Magtronics

Remote AIR
07 – 28 December 2020

MAG and Mika planned to come to Ljubljana for an Artist in Residency, but ended up in a village in Sweden instead. Nonetheless, they are going to proceed with their experiment with an e-textile costume and a body gesture music controller for the MAG’s new performance.

During the residency, they will post their experiments and explorations, snippets, prototypes, and the daily findings from the up-north online, so you can peek into their non-Ljubljana residency life here: https://nerding.at/magtronics/

The proposed project is an aesthetic and technical exploration of textile sensor embedded costume and experimental music performance. They will create an e-textile sensor embedded costume that controls an analogue synthesizer and effectors and music performance that uses the explored techniques. We are curious to explore how body embedded sensors and playing analogue instruments works together as a performance, what kind of new composition, techniques are possible with this combination, what kind of aesthetic we can create as a whole performance.

Colophon

Mika Satomi in Magdalena Ågren: MAGTRONICS, 2020
interactive costum

Production: Projekt Atol Institute

With financial support from the Slovene Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Public Administration and the City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture. It was part of the Feral Labs Network, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Bios

Mika Satomi is a designer and an artist exploring the field of eTextiles, Interaction Design and Physical Computing. She has been a guest professor at the Weissensee Art Academy Berlin for five semesters. She has worked as a researcher at the Swedish School of Textiles and at the Distance Lab, Scotland in the field of practice based design research. She holds BA in graphic design from Tokyo Zokei University, and MA in media creation from IAMAS, Japan. Since 2006 Mika has collaborated with Hannah PernerWilson, forming the collective KOBAKANT creating artistic projects in the field of eTextiles and Wearable Technology Art. She is a co-author of the e-Textile online database “How To Get What You Want”.

Mika Satomi

Magdalena Ågren aka MAG is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Using trombone, megaphone, voice, homemade electronics, loops, and drum machine all at once to build her music from scratch. From the smallest simple element, it grows into a gigantic dystopian lo-fi orchestra. Sometimes restrained and suggestive, sometimes chaotic and wild. MAG strives for deep introspection and expressive power, seeking both confrontation and commonality. MAG has released one solo album, Magnitude, in 2016 on Surplus Recordings and Zeon Light Skiva, and has played more than 200 shows in Europe and North America. Magdalena Ågren also currently plays in two other band projects, SORK and Trapped in a Loop.

Magdalena Ågren