Tag Art

Entries 41 Total

Glacial Sounds

Nov 5, ’07 12:16 PM

Artist Katie Paterson uses the sound recordings of melting glaciers to document and bring attention to environmental devastation. For vatnajökull (the sound of) Paterson set up a hydrophone in the rapidly growing lagoon of the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajökull.


image of the lagoon at Vatnajökull

The underwater microphone was then linked to an amplifier, which connected to a mobile phone. Callers were invited to listen to the glacier’s disintegration using a phone number mounted on the wall of the Slade Gallery.


phone number in gallery

While others have sucessfully used photography to raise awareness about global warming, audio incites an emotional response distinct to the medium. With this project, Paterson provided the glacier with a “voice” and thus animated it with identifiable human qualities. This reaction is futhered by the selection of a telephone as the means of tranmission.

Another project by Paterson, langjökull, snæfellsjökull, solheimajökull, repositions the glacial recordings as a performance.

The sounds of three melting glaciers were produced as three records, each with a loop at the end. The records were then cast and frozen with the actual meltwater from the glacier. For a duration of two hours, the records played simultaneously on separate turntables, until the ice completely dissolved. The sound emitted is a combination of the recorded sounds of the glaciers and the melting ice itself. The source event for the recordings is synchronously enacted and reenacted, making a tragic fact of climate change evident outside of its original site.

Comments (1)

White Noise II

Nov 3, ’07 9:51 AM


Eva Sjuve, Go Karamazov

In conjunction with Performa 07, White Box will host a special program of its New Composers Series entitled White Noise II. For the month of November, sound artists will install sound works in the space as well as stage weekly performances. The presentation will culminate in a special installation of John Cage’s 33 1/3 from November 19-26. See below for a complete schedule of events. Eva Sjuve research into and implementation of mobile technology is pretty interesting. Kabir Carter’s work, which involves environmental sound and the investigation of private/public space, is also worth checking out.

Performance Dates

Michael Northam: Membrane Seeding
on display: November 1-10
live performance: Saturday, November 3 @7pm

James Fei & Kato Hideki
live performance: Friday, November 9 @ 6pm

Eva Sjuve: Go Karamazov
live performance: Saturday, November 10 @ 7pm

Kabir Carter: Overexcited Recaptures
on display: November 13-17
live performance: Saturday, November 17 @6pm

Comments (0)

Phillip Stearns- Burlap I II III IV (2006)

Oct 24, ’07 1:41 PM

Phillip Stearns is an LA-based sound and visual artist. For Burlap I II III IV, Stearns wove integrated circuits into burlap fabric. The function of the circuits dictate the unique behavior, sound and design for each user-activated piece. The burlap material is a historical reference to the use of mechanized textile production as a model for computer programming. Burlap additionally introduces an organic feel usually disassociated from circuitry. Produced for SoundWalk 2006 .

Comments (0)

Lina Selander- 14th of February to 24th of June, 2003 (2003)

Oct 22, ’07 8:54 AM

For 14th of February to 24th of June, 2003 artist Lina Selander photographed the night sky of Stockholm over the course of 5 months. She then used this collection of photos as a basis for a digital sound composition which she transmitted under the ground through pipes in Djurgarden park in Stockholm. The pipes jut out of the ground in three places, making the sound audible. I like the idea of taking a natural occurence- the night sky- and converting it into a score for a man-made artifact- digital sound. Then integrating this work back into nature, as if the transference never occured.

Comments (0)

Udo Wid- A Synergy of Disciplines, BrainPrints (1999)

Oct 17, ’07 12:52 PM

Austrian biophysician and artist Udo Wid produced this project in 1999 at Secession in Vienna. Visitors to the gallery were invited to have their brain waves scanned and mathematically interpreted as a diagram. Wid, drawing from his scientific research, was then able to take this information and associate it with distinct personality traits, creating a “portrait” for each participant. BrainPrints comes out of Wid’s larger scientific and philosophical position of a Synergy of Disciplines, which argues that cultural structures are rooted in the brain’s reaction to its physical and physiological reality. Wid is especially interested in the effects of extremely low frequencies or ELF within this framework. ELF fields partially overlap with the frequency of the central nervous system, and therefore, ELF can potentially have an effect on the brain and, thus, cultural production. Since 2001, he set up a permanent ELF Observatory in northern Lower Austria to measure and study these frequencies.

