Bojan Gagić is a multimedia artist based between Zagreb and Vienna. He mostly works in the form of sound art, installations and luminoacoustics.

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Twelve Dead Birds

A Template for Possible Development of Genetic Digital Systems

P R E F A C E: D A V O R K A B E G O V I Ć
The artistic idea behind Bojan Gagić’s artwork "12 Dead Birds" relates primarily to research and rethinking of relations between the digital and physical world, their common characteristics and possible extensions. A genetic code is gathered from the digital object and, during further processing, transformed into a music DNA score, with the final form being an auditive image of that same object. In this artwork, Gagić rethinks the wider usage of old software that has been deprived of its function, for which it has been created. He then uses this software in his artistic creation, fostering in this manner the formation of new research directions in new media artistic practices.

On the occasion of the 43rd World Communications Day (23rd October 2009), Pope Benedict XVI has officially proclaimed the digital media as a new digital continent. This proclamation of the Catholic church on the topic of digital system development has been awaited for the last 30 years, since it became clear that the development of personal computers and similar devices are the pivotal technological innovation of the 21st century. Yet the definition was not clear until the social digital communications systems emerged.

If we look more carefully into this definition, we can see that the word continent is the most interesting part of it – and this continent can be defined as an interconnected mass of the Earth’s surfaces. A continent has two main characteristics: it has its own borders (water) and it is populated by living beings. In determining the borders of a digital continent, we can easily conclude that these borders are represented by the physical world. Much like the continents rising from the water surrounding them, digital media also exists within the physical reality. It is much more difficult to determine the inhabitants of this digital continent; we can conclude that it is populated by different digital codes, sequences linked together to form content comprehensible to human beings (images, films, text, tools and similar). But how can they be defined in the context of the living/non-living? Although all digital content is defined as a cluster of information not belonging to the biological world, we need to state that each of these digital entries has its form, colour, shape, meaning, and a certain energy structure.

The seriousness of this hypothesis is becoming evident in the development of the cyber proto-science during the past few years in which different types of digital bio-implants are being used more and more in order to facilitate/expand the possibilities of communication methods’. For example, some of them refer to implanting microchips for control or inhibition that allow identification and detection of health conditions of a biological subject, or expanding the basic sensory capabilities so that different types of radiation can be located, infrared soundwaves heard, much larger light spectrum seen etc.

So, who lives on the digital continent?
Can we determine the code systems as a certain form of life known to us?
What kind of new artistic forms can come out of this systematization?

In the early 90s, programmer John F. Dunn and biologist Mary Anne Clarc presented ArtWonk – one of the first public software for analysis and conversion of DNA and protein sequences. The software has been designed for the purpose of analyzing and converting data stored in the existing genetic banks into sound and image data. It was the result of their decade-long research during which they worked on translating complex bio-data repositories into numeric protocols that can be used in sonification processes. Simultaneously, Nobuo Munakata and Kenshi Hayashi also deal with analysis and mathematical translation of DNA systems, advocating as well for the sonification process.

Installation side left, backtranslating 6

In the artwork "12 Dead Birds", Gagić achieves the translation of the binary code of the file by changing the extension of any file in the computer to the .txt unicode entry. This entry is analysed in the Dunn/Clarc BioEditor that searches the given material with the aim of discovering simple genetic sequences (DNA and protein series) found in the digital entry. There are thousands of these sequences, even in the simplest digital organisms such as ordinary .jpeg photographs. It must be noted that each file is made of unique genetic material. In the next phase, the selected genetic material is being transformed into .mid files using already established patterns of converting genetic sequences into sheet music. In short, the file that is being analysed within the media in which it had been created is defined as a living being. From its genetic structure, a new basic structure of the musical record is derived.

