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July 13, 2015, San Francisco, CA—Tickets are now on sale for SonicLABs 7 Architecture, produced by MEDIATE Art Group.

SonicLABs is the first year of the two-year Soundwave Festival; Soundwave ((7))’s theme is Architecture, addressing San Francisco’s constantly shifting built and natural environments and identifying and exploring the unique relationships between architecture and sound. This is Artistic Director Tiare Ribeaux’s first season with MEDIATE Art Group; this year’s SonicLABs line-up comprises artists, composers, musicians, architects, and programmers who are being presented by Soundwave for the first time.

On August 2, Reverberations at Battery Townsley, in partnership with the National Park Service, will include three immersive performances set at the historic Battery Townsley, a WWII battery fortification overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Zoey Vero, Vanessa Li, Dan Gottwald, and Gabriel Goldberg will harness the extreme resonances of the tunnels and uniquely shaped rooms of the structure, giving an extraordinary sound experience in an extraordinary setting.

Gabriel Goldberg is a San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist. His other-worldly vocals will be accompanied with the Halo Handpan (a type of melodic steel percussion instrument), and a selection of exotic, ethereal-sounding acoustic instrumentation. Gabriel continues his exploration of sacred resonant spaces as part of an international, decade-long music project based in spaces of acoustically resonant architecture.

Dan Gottwald is an instrument builder, sculptor, sound artist and composer. His work focuses largely on social, tactile and temporary experiences. For this event, the Analogous Ensemble performs his original composition and sculpture, The Abundant’s Eyes.This work explores the sonic, visual and metaphoric architecture of those eyes. Information is provided, received, processed and reflected by partnerships between the instruments and operators of the Analogous Ensemble. Each instrument embodies a function of the Abundant’s ocular system.

Zoey Vero and Vanessa Li will present Delineated Echoes, a collaborative interpretation of the Battery, inspired by its notable history as a secret bunker in WWII and the Cold War and as a memorial. The network of underground passages and cavernous concrete spaces are brought to life and re-imagined in a series of soundscapes and visual compositions that seek to examine the Battery’s architectural confinement during wartime, the desolate emptiness in its decay and abandonment, and its rediscovery by young locals looking for escape and canvas for expression.

Vanessa Li and Zoey Vero’s collaborations explore textured visuals, generative structures and systems, chaotic behaviors, glitches, sexuality and gender. Their work is often experienced in the form of immersive environments that include interactive technologies, projection mapping, live visuals, motion graphics, installation design, video as well as sound and photography. Vanessa Li is a sound technologist with formal training in classical music, music technology, computer science, and architectural acoustics. Her recent sound installations discover meaningful mechanisms in and intersections between art and science. In exploring latent acoustic properties of built spaces using technology and natural resonance, she finds new ways to enhance one’s auditory awareness in different physical environments. Prior to living and working in San Francisco, Vanessa completed her studies in Montréal, Canada, and Troy, NY. Zoey Vero is a visual and installation artist with a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She has performed and displayed works internationally in festivals and galleries such as the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Switzerland, Live Performers Meeting in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Cascina Martesana in Milan, Italy, NGBK and Panke in Berlin and locally at the SkyHigh Odditorium, Mystic Creations, Lumen Labs, CSU Monterey, Nimby, Chabot Space and Science Center, F8, and DNA Lounge.

On August 15, AudioBus, a mobile venue, will take participants on an auditory journey, translating architecture into a sonic language on a 45-minute bus ride. Artist Geoff Morris, a multi-instrumentalist working in improvisation and in evolving ambient expressions, will use field recordings from the various locations in the Dogpatch and Bayview districts as textural layers for a long-form improvisation, responding to the histories and physical structures of the areas passed by this mobile venue.

The popular Nightlife at California Academy of Sciences on August 20 will feature interactive, immersive demonstrations and performances. Bermudan-born DJ Russell Butler, whose work focuses on the colonization of black bodies, and how they can be liberated through dance and experimental ritual practice, will construct a synth patch–in real time–from scratch. There will also be a DJ from Honey SoundSystem, a San Francisco-based collective inspired by pivotal gay underground parties and dance music history. A demonstration by I/O Music Technology, an exclusively Modular Synthesizer web store and mobile shop based in Oakland, will demonstrate several innovative applications of modular hardware synths in music, sound design, and sound synthesis. Artist-technologists Matthew Howell and Chris Chrismond will present an interactive audio-visual piece that allows participants to fly through a virtual 3D cityscape with a dynamic musical accompaniment.

On August 29, MEDIATE partners for the first time with AIA San Francisco’s popularArchitecture and the City Festival. Artist, musician and developer Matthew Howell premieres Polyenvironments, a creative work of technology for exploring the somatic effects that architectural designs have on us. Matthew will introduce participants to a new way of capturing and interpreting the designs that they find while exploring the city. Participants will be able to reinterpret what they see into soundscapes that they can compose and hear.