Making a Diagonal with Music / Hacer Una Diagonal con la Musica

Aura Satz, 'Making a Diagonal with Music / Hacer Una Diagonal con la Musica', film still, 2019

A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrete alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the '50s and '60s. Here she discusses her 'sound hunting' recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialization. Featuring creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.

Exhibitions:

Opening on 23 April, Lei ricalibra / She recalibrates marks the first Italian solo exhibition of filmmaker and sound artist Aura Satz, continuing program dedicated to sound art in AuditoriumArte, One Space / One Sound. The exhibition brings together a series of video portraits devoted to pioneering figures in electronic music—composers who have often been overlooked, yet whose work has been fundamental to the development of sound technologies, notation systems, coding practices, and to the very materiality of sound itself. Among them are Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, and Beatriz Ferreyra. Complementing these works is a film focusing on the contemporary deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie (b. 1965). At the core of the exhibition lies the notion of recalibrating sound in electronic music through the dial—the control knob—as explored in the drawing series She recalibrates. Here, the dial becomes both a conceptual and material device for refining perception: a means of recalibrating listening through a feminist lens. In doing so, the exhibition restores visibility to these composers, positioning them as key figures—liberatory and transformative—who re-centered listening through experimentation and imagination, ultimately reshaping how we relate to the world.

Opening on the 22 April, 'Dial Tone Drone' (2014) will be exhibited at l’Accademia di Spagna a Roma, as part of “Qué bien che siamo donne”, two months dedicated to feminist artistic practices. In collaboration with the Spanish Academy in Rome.

Like one of those children’s crosswords puzzles consisting of a page full of numbered dots that, when connected with lines, draw us the silhouette of an animal or a recognizable figure. This exhibition takes this displacement of the hand on the paper as a way of approaching the cinema of Aura Satz. The difference is that here the dots are not numbered. They exist, but no notation can capture them. Drawing the contour thus becomes an elusive, shifting, interchangeable procedure, but also precise and generative. Connections happen in an experiential dimension without prescription. They happen in a more intimate, affective and sensual development. Attuning focuses on a particular set of works within Aura Satz’s body of work from some blind spots – but not deaf ones – of the dominant narrative of electronic music and the conventions that have perpetuated it. The artist portrays a series of female composers who have been relevant to the development of electroacoustic music and the technologies associated with the creation of electronic sounds. The exhibition includes 'Oramics: Atlantis Anew' (2011), conceived as a tribute to Daphne Oram; 'Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken' (2016), an intimate profile of the study of American composer Laurie Spiegel; and 'Making a Diagonal with Music' (2019), with electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, a promoter of concrete music along with Pierre Schaeffer.

On 23 November at 18:30h, there will be a listening session with two of the artist’s telephone sound compositions: 'Dial Tone Drone', 2014, with Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel and 'Tone Transmissions', 2020, with Éliane Radigue, Julia Eckhardt, and Rhodri Davies. For this event, we will be joined by Aura Satz. After listening to the two sound pieces, there will be a dialogue between Aura Satz and Carolina Jiménez, the curator of the Attuning series.

In Z Gallery programme, Aura Satz presents the films 'Oramics: Atlantis Anew,' 'Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Take' and 'Hacer una diagonal con la musica,' three works based on three pioneers in the field of electronic music. 'She Recalibrates' (2018) are a series of drawin fine-tuning the sound in a listening feedback loop."

*Hacer una diagonal con la musica*. 2019. 10 min. A short film about Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, a pioneer of musique concrete together with Pierre Schaeffer during the 1950s and 1960s. Here she discusses her 'sound hunting' recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialization, illustrated through onomatopoeia and dynamic hand gestures. In the key opening scene, Ferreyra is seen listening to the miniscule creaks produced by a door, expanding the simple binary of open vs closed to encompass an entire sound universe, an expanded bandwidth of what can be heard and how we might listen.