(Based on a text written by Bojan Gagić)

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2022
Davorka Begović
interactive spatial-sound installation
Pogon Jedinstvo
Kontejner Collective
Greta Creative Network
Miodrag Gladović
Sanja Bistričić

Positive Feedback of An Acoustic Signal

A+B, Circle of Emptiness

P R E F A C E : E V E L I N A T U R K O V I Ć
The works of multimedia artist Bojan Gagić created in the last few years are defined, often very loosely, as new forms of acoustic expression. We are concerned here with synergetic, environmental performances, in which initial visual impulses are transmitted or transformed into acoustic responses, or perhaps initial impulses of an entirely different nature are transformed into sound. A tragic story from the history of the author’s family, about the forced separation of his grandfather and grandmother, became, for example, at the end a composition of entirely abstract acoustic signal , which were also very symbolic in their long-lasting monotony ( I N T E R I E U R ). In spite of the occasional complex story as the groundwork or a complicated electronic equipment, in Gagić’s installations or performances, what is dominant is in fact a minimalist quality. He uses on the whole basic manifestations of a certain phenomenon: pure light, for example, sometimes just sunlight, or the light of a single theatrical spotlight, or in sound, an even drone or heartbeats. The medium of performance is almost always synonymous with the content that it communicates.

The intuitive composition that Bojan Gagić performed for Picture of Sound was created, we might say, out of nothing. A set of four speakers and four microphones combined with a sound panel transmitted no kind of external sound, only their own signals. That is, all the sounds were created by a process of transmitting small acoustic irregularities from the input audio signal – the microphone – to the output audio signal – the speaker, and their incessant repetition and amplification. Or put more professionally, the Larsen effect, or microphony, in which source A produces more B, which in feedback produces more A. The artist gave his composition shape on the spot at the audio control panel, according to the characteristics of the actual speakers and microphones, without any additional source of sound or subsequent effects.

live recording from Meštrović Pavillion Zagreb, 2012
sound engineer: Tomislav Šamec
24’50’’

In the description of this audio work it is worth mentioning that it was recorded in the Meštrović Pavilion in Zagreb, in an outstandingly acoustic space the shape of which will amplify and additionally transform every sound value. The author went into a gallery, with all the connotations that the space itself has, without any content or any work. Out of this silence, determined by the features of the space, of the equipment and his own momentary mood, he produced his composition.

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2012
Evelina Turković
live recording for radio broadcasting+live set
Evelina Turković
Picture of Sound-Croatian National Radio
Picture of Sound exhibition,
Pogon Jedinstvo, Zagreb, 2013
Croatian National Radio
Tomislav Šamec

Azot After Wain

cat/Cat/cAt/caT

P R E F A C E : I V A N B U J G E R
Louis Wain (1860 - 1939) was a successful British painter of the first half of the 20th century who got famous with his drawings and paintings of his family cat, Peter. He made the paintings for his wife Emily who suffered from breast cancer, so as to alleviate her suffering during her final years.

After her death and after the World War I, Wain suffered from schizophrenia, but continued painting cats. Those paint- ings done during the time he was affected by shizophrenia have strange forms, colours and antropomorphic structures through which we can trace the development of disease.

Azot After is a series of works by Zagreb based authors, Ivan Bujger, Ivo Korečić, Ronald Panza and Bojan Gagić, which explores recontextualisation of artistic practices and ideas through a contemporary multimedia expression (Azot After Cage, Azot After Bogdanović, Azot After Richter, Azot After Azot...).

The resulting video serves as a score for developing a musical composition, where the tonal values and way of performing depend on changes in the video material that occur in the moment, according to pre-defined settings (blur in the image = reverb in sound, colours = pitch, etc.).

Public performance includes a video score that is shown on the projection screen and audio material which is created live, in a form of electroacoustic concert.

video interview: Karolina Rugle/Izlog suvremenog zvuka

AZOT (2005-2013)
Azot is an electro-acoustic drone quartet from Zagreb, Croatia. Active from 2005, the quartet started out of a wish for free musical improvising. Initially influenced by so-called onkyo style of electro-acoustic improvisation (Otomo Yoshihide, Toshimaru Nakamura, Keith Rowe, etc) which was developed from the fusion of Japanese gagaku music and western experimental tradition. These artists treat sound in a painterly manner, placing a great deal of attention to silence. This particular style of music set out to minimise the time spent between the music production and presentation. It renders the musican almost invisible, allowing one to achieve a higher level of concentration for listening and playing alike. Artistic impulses modulated by these principles manage to create temporary 'audible thoughts' unrepeatable by nature.

