Residency of NAE Ensemble, hosted by Festival of New Sound in partnership with KotorArt International Festival & Music Biennale Zagreb
NAE Ensemble is a co-creational art collective founded by Tomislav Oliver, Branimir Norac, Vid Veljak and Filip Merčep. It started its journey just a couple of months ago when the Festival of New Sound applied to the European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists - EFFEA for young, extremely talented musicians and interdisciplinary artists to develop their first work, Nature Amplified, for their next festival edition. From there, the collective started to broaden and expand in all directions. In just a few months, it formally registered as an artistic body, visited South Korea for the festival SICMF, secured a 6-months residency along with guest performances in Zagreb and Dubrovnik, and included two more interdisciplinary artists (Goran Nježić and Tin Dožić) who are now developing their project,Nature Amplified, even further.
Nature Amplified is an audiovisual, performative project by the NAE Ensemble that combines elements of performance art, acousmatics, sound and video installations. Inspired by natural processes, the ecological state of our time and the pioneering work of American composer David Dunn, the project utilises innovative sonification techniques and technologies to translate bioacoustic and environmental data into sound formats, thereby bridging art, science and ecology. Aesthetically, the project explores the boundary between the natural and the artificial, using synthetic sounds generated by algorithms but inspired by real natural processes and biological structures as the foundation for a multimedia performance. These sounds are mixed with processed sounds captured through field recordings in various locations across Croatia, creating a complex counterpoint of elements derived from reinterpretations of the same natural phenomenon.
The project explores human estrangement from nature not only by questioning the current disconnect and lack of awareness about coexistence but also by speculating on our future relationship with the natural world. The use of synthesised sounds, created through the sonification of natural processes, seeks to simulate the artificiality of this fragmented connection. The incorporation of collaged real sounds from nature further emphasises this division. The aim is to present “nature in boxes,” enclosed and isolated, reflecting our experience of understanding and “consuming” nature.
However, within this synthetic representation, nature is amplified in an attempt to evoke a living, organic presence within the algorithm. These sounds serve as a reminder of nature's enduring vitality despite its abstraction and distortion in human perception. The composition becomes a tension between the artificial and the organic, representing both our broken relationship with nature and its resilient strength that sustains life.