lineforms

requited journal: issue 6

2012-01-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

my work is currently being featured in the online publication requited journal. scroll under SOUND on the left hand side to see and hear. from poetry to visuals to reviews, so many great pieces to explore.

Requited is a journal that explores the convergences between literary writing and the experience of art as a creative exchange, a contract. These convergences evoke the blurry in-between where an infinite number of possibilities manifest. As Hélène Cixous says of relationships, the convergences of human-to-human contact are co-created spaces; they are the 'entre-deux,' the spaces of love, language, and eroticism that exist between the two. Meaning is dependent upon this exchange, and we wish to draw attention to this amorphous space between bodies. In a sense, the text is the mother, the generative body, and the audience, in its private space, must seed the experience for creation to successfully take place.

www.requitedjournal.com

rock sounds

2012-01-11T00:25:00.000-08:00

besides the world's largest glacial pothole, pennsylvania has a little-publicized but mystifying natural wonder known as the ringing rocks. a couple of miles west of upper black eddy on the delaware river are four and a half acres of broken pock-marked red rocks which ring mysteriously when struck with a hammer or thrown onto the huge pile. in 1890 a dr. ott of pleasant valley assembled a musical scale of these stones and gave a concert accompanied by the pleasant valley brass band. these jagged stones differ from others in the area and no one knows where they came from or how they became to be pock-marked and broken into these jagged pieces. for size, note leaf in cavity of rock in close-up. some rocks are as big as footballs, others weigh many tons, but all are exceptionally heavy for their size.

from america's natural wonders: strange forests, mysterious caverns and amazing formations

by c. b. colby

1956

cabin fever

2011-12-23T15:04:00.000-08:00

i have a new architectural obsession—cabin porn! these are a just a few that strangely (or not so strangely) resemble my sculptures (people were referring to the last installation as 'little houses'). so now, along with a daily dose of architecture, the brick house, my scandinavian retreat, and emmas design blog, my virtual holiday plans are complete! enjoy x

kclog blog

2011-12-19T05:08:00.000-08:00

my work was recently featured on KCLOG blog (pronounced clog), created by artists vince contarino and kris chatterson to share a dialog with the communities that keep art and artists at the forefront. starting as a simple journal, KCLOG has turned into a supportive network of artists working in nyc, la, eu and points in between...

reading their blog is a like a virtual gallery tour. they also are behind the curatorial team progress report and have a nice show up right now—ritual aesthetics—at tompkins projects in brooklyn.

if we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it

2011-12-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

"i want labor to be the point. because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. as an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, i wanted a transparency of construction here. if we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it."

tom sachs

no one belongs here more than you

2011-11-30T20:43:00.000-08:00

"i'm probably kindest to myself in my work," she says. "it's how i practice self-love. i'm crippingly critical of myself in every other area, not permissive, not letting myself be free, and feeling like i'm doing every single thing wrong all the time. but in this one area i tell myself: you can do no wrong. let's just try this. it's OK. like a really wonderful teacher or something." referring back to the title of her first book: "I'm saying, no one belongs here more than you, to myself—because I totally don't belong."

miranda july

paper mag

drawing on the utopic at norte maar

2011-11-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

the artist austin thomas stopped by concrete sound with her class on a tour of bushwick last week. she took some great photos and posted them on her inspiring blog drawing on the utopic. i love this one with gallery director jason andrew of norte maar.

concrete sound—a reading

2011-11-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

please join me at norte maar for a reading with writer and poet christine shan shan hou tomorrow at 7:30pm. she will be reading excerpts from concrete sound, our collaborative publication that accompanies the exhibition—an experiment that unfolds the poetics of responding.

CONCRETE SOUND: a reading with writer and poet Christine Shan Shan Hou in collaboration with Audra Wolowiec

Thursday, November 17 at 7:30pm

Closing Brunch Reception for the exhibition Concrete Sound will be held Sunday, November 20th from 1-4pm.

NORTE MAAR

83 Wyckoff Avenue, #1B

Brooklyn, NY 11237

(L train to Jefferson)

fluxus at the grey art gallery

2011-11-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

mieko shiomi

water music, 1964

nam june paik

zen for film, 1964

at the very center of the earth is a cavity as large as your fist. in the cavity, on its back, lies a beetle. as long as he lies on his back all objects on the earth tend to fall toward him. he is trying to turn over.

from thoughts on gravity by peter longazo

translated by george brecht

i don't mind to be "an artist" or

"a composer"

i mind to be "human"

and all i do is just

simple (and complicated)

searching of life

teaching myself and others

how to live. to live

otherwise. to live better.

milan knizak, 1972

fluxus and the essential questions of life

grey art gallery at new york university

september 9 - december 3, 2011

concrete sound - an introduction

2011-10-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

To wave in comfortable abstraction. The echo remains indeterminably against the fence. Friendship weighs and flatters while approaching the uneven. Do we want concrete? As if uncertainty looms unconventionally like a black skirt in the corner. Sound waves its left hand amongst tremors. The women in search of an echo may unhook themselves from the mirror. Attention can drop thought or hearing. Senses like alert chimneys without instruction. Can personal history be detached from the body? If I start with questions will there be a sense of openness? We started this without completion. Can we succeed in openness? What is succession but a bifocal channel? As if, we women, enamored with sound and curiosity were to rejoice incandescently with candlesticks and frosting. We still perch unevenly in our skirts. Here and there we go. A month. Two. The dialogue unfolds and loops in touring momentum. Cozy habitats bind us. Bending resistance up and down. How did this appear? What made you think of me? To gray indefinitely and then lean heavily amongst leaves. I prop myself up in a popping matter. Not being reduced to smoking chatter. Depth in transparency reveals our guests’ observations. Heaves in only one direction. Audra, you are contact and outline. It is the afternoon. I am reluctant and chiming, counting words inside breath. We must travel slowly and heedfully. So too, the body may be convinced.

christine shan shan hou, october 2011

the poetics of responding

2011-10-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

an echo—a tint of sound like color rushing in the wind

can sound take on a geometric quality?

is it the shape of my mouth?

a voice

extruded

he wants to know 'if the train went under the sea'

if the line from my eyes to my hands is dotted

sensory

disobedience

clings dramatically to the page

never a circle or persistent ringing

we meander along frivolous edges meantime

these are just a few lines from a project i've been working on with the very talented writer christine hou. we're putting together a publication of our conversations, a series of image and text exchanges that took place over email. the book, concrete sound, will be featured in conjunction with my upcoming solo project at norte maar opening at the end of october.

her work, a beautiful collection of poems titled accumulations, was recently published by the independent press publication studio. you can read a selection of writing on her blog hypothetical arrangements and be sure to keep an eye out for her reviews on dance and performance in the brooklyn rail.

experimental notations

2011-09-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

i am pleased to have a few pieces in the group show experimental notations:

an exhibition of dialogues between sound and visual representation and the systems or interpretive strategies that inspire them. Through video, drawing, and sculpture, these non-traditional scores will be accompanied by the sound which inspired their creation or, resulted from the score.

Experimental Notations

curated by Jeff Ray, Kevin P. Clarke, Carrie Hott, and Elizabeth Bernstein in collaboration with the Mission Creek Music Festival, Royal NoneSuch Gallery and MacArthur B