Miha Ciglar - 7 Skladateljev Zvo.i.ti (so.und.ing) 2010

Miha Ciglar - (text by Luka Zagorinik)Miha Ciglar, a sound engineer and sound artist, has in the recent years devoted his musical efforts to the sound research of feedback and to environment creation, into which he positions, besides the technology and objects, also his own body. Often producing sound objects out of everyday objects, Ciglar places into the electric circuit a round glass container, for example, filled with water or soapsuds, or a television screen, while modulating the constituting sound field of the feedback with the movement of his hands, with a washing sponge or the body, thus carefully tailoring a highly expressive sound landscape of noises, high and low frequencies, pulsations, and interferences. The material, the space, the medium and the interface, and especially movement are essential. Because Ciglar so frequently relies on the latter, his performances can also be seen to belong to the field of sound performance art, in which he over the years developed an exceptional sense for the whole, be it in his work in the field of performance art and multimedia environments or in the gap between art and science, in a field which can be defined as many-sided, ambiguous even, as an extraordinary reduction of sound to basic elements and the examination of the act of performance itself, role of the performer and contemporary technology. Ciglar has been for a number of years adopting a rather unique position in the field between music and sound, which can be delineated through the field of sound art, a field which Miha Ciglar significantly co-creates with his nongovernmental institute IRZU Institute for Sonic Art Research through an on-going organisation of theoretical reflections, workshops, discussions, lectures, round tables, and ultimately, with the festival Earzoom, which is with numerous collaborations with similar nongovernmental producers of similar contents becoming the central festival of sound art in Slovenia. Ciglars effort, engagement, and his insistent demand to introduce electronic music, sound art, and ultimately the concept itself into the general music discourse in Slovenia is exceptionally adamant and at the same time contagious, creating in a strong platform which may finally make a rupture in the headstrong membrane of the prevailing music discourse in the institutional milieu so that it may at last open up also to this kind of contents. Ciglar performs and gives lectures on such initiatives throughout the world, in prominent institutions, such as the Dutch STEIM or the French IRCAM, as well as in established international festivals in France, Japan, North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. As a student of guitar and saxophone, Ciglar graduated from the Austrian IEM in 2009, while establishing himself as a strong author in the field of contemporary composition, both for various, often re-worked instruments as well as in the field of electroacoustic and computer music. In his work, Ciglar has always knocked against the boundaries of the merely musical and increasingly appeared in the field of the interdisciplinary, where different expressions of audiovisual installations, interactive dance performances, etc. are traversed. In the between spaces of science, technology, and art, Ciglar understands the body not only as an interface but as a space of spontaneous action, as a space of pain even, which functions as a constitutive moment for the overall context and structure of individual creations. And it is precisely through space and the collision of elements in it that this kind of works, unique instances of music research, can be interpreted also as compositions. However, here Ciglar strikes not only against the physical phenomenon of sound and its meaning, but also against the multiplicity of meanings and the critique of complex relations between technology, man, and the structure of society at large at the same time. Given that the research dimension of his creativity is ine