Comments (0)

Carolina Caycedo- Local Motion (2006)

Oct 10, ’07 1:44 PM

This piece was included in a solo show for Carolina Caycedo at London gallery Blow de la Barra last year. Caycedo’s work deals with identity, nationality, immigration, and economic exchange in an era of globalization.

Local Motion is a jukebox containing 60 CDs collected by Caycedo from all the different cities she’s worked or lived since 1995 as well as music projects developed by Caycedo from Bogota and her recordings from Spain and Brasil. The jukebox is both a documentation and soundtrack of the artist’s migratory life.

This piece in particular reminds me of the Babel Series which I posted a few weeks back. It similarly deals with the global media’s participation in the formulation of a universal “pop language” through popular music. While Brietz suggests that this process degrades communication through uniformity, Caycedo’s project shows how popular music may be individualized. In turn, visitors can change and manipulate her soundtrack for their own experience. The fundamental difference between the two is that Brietz assumes a static subject whereas Caycedo participatory one.

Click for more shots from the Locomotion show and an interview with the artist

Comments (0)

Ear to the Earth Festival

Oct 8, ’07 11:51 AM

This week, the Electronic Music Foundation kicks off their second annual environmentally-conscious sound art festival Ear to the Earth Festival at Judson Church.

One of the performances includes the New York premiere of John Cage’s A Dip in the Lake by George Boski, Bill Blakeney and Gayle Young. See below for a brief description of the project, for further information please visit the site.

John Cage A Dip in the Lake

EMF presents the New York premiere of John Cage’s A Dip in the Lake. Performed only once before, A Dip in the Lake is the exploration of a city by means of a ‘random’ soundmap that leads performers, listeners, or participants to places they may never have been before. The score identifies up of 427 locations within a city. The ‘locations’ are either very specific (such as the intersection of two streets), or more general (such as ‘a park’ or ‘Lake Ontario’). Recordings are made at each of these locations, and divided into 10 groups of 2 (quicksteps), 61 groups of 3 (waltzes) and 56 groups of 4 (marches). These groups of recordings are then mixed live by the performers.

Originally scored for the city of Chicago, this performance, created by George Boski, Bill Blakeney, and Gayle Young, will use sounds recorded throughout Toronto, Canada. The three performers will each control four channels of sound, distributed throughout the beautiful Judson Church Meeting Room. The audience is then invited to walk around the space to hear the piece from different sonic perspectives.

Comments (0)

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher- Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery

Oct 3, ’07 6:04 AM

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher’s show Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery closes on Saturday and I strongly encourage those in the NY to catch it before it comes down. For Reel to Reel, Shore and Fisher adhered a network of mechanical instruments on the walls of the gallery space. Once activated, the instruments play a 10 minute composition accompanied by live video sequences captured from tiny surveillance cameras in the space. During each performance, a dark blue light saturates the gallery, giving the piece a dream-like and eerie ambience.

Comments (0)

NY Art Book Fair Recap

Oct 2, ’07 4:04 PM

I spent part of the weekend at the NY Art Book Fair, one of my favorite annual events. This year I helped my buddies from Fillip man their booth with the Charles H. Scott Gallery .


Issues of Fillip


Jordan Strom, Editor of Fillip

We had the fortune to be seated inbetween ANP Quarterly and Onestar Press. Onestar installed a beautiful bookshelf by Lawrence Weiner in their booth (image below).

With over 120 exhibitors, there was an overwhelming amount of material to browse (and buy!). Picks:

/// 1% by David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima a double-CD by Pork Salad Press which compiles all music contributions (114 sound pieces / 01:50:22) to David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima’s installation for the elevators of the French ministry of Culture and Communication. According to the French government’s 1% guidelines, one per cent of the total amount spent in the construction of any public building is to be allocated for the realization of site-specific artworks. In this context, David Jourdan and Yuji Oshima were commissioned to create a permanent installation for the new building of the ministry, 182 rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, completed in February 2005. The audio compositions are activated 1% of the time by visitors entering the elevator and pushing a floor button.

