Category: Texts
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Imaginary Beings; three characters walk into a Bar.
Three characters walk into a bar, a Virus, a Human and Santa Claus. The bartender refuses to serve the Human and Santa Claus on the basis that he regards them as chimera, but happily serves the Virus with three beakers of industrial alcohol, which the Virus generously shares with his two colleagues. As the bar…
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Freeze Frame; Cinema and the Afterlife.
Quelle est votre plus grand ambition dans la vie? Devenire immortel et puis mourir. Jean-Luc Godard, À bout de souffle 1960. Fictionalising fiction. As a thirteen-year-old lad, I along with a couple of friends, were once left to kick our heels for the day in central London —we were the crew in a sailing regatta…
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Sonique; the life and art of Dr Sonique (the Graphic Novel)
Sonique; the Life and Art of Dr.Sonique, is the authorised biography of Dr. Nigel Helyer in the form of a speculative fiction Graphic Novel. The work is a collaboration between Sydney-based comic writer Mark Hobby, the Taiwan-based graphic designer The Milkman, and Dr. Sonique himself who provided copious amounts of factual, anecdotal, and totally fictional…
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Bed-time reading
Editions Sonique invites you to download a series of texts that have been sized for mobile devices. Some of these are published as hardback books and many are available as epubs (on Apple books) or as larger Pdf files on the Internet Archive. AlphaBravoCharlie and The Deluge Ark(ive) are also dedicated websites (see splash…
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Echo and Narcissus; and the contest for aural space.
Here is the essay Echo and Narcissus; and the contest for urban space, as a PDF formatted for mobile devices – read it instead of doing Wordle! In this article, I invite you to journey through the Sonic Commons, a resonant and contested geography, that encompasses shared human sonic experiences, public, private, and those imagined…
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Freeze Frame
Freeze Frame is a novel that explores the relationship between Cinema and the Afterlife. Set in a ‘soft’ post-environmental apocalypse the narrative features a set of semi-feral youths who also happen to be avid Cinephiles who attend the last functioning Cinema in the world. The Orpheum Cinema is managed by a mysterious group of Greek…
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Virtual talking in 2020
Here are two short video presentations given at the TTT conference (virtually in Wien, Austria 2020) Tracing Silence; Ecocide and Omnicide Co-composition and De-Composition; Biological Agency as a Compositional Tool.
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The Sound of Place; Environmental Artworks at Bundanon.
This essay by Nigel Helyer and John Potts listens to the sound of place: of Bundanon, a three thousand acre property in the Shoalhaven river valley in rural NSW, Australia. Bundanon is today an artists’ colony and education centre, following the gift to the Australian people in 1993 of the entire property—including homestead, artist studio…
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Co-Composition and De-Composition Biological agency as a compositional tool.
This paper examines a series of creative sound-works which combine human and biological agents to re-mix, create and re-invent musical scores. The central concept is to consider Genes, Memes and Musical notation as parallel mnemonic structures that function as instructions for the fleshing-out of life across temporal barriers. GeneMusiK and associated works Under the IceCap…
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Semi-Automatic Writing: An Opera for Human and Machine Voices.
Semi-Automatic Writing; an Opera for Human and Machine Voices. Debut ABC Radio National (1991). Nigel Helyer ~ Libretto, Direction, Sound Design and Production. Rhys Rees – Music. PDF of the Libretto.Semi-Automatic Writing; an Opera for Human and Machine Voices An ABC Radio National commission for the Listening Room. Original broadcast 1991. The Libretto. SFX Orchestra…