Onsite Sounds

Guest performance with Tarek Atoui's Waters' Witness

Museum of Contempoary Art

24 November 2023

Gail was one of two artists invited to perform with and in repsonse to Tarek Atoui's multichannel installation Waters' Witness. Gail tapped into Atoui's installation sending sounds through the sandstone boulders, iron girders and worm farm towers that comprise the work, melding her voice and machine noises with his solid materialities and liquid transformations, collaborating with Atoui's very present objects that manifest his absent presence.

Image courtesy the artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © Tarek Atoui. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

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Here Now Hear

site-responsive sound, text and visualworks

#2 Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 11 October - 4 November 2023

#1 Our Neon Foe, Sydney, 29 September - 1 October 2022

An ongoing project in which Gail takes sounds from the gallery environment creating compositions, textual responses and visual works such as wall tracings and spectral zither pieces. The visual components are inspired by the graphical tools found within digital software used to visualise the frequencies of sounds. In this way she is exploring a re-materialisation of her primarily digital sound-making practice.

Image: video still Sam James

Parkville Picnic
E-Orchestra

Workshops & Performance

11-22 September 2023 MPavilion, University of Melbourne

Gail Priest was the September artist-in-residence, working with students to devise a performance for the pavilion and surrounding park using digital devices (phones, laptops and homemade technology) to create an “E-Orchestra”.

The composition was inspired by the site and research into the history of bandstands as places of social cohesion and leisure. It could be argued that we are at a comparable crisis point in the early 21st century, as our mobile digital devices encourage insulation, isolation, and interior lifestyles. This performance uses the same technology to bring people back together, in public space.

Songs for Phantom Dances

A geolocated soundwalk by Gail Priest & Amy Flannery

April 2023-March 2024, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

Gail Priest and Amy Flannery rambled around Erskineville with ears tuned to sonic spectres and spirits. With a shared listening in the present they sought sonic histories and future speculations creating a suite of songs that encourage an understanding of place through the potential energy of the moving body.

You can experience the walk onsite or remotely. Start here. Download PDF catalogue here.

T5 Tank Project

T5 Fuel Tank, Georges Heights

Performances 19-20 January 2019; installation 23-27 January

Mosman Art Gallery & Syndey Festival

Artists: Gail Priest, David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Chris Caines (project instigator).

Mosman Art Gallery provided access to the decomissioned fuel tank from August 2018-Jan 2019, allowing the artists to create site-responsive, octophonic compositions. These compositions were performed live as part of the Sydney Festival and also in a self-playing installation mode. Gail created the three part composition 'Orbital Suite 1'.

Songmapping Ólafsfjörður

Site-resonsive compositions for Northern Iceland

September-October 2016, Listhus Artist Residency

Sound creations made in and around the town of Ólafsfjörður while on the Nor∂andvindur: North Wind Sound Art Residency at Listhus. There are two bodies of sound and photographic work—Heraclitus in Iceland and Singing with Scenery—that are geolocated via googlemaps and accessed via a websites. Heraclitus in Iceland is also available as a digital release.

Runic Engine: Industrial Dreaming

8 November-10 December 2016, Sonoretum, Kapelica Gallery, Lubljana, Slovenia

The 'Runic Engine' is a chance-based compositional structure derived from the format of a simple reading of the divinatory symbols called runes. Based on the interactive installation Urban Runes, this self-playing version was designed for the 8-speaker public sound space, the Sonoretum, at Kapelica.

Concept and sound: Gail Priest
Max/MSP programming: Wade Marynowsky
Image: Samuel James

More on Runic Engine: Industrial Dreaming

28 Songs for a City: Tokyo

Diorama of a City: Between Site and Space (Japan/Australia exchange)

13 September-13 October 2008, Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya

28 locations
28 live improvisations with the city
28 earprints to mark the spot

Over 28 days Gail went to different locations in Tokyo to make audio recordings. Listeneing to the sounds around her she then sang back what I heard, improvising a small tune with the city. In return for this sonic sample she left a token of her appreciation—a temporary imprint of my presence in the shape of an ear