Soundwave Biennial Festival is a sound, art, and music festival that happens every two years for two months in San Francisco.
Overview
Soundwave is produced by the 5013 non-profit Mediate Art Group. The festival features diverse local and international multimedia artists working with sound including noise artists, sound artists, improvisers, experimental musicians, composers, avant-garde musicians, vocalists, electroacoustic musicians, classical musicians and rock musicians. The festival focuses on new and unusual performances and art works, often in untraditional environments. Soundwave primarily showcases "sound art," but also explores disciplines such as media art, performance art, music, dance, and installation. It’s an art experience out of the unexpected to explore important ideas and issues of our time.
Artists
Soundwave created the well-received AudioBus series conceived by Soundwave founder and artistic director Alan So for its third season MOVE SOUND in 2008. It featured Bay Area singer Goh Nakamura, avant-cellist Zoe Keating, Odessa Chen and and David Graves. Other noted artists and musicians that have created performances at Soundwave include: Moe! Staiano, Andrea Polli, Matt Davignon, Diana Burgoyne,, Dana Gumbiner, Danny Grody and Neal Morgan Soundwave was awarded "Best Sound Sculptures – Future Classic" by the editors of San Francisco Magazine in their Best of 2007 issue while being compared to San Francisco's Audium.
Soundwave seasons
Soundwave has had eight seasons: FREE SOUND 2004, SURROUND SOUND 2006, MOVE SOUND 2008 which included amplified skateboarding, sound drawing, holographic movies. ME'DI.ATE's fourth Soundwave season GREEN SOUND 2010 included performances in historic WWII Bunkers, churches, city streets and parks, and an artist-imagined environment Illuminated Forest. Its fifth season Soundwave HUMANITIES 2012 has been called , and with artists. Season six explored WATER in 2014 in the midst of a California drought. The seventh season ARCHITECTURE occurred in 2016 exploring the rapid transformation of San Francisco's changing cityscapes and its implications. Its eight season in 2018 is INFRASTRUCTURE exploring Bay Area and global networks provoking ideas around isolation amid interconnectivity; environmental degradation and mass consumption of electronics; the politics of energy infrastructures, fossil fuels and renewables; the movement of goods and services across roads, bridges, railways, channels and ports; the often invisible protocols that affect our daily lives.
Locations
Soundwave events have occurred in galleries, museums, and unusual and iconic locations in and around San Francisco. They have included:
