Open call: Dada Sounds – celebrating 100 years of Dada

We’re pleased to launch an open call for our latest Cities and Memory project – Dada Sounds.

We’re looking for sound designers, artists and musicians to help us create a sonic tribute to the creativity and influence of Dadaism on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire.

Cities and Memory: Dada Sounds is a project to mark a century of Dadaism by applying the techniques and practices of Dada to field recordings from around the world, bringing a Dadaist approach to the concepts of sound, place and memory.

February 5, 2016 marks 100 years since the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and thus the beginning of Dada.

Cities and Memory: Dada Sounds invites artists to apply the techniques of Dada to field recordings and sounds from around the world, creating a new, Dada-inspired reimagined sound world and paying tribute to the creativity and long-standing influence of the movement.

Dada techniques included photomontage, collage, assemblage, readymades, abstraction, chance and sound poems: techniques that can be applied to sound compositions just as readily as to visual art.

How the project works

• Artists either take one of their own field recordings as source material, or a sound from the Cities and Memory sound database.
• They then apply one or more Dada techniques to the recording to produce a new reimagined sound. The reimagined version must contain the original recording or elements of it, or be based on the original recording. You don’t have to apply only Dada techniques to your piece, and you can apply more than one technique as you prefer.
• The sounds will be presented here on a Dada Sounds sound map of the world, and selected sounds will be released as an album at the end of the project in March. Individual posts about each sound will be posted on Cities and Memory from 5 February onwards.

Call for artists

• The project is open for artists, musicians and sound designers to join the call until Sunday 3 January.
• To join the project, email us today at stuart AT citiesandmemory DOT com – if you’ve not contributed to Cities and Memory before, please include links to some of your work or some information about yourself!
• Finished pieces should be submitted by Friday 29 January.