*Oramics: Atlantis Anew*. 2011. 7 min. Conceived as an artist's film that pays tribute to Daphne Oram, pioneer of British electronic music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, the film depicts a close encounter with her unique Oramics machine invention, housed in the Science Museum in London.

*Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken*. 2016. 8 min. Following Satz's earlier films about women composers and inventors of electronic music, this short film offers an intimate look into the studio of American composer Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945). Renowned for her electronic music compositions and algorithmic composition software, the film also reveals all manner of musical and technological paraphernalia, ranging from sheet music to DIY inventions and collections of quirky toys. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Spiegel and Laurie's voiceover reflecting on electronic music and the process of composing.

The* Z Gallery* (Z for zinema, cinema in Basque) programme is neither a season of films nor an exhibition. It is a project that constructs an intermediate space from which to reflect on and draw attention to works by artists making the leap into the cinematographic field as well as filmmakers exploring the exhibition format. It is a programme arising from the determined gesture of thinking about the moving image in the museum. A programme that aims to bring to the public authors interested in searching for new narrative forms by questioning the genres that historically categorise cinematographic language.

Curator: Garbiñe Ortega. Catalogue includes newly commissioned essays by Jo Hutton and Xabier Erkizia.

Interview in Elemmental Magazine https://elemmental.com/2022/02/18/aura-satz-entrevista/

Aura Satz, 'Making a Diagonal with Music / Hacer Una Diagonal con la Musica', film still, 2019

4-18 Feb 2022

Vdrome online, introduced by Ela Bittencourt

Screenings:

22 Jan - 2 Feb 2020

IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) World Premiere, screening as part of Bright Future Shorts

5-19 Feb 2020

'Doc Fortnight' at MoMA, NY (US premiere)

Doc Fortnight celebrates its 19th edition with some of the most formally innovative, thought-provoking documentary and hybrid films being made in the world today. This year's edition features 12 world premieres, 17 North American premieres, and 14 US premieres from 38 countries. Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, with Stergios Dinopoulos, 12-Month Intern, Department of Film. The Nonfiction+ sidebar is organized by Kathy Brew, Consulting Curator.

13-18 May 2020
Shortlisted for competition at 66th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen

Because of the Corona crisis, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is currently organising its 66th edition as an online edition. The festival is happy to announce that all five competitions - International Competition, German Competition, NRW Competition, Children's and Youth Film Competition and the MuVi Award for the best German music video - will be presented online. They will be accessible between 13 and 18 May, when the online festival will be open to both the public and professionals. For the International Competition, the largest and oldest of the Festival, 57 works were originally selected. 56 of these will be screened in the online festival.

1-14 August 2020
Shortlisted for EX-now competition, EXis Experimental Film and Video Festival, Seoul

25 August - 8 Sep 2020
Shortlisted for Indiemusic competition, IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon

22-25 Oct 2020
Screening as part of 'She Makes Noise' festival, La Casa Encendida,Madrid

Festival de musica y cine dedicado a mujeres que se dedican a la musica electronica y al audiovisual contemporaneo con perspectiva de genero. Un proyecto de Playtime Audiovisuales y La Casa Encendida. VI edicion Octubre 2020 - Madrid

While I yet live, de Maris Curran. EE.UU., 2018. 14'.
Making a diagonal with music, de Aura Satz. 2020. Reino Unido, 2010. 10'.
Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story, de Posy Dixon. Reino Unido, Canada, Belgica, Paises Bajos, EE.UU., 2019.

2 - 10 October 2021
Artist Special Focus screenings and live performance as part of VideoEx, Experimental film & Video Festival Zurich

4 Feb 2022
Screening as part of 'Looking at Listening: Films on Women and Experimental Music' at The Block Museum of Art, Evanston IL

7-10 April 2022
Films screening as parts of Rewire festival, the Hague

9 Dec 2022
'Little Doorways to Paths not Yet Taken' & 'Making a Diagonal with Music' screening as part of Mono-Poly, curated by Debris Facility and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne

21 March 2026
Screening at part of Luke Fowler #1 - carte blanche, Cinéma du réel, Paris