The quartet, through regular meetings, has further developed these basic principles by addition of a continuous and concentrated 'empty' sound - the drone, which in its minimal shifts provides the clearest background for the ongoing actions in the soundspace. The drone somewhat resembles continuous forms of French composer Eliane Radigue but also gives a nod to white noise symbolism as well as doom metal aesthetics...

Azot has given a great number of concerts around Croatia, both solo as well as supporting various other artists, including Tetsuo Furudate, No Necks Blues Band, jgrzinich, etc. The band was also heavily involved in organising the only festival of drone, minimal and electronic music in Zagreb called SineLinea (2009-2021)

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2013.
Davorka Begović
audio video live set
Izlog suvremenog zvuka
Kultura promjene SCa

Remix Mangelos

sentence, message, formula, manifest

P R E F A C E : B O J A N G A G I Ć
Remix Mangelos is a sound-visual installation created through the form of concert before an audience. The work has been created as an hommage to the work of the art historian, curator and artist Dimitrij Basicevic Mangelos (Sid 1921 – Zagreb 1987). His works can be found in the collections of world museums such as Centre Georges Pompidou, MoMa and the Tate Modern. In Croatia, his work is still largely unknown.

In one of his artistic stages DB Mangelos used school globes which he covered with color and on them wrote certain sentences, messages, formula, manifests. This form of creation he called landscapes.

Bojan Gagic performed Remix Mangelos for the first time in 2002. in the Church of St. Dominic in Zadar as a part of the project Digging the Channel and in collaboration with the Boston based artistic group Mobius; soon after he performed it as a part of the off program of Mittelfest in Cividale and art residency in Lazareti. In 2004 the work was presented in the Museum of Contemporary Art as a part of the experimental program Pilot 04.

In the project the artist also uses school globes 40 cm in diagonal in matte black color. They don’t contain any text, they are Tabula Rasa by themselves. Above the globes on the gallery construction in the central part of the room there are spot lights which receive a dimmer signal through a multichannel light processor. The channels are divided in several different groups according to frequencies.

Switching on, off and the intensity of each spot light varies depending on the input sound signal which comes from the audio mixer and which is created in a live performance by the musicians. After a period of time, the heat from the spot lights above the globes begins to alter their structure so that they begin to melt. At the very end of the performance, globes remain as gallery objects of altered form. The alteration of form is the alteration of content.

Basically, the story is very simple:

our internal world
through sound
transformed into light
alters matter around us

The alteration of the globe structure is my sentence, message, formula, manifest.

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2002
Mobius Art Group
sound installation
St. Dominic Church, Zadar
(part of project DIGGING THE CHANELL)
Claudia Nanni, Antonija Majača
Mobius Art Group

Sounds In Disappearance

Means to An End

P R E F A C E : B O J A N G A G I Ć
When we first talked about the sound mapping of Trešnjevka, everything seemed clear: a series of locations where I wanted to stop, which I wanted to capture, to connect, the interiors, exteriors, early mornings, evenings, rains, trams, little streets that I am led through by some very personal memories. Trešnjevka is the place of my growing up, my first public and clearly defined microcosm. A solid amount of sounds was collected, now follows listening to it in the studio, editing, overdubbing, dramaturgy of sound image. It doesn’t sound good. All together one after the other, this isn’t Trešnjevka to me. Not the one that I think it should be. Problem, panic, scratching my head. Withdrawal from my original intention. Dropping the spaces that I remember and the attempt to find spaces from nineteen-seventy-something in the sounds of two-thousand-and-sixteen.

I have a child. A girl aged six and a half. We moved from Bužanova Street to Trešnjavka when she was a year and a half. Next month she is going back to Bužanova, somehow it seems I can say she grew up on Trešnjevka. I don’t know what she will remember when she grows up and if anything of that Trešnjevka will be important to her. But this is her recording. Once, if she wishes, she will be able to hear the sounds of her first microcosm: the hall of a kindergarten, the walk to grandma’s building, the shop where she bought ice cream, karate in Dom sportova, the place where dad had coffee, the little park, the tram she took to town, the cellar where the sleds are when there is no snow, the neighbour’s balcony, walks around the neighbourhood… What this sounds like, is what you will find out after the ride in a van around Trešnjevka. She will find out about it probably only after some ten years in a car ride for two.