/// Leisure a new arts magazine by the Los Angeles-based 2nd Cannons. This issue presents a collection of artist responses to a questionnaire on “radness” (with Evan Holloway, Bruce Hainley, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Smith, Bruce LaBruce, Darren Bader, Mayo Thompson, AA Bronson, Jess Holzworth, Corrina Peipon, Brian Bress, Julie Lequin, Meg Cranston, Natascha Sofia Snellman, Monique Prieto, TRUDI, Drew Heitzler, Elk, Christopher Russell, Tom Allen, Catherine Taft, Betty Tompkins, Kathe Burkhart, Michael Ned Holte, Paddy Johnson, Ami Tallman, Daniel Hug, and lastly, Jason Meadows).

/// Slavs & Tatars, a Moscow-based collaboration project between artists Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi which explores the fluctuating situation in Eurasia. They produced the series of posters on the second floor wall. Their independent work is also quite interesting: Kasia Korczak /// Payam Sharifi

/// The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg – An interpretation by Luca Frei From Book Works, the book is a translation of a 1976 text by Albert Meister which chronicles a fictional radical libertarian space built beneath the newly constructed Centre Beaubourg. Elizabeth Schambelan wrote an interesting piece on the book in this month’s Artforum.

/// The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-68 by Tim Donough From MIT Press, this title is easy to pick up anywhere. I’m looking forward to reading it. Full description below:

In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used—or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated—elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named “beautiful language” of this book’s title, itself an appropriation from Guy Debord’s collaged Mémoires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointed juxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken inside the occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by a clever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself and memorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist.“The Beautiful Language of My Century” describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.

McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of détournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War (“La France déchirée”), Godard’s early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo’s Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left’s adoption in the mid-sixties of the “end of art” as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fête as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equally by the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events of May 1968—when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance to capitalist modernization.

PS: I posted this entry earlier today and it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. I apologize for any confusion!

Comments (0)

Julien Previeux- A la recherche du miracle économique (2007)

Sep 25, ’07 3:45 PM

This piece was included in Julien Previeux’s solo show Management of Change and Conflict, which was on view at the Jousse Entreprise Gallery last Spring. Previeux attended business school before he became an artist, and one could easily speculate that his concern with the nature of current economic structures is an extension of his studies. He produces concise and instructive meditations on value, work, and profit in a world economy marked by globalization and the primacy of information.

A la recherche du miracle économique (In Search of the Economic Miracle) is a triptych made up of three drawings. In the centre of each panel is an excerpt from Volume 1 of Capital, the border, or outer rim, is covered with an amorphous grouping of key words spotted in Karl Marx’s text. The system of deciphering used to highlight these key words goes back to the biblical code. In the Middle Ages, monks used this code to reveal the secret meanings in sacred texts. The decoding technique shows hidden terms according to equidistant series of letters, words are laid bare by choosing a starting letter then by leaving out the same number of letters each time. The words are linked together by arrows suggesting relationships of cause and effect and membership. This network of lines form a graph which Julien Prévieux uses to chart the twists and turns of financial scandals and economic crises. In the first panel, the text written in 1867 predicts the Great Depression. The dates, facts and sometimes even the names of the people involved in the slump can be found. The second drawing brings together terms having to do with the very recent Enron scandal, symbol of today’s malfunctions and of deregulation taken to the extreme. The people running the company, the politicians implicated in the affair as well as a whole set of terms concerning the failure of the company are found in the same way. The third and last element of the triptych depicts a future event: a widespread fall combining the development of an informal economy and the failure of the classic monetary system.

In these conditions, the search for the economic miracle looks to be pretty tough, the oracle tells of nothing but a series of catastrophes, a chaotic picture of the years gone by and the years to come. The events presented are so many icons of capitalism’s spectacular failures. At one and the same time a book of economic analysis and revolutionary tool, Capital is a real “bible of the international workers’ movement” (Engels), and it’s to give him additional power, a prophetic power from which to extort hidden meanings.

The act of deciphering or decoding is at once complex, long and ridiculous. It forces economic analysis into some sort of mystical corner and points the finger at the overly “magical” interpretation of certain texts. The work gives its reading model and serves as a commentary highlighting the need to suspect the secret entries in all work.

Julien Prévieux explores the boundaries between artistic praxis and economic reality, he extracts a kind of visual poetry from a complex reality in which the past, the present and the future get tangled up in a network that is forever wrapped and looped around itself.

Comments (0)