundaries between artist and technologist into new forms of expression. His experimentation is heavily focused on installations, generative works, and demystifying and creating new musical tools, with specific interest in gesture and embodiment, urbanism, and architecture.
kasich’s newest installation, Preservation of Silence, combines architecture, urban and material studies, and sound, in order to highlight the disappearance of quiet spaces in urban contexts. The piece maps a city’s noise levels in order to determine its quietest area, and results in an impressive structure of noise-canceling walls made of materials with anechoic properties. Visitors entering the space reflect on the interesting solution of using a passive shape to change the dynamic conditions of an environment. Another recent work, FingerRing (2016), uses human skin’s electrical conductivity to create a multi-channel sound collage instrument. In imagining the device, kasich “looked to folk acoustic instruments, the theremin, and noise music, where the lack of standardization and abundance of system instability force the player to compensate with “hand-to-ear” adjustment during live performance.” – VICE. In the spirit of DIY, he shared instructions online, explaining how the instrument can be built in a very basic beginner form or elaborated with extra tools to be able to achieve more intricate sounds and player control.
While sergey has created regular artistic output over the past decade, his commitment to DIY and sound art communities has taken up most of his time. Seeing a need to build sound art and experimentation-oriented communities in Russia, he initiated the russian sound art community SoundArtist.ru in 2011. In 2014 he further developed this initiative into the SA))_gallery (Russia’s first ongoing sound art gallery) and the SA))_studio (an artist-run studio for experimental sound and multimedia arts). Through the yearly Podgotovlenniye Sredy Festival of experimental sound, which he established in 2009 in Moscow, sergey hosted one of Russia’s first electrical sound walks with invited artist Christina Kubisch (2013, supported by Goethe-Institut Moscow), as well as countless performances, workshops, and other events with Russian and international artists.
The Sevastopol, Crimea native completed undergraduate and graduate studies in Psychology (Lomonsov’s Moscow State University) that overlapped with five years of study at the studio Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music in Tchaikovsky’s Moscow State Conservatory.
kasich has participated in the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica jury (Digital Musics and Sounds Arts), and produced a Russian Sound Art Showcase for that same edition. He performed at the Takamatsu Media Art Festival in Japan (2015). In 2018 he presented his FingerRing technique at the NIME conference (Virginia Tech University, USA), and offered several months of FingerRing seminars at New York’s HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center. He curated Russian Sound Art Showcase for New York’s Electronic Art Festival in 2019.
Text: Taïca Replansky