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2016
BLOK, CURATORIAL COLLECTIVE
(Ana Kutleša, Ivana Hanaček, Vesna Vuković)
audio tour on wheels
Mapiranje Trešnjevke, Zagreb

Bojan Gagić
Mario Šarlog
BLOK

Ciphers Of Sonorous Cities

Azot After Bogdanović

P R E F A C E : R O N A L D P A N Z A
For Bogdan Bogdanović, an urban philosopher, a city is awareness of symbols. A city has to be thoroughly read in order to be a city, and its citizen is the one who reflects himself in his cities mirrors. If there is nothing to be read, the city can risk losing the continuity of history. Urban quandaries give opportunities for reading to exist. Many of them are obviously present; however there are those which appear differently. Sound is present in cities, as a transient but also a constitutional element.

Do physical cities also contain within them cities of sound which continually change within one sound? What is left at these locations of change are drawings, acoustic codes – they are the doors for entering these invisible cities.

Bogdanović considered Mostar a city in which "the builder builds with consideration". All those urban quandaries certainly remained beyond ordinary reality, while on them lay patches of fresh emptiness. And that demolished Mostar, the city of Bogdan Bogdanović and his friends, in its recollection is now surely a city of sound as well. It is quite possible that sound is the only tactile approach to recollection.

In his school, "Mistrija pod orahom", Bogdanović required his students to improvise. Regularly, his lectures consisted of asking students to draw a complete city, while giving them only 90 seconds to do so. Therefore, impossible and unseen constructions evolved.

In their performance Azot will, by applying the Master Craftsman’s principles, be providing their code of their city of sound, with an acousmatic and improvised approach.

AZOT (2005-2013)
Azot is an electro-acoustic drone quartet from Zagreb, Croatia. Active from 2005, the quartet started out of a wish for free musical improvising. Initially influenced by so-called onkyo style of electro-acoustic improvisation (Otomo Yoshihide, Toshimaru Nakamura, Keith Rowe, etc) which was developed from the fusion of Japanese gagaku music and western experimental tradition. These artists treat sound in a painterly manner, placing a great deal of attention to silence. This particular style of music set out to minimise the time spent between the music production and presentation. It renders the musican almost invisible, allowing one to achieve a higher level of concentration for listening and playing alike. Artistic impulses modulated by these principles manage to create temporary 'audible thoughts' unrepeatable by nature.

The quartet, through regular meetings, has further developed these basic principles by addition of a continuous and concentrated 'empty' sound - the drone, which in its minimal shifts provides the clearest background for the ongoing actions in the soundspace. The drone somewhat resembles continuous forms of French composer Eliane Radigue but also gives a nod to white noise symbolism as well as doom metal aesthetics...

Azot has given a great number of concerts around Croatia, both solo as well as supporting various other artists, including Tetsuo Furudate, No Necks Blues Band, jgrzinich, etc. The band was also heavily involved in organising the only festival of drone, minimal and electronic music in Zagreb called SineLinea (2009-2021)

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2011
Amila Puzić, Mela Žuljević
audio live set
OKC Abrašević, Mostar
Abart/(RE)COLLECTING MOSTAR

Happy Place

Not Visible On Google Maps

P R E F A C E : K A R O L I N A R U G L E
The work consists of twelve autonomous loudspeakers, twelve floor sensors and the main computer containing the recordings of happy places - locations chosen by the blind residents of Tokyo, recorded a couple of days earlier. Each of these sounds is a separate story with site-specific structure, the narrative of which depends on the moment the recording was made.

The overall sound landscapes are formed by movement of people (audience) at the site of the installation.

Each of us has their own happy place(s). The idea of someone’s happy place changes depending on person’s feelings and states, upbringing, life situations we are put through. My daughter says she has many happy places. My grandmother was blind, her happy place was her armchair in the living room. My happy place changes depending on my mood.

