Rui Costa
Sound artist from Lisbon. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1998. He is a founding member and artistic director of Binaural Media.
He has performed in many venues and sound art festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United States. He has played with such musicians as Maile Colbert, Iñaki Ríos, Manuela Barile, Natividad Plasencia, Pablo Rega, Nilo Gallego, Toshio Kajiwara, Casey Rice, Lê Quan Ninh, Richard Antez, John Herndon, André Gonçalves, Carlos Santos, Paulo Raposo, Emídio Buchinho Miguel Carvalhais, Pali Meursault and Cédric Anglaret.
From 1999 to 2003, Rui Costa collaborated with the Spanish musician Iñaki Ríos, under the name ja_dijiste. This duo explored improvisational and compositional techniques based on computer software developed by Iñaki and Rui (programmed on Max/MSP, Lisa and Csound) and developed a series of site-specific works. As examples, it is worth mentioning a series of intermedia works done in the Portuguese village of Nodar, with subsequent presentations in sound and media arts festivals in Spain (Con-Mutaciones, in Zaragoza, Musica Ex Machina, in Bilbao, Experimenta, in Salamanca).
Between 2004 and 2005, Rui Costa developed a series of sound works commissioned by Granular, an experimental musicians’ organization based in Lisbon, in which he focused on the translation to the sonic domain of other realities such as the tourist’s experience of Lisbon (“Sightseeing for the Blind”) and an account of a train trip (“Le Train de Bordeaux”, based on a short story by Marguerite Duras).
In 2007, Rui started collaborating with the Italian vocal performer Manuela Barile, through a large scale intermedia project entitled ‘La Scatola’, which was conceived as a series of installations and/or performances. The first of several versions of this project was premiered in November 2007, at Binaural’s art residency space in Nodar, Portugal. A series of installments of this project were presented in 2008 in Madrid, Barcelona, Navarra and Léon (Spain), Bordeaux (France), Venice (Italy) and Guarda (Portugal). The Portuguese Ministry of Culture funded this project.
Rui Costa is a regular speaker in lectures and workshops dedicated to sound art. In 2005 he organized a workshop module on the new tendencies of sound art at MUSAC - the Contemporary Arts Museum of Castilla-León (León, Spain). In 2006 he was a speaker in a series of conferences organized by Binaural within an international arts symposium entitled “Pushing the Medium #2”. In 2007 he helped to organize and gave a lecture at the Fine Arts Faculty of Pontevedra (Spain), as part of “Fronte[i]ras 07 “, an international meeting of transdisciplinary arts dedicated to the theme of “borders’. In 2008 Manuela Barile and Rui Costa gave two workshops (one at MUSAC, in León, Spain and another at Centro Huarte in Navarra, Spain) entitled “The Amplified Expression of the Body”, in which they engaged the participants in using sound as a means of characterizing and expanding the identity of a performer’s body and of the surrounding space.
