John Wynne
composer/sound artist

Composer and sound artist John Wynne's recent work moves in two very different directions.

He is engaged in a series of elaborate electroacoustic portraits of people he has met on his travels in Africa. The first of these, James Kamotho Kimani, was selected by the International Society of Contemporary Music and played at the World Music Days in Copenhagen. It was also chosen for Kiasma's SOUNDBOX webcast project, released on CD by Unknown Public in London and broadcast in Berlin, London and San Francisco. The second piece, Upcountry, premiered in the Purcell Room London and at the AGON Festival in Milan and has been broadcast in Canada and Germany.

He also designs auditory warnings for installations. His first work with alarms was for the SOUND/GALLERY in Copenhagen, where 25 speakers were hidden under the paving stones of the Town Hall Square and the sounds were programmed to move around the square via a unique computer-controlled diffusion system. The Sound of Sirens was banned by the city council, which claimed that some members of the public were "frightened and confused." He recently composed Cry Wolf for the exhibition Transience that used a 25-speaker system on the 4-storey central wall of Kiasma, Helsinki's Museum of Contemporary Art. Previous to that he designed tiny interactive devices programmed with his own alarm sounds in an exhibition Grasping and Clinging at Project 304 in Bangkok, a collaborative installation with visual artist Denise Hawrysio.

Work for film and TV includes soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open and the European Media Art Festival, as well as The Trial of Freedom, aired on Channel 4 in the UK and CTV in Canada.

Wynne is a visiting artist at the Helsinki Academy of Fine Art and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sound at the London Institute's LCP School of Media.

The Wire magazine: John Wynne's Cry Wolf dramatically increased the nervous pressure by occupying the space with a series of specially constructed 'false alarms' that provoke a new appreciation of the city as one (in)tensely saturated by unstable electronic signals.- (Angus Carlyle)

Variant magazine: Panic and Depression ". . . affirms the communicative possibilities offered by new media." (Ed Baxter)

The Independent: "John Wynne . . . kept the modernist banner flying high. His piece C90.RTS5.L1-37 . . . used electronics not as a pretty and exotic backdrop but to explore pure noise." (Adam Lively)
 

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