Neurophysiology teaches us that every thought is an image, sometimes realistic, sometimes abstract, but always an image. It has its shape, its colors, a certain energy charge. Somehow, from that, one could derive a theory of the dominance of the sight over all other senses, at least in the times we live in, as we do indeed conquest the world around us through sight.

Deprived of sight, blind people construct their images, thoughts and memories in a different way. Mostly through sound and touch. They don’t hear better than we see. But they listen and hear in a different manner, for them sound carries some meanings and content that elude us – people relying on sight.

voice: M.A.
2’01”

Field recording as one of the art forms of sound is nothing new. In 1889, an eight-year-old boy, Ludwig Koch, recorded the sound of birds outside his home using an Edison cylindrical wax phonograph. Through the years, the form has evolved in various directions; we record sounds of untouched nature, undersea, space, electrostatic storm surges, melting ice, deserts and rainforests, we record the sound of everything.

The ambient-sound installation The Happy Place is simple. In its core it carries recorded sounds of the happy places of blind people living in Tokyo. As they listen differently, they will walk us through their particular landscapes of the ordinary. Because, with all due respect to the universe and electrostatic discharge, the happy place is here and now.

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2019
Karolina Rugle
interactive sound installation
Dubrovnik summer festival
(part of project: The Future of Ambiance)
Dubrovnik Summer Festival
Art workshop Lazareti
Bojan Gagić

Soundentity

Full Range Society

P R E F A C E : A N A D A N A B E R O Š
Full Range Society is a participatory audio installation by the artist duo Lightune.G (Bojan Gagić and Miodrag Gladović) and part of the Actopolis Zagreb project Invisible Belonging, curated by Ana Dana Beroš.

Conceived by Lightune.G as a "composition in the making", the work consists of two parts. The first part is the installation ZVUČNE ISKAZNICE: SOUNDENTITY, taking place in Greta Gallery. The second part of the project will be introduced to a global audience in September 2016 as a web application, which is based on a virtual, statistically demographic sound map of Europe.

Lightune.G: (Bojan Gagić and Miodrag Gladović) about FULLRANGESOCIETY:"The installation at the Greta Gallery is a creation of personal composition which is formed by every visitor through the contribution of different parameters via a questionnaire with questions about gender, age, nationality, religion, marital status, assets, family status and so on. Every recorded data changes the structure of the sound in the room and the result is a personalized audio image of the single person. With this approach we would like to emphasize the uniqueness of every person regardless of the belonging to any social context."
(BOJAN GAGIĆ)
"The web project gives us an access to the complexity of human relations inside of communities we call states. Through public data of the population in several European states it`s possible to observe the changes these countries went through the history. Like in the installation, the focus lies on the transformation from data to sound.”
(MIODRAG GLADOVIĆ)

ACTOPOLIS | The Art of Action A project of the Goethe-Institut and Urbane Künste Ruhr
Concept: Angelika Fitz
Artisitc direction: Katja Aßmann, Angelika Fitz and Martin Fritz
Project management: Juliane Stegner, Goethe-Institut Athen
Project coordination: Natalia Sartori, Goethe-Institut Athen
Project management: Urbane Künste Ruhr: Daniel Klemm
Local curators: Ankara / Mardin: Pelin Tan, Athens: Elpida Karaba / Glykeria Stathopoulou, Belgrade: Boba Mirjana Stojadinović, Bucharest: Ștefan Ghenciulescu / Raluca Voinea, Oberhausen: Geheimagentur, Sarajevo: Danijela Dugandžić, Zagreb: Ana Dana Beroš.
Co-producers: Goethe Institut Ankara(Thomas Lier; Raimund Wördemann); Goethe-Institut Belgrad(Matthias Müller-Wieferig); Goethe-Institut Bucuresti (Beate Köhler; Evelin Hust); Goethe-Institut Bosnien und Herzegowina(Charlotte Hermelink); Goethe-Institut Kroatien (Katrin Ostwald-Richter), Theater Oberhausen (Peter Carp)

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2016
Ana Dana Beroš
participatory sound installation
Greta Gallery
part of Actopolis project
Goethe Institute
Matija Kralj
Matija Kralj