Open call for British Library Sounds Commission
To be premiered at the Supersonic Festival
Deadline for applications: 5pm Friday 27 March 2015
Commission dates: April – June 2015
Performance/installation:
Supersonic Festival, Birmingham, June 11 – 14 2015
Supersonic Festival are delighted to be partnering with the British Library to offer an opportunity for an artist to develop a new work as part of the festival programme in June 2015. The successful artist will have the opportunity to work with selected material and their associated documentation in the Library’s archive to create a new work culminating in a performance or an installation at the festival, as well as being archived within the British Library’s sound collection.
This commission will be presented at the Supersonic Festival, 11 – 14 June, the UK’s premier experimental music and arts festival. Its international reputation and multidisciplinary programme draws audience, artists and industry professionals from across the globe ensuring a great showcase for this new work. For more information on the festival visit www.supersonicfestival.com
The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment, from the 1880s to the present day. It has recently launched the Save our Sounds programme which is a major digitisation project to preserve the nation’s sound heritage www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds.
For this commission, selection of wildlife and environmental recordings from the collection will be made available and will include, among other things, the songs & calls of British birds, the soundscapes of natural habitats such as woodland, marshland and the British coastline, and a range of environmental recordings covering weather, waves, streams, rivers and more. Additonal content from other curatorial areas may also be available, subject to availability and rights clearance
More information on the collections can be found at http://sounds.bl.uk
The selected applicant will receive a £750 fee for the development and performance of the commission. They will receive mentoring from the Supersonic team and an introduction to the collections from the British Library’s Curator, Wildlife and Environmental Sounds.
How to Apply:
To apply please send a proposal that includes all of the following:
Your name, contact details and website address.
A short statement explaining why you want to undertake the commission and what you hope to gain by working in this context (300 words max). Also tell us about two pieces of recent work that you are most proud of (200 words max) please save these documents together as a PDF or .doc file.
Evidence of your current work in the following form:
2 x links to your work uploaded to Soundcloud or You Tube/Vimeo.
Please send to [email protected] with ‘BL_SS commission’ in the title
Email attachments must not be larger than 5MB. Application is by email only.
Deadline for applications: 27 March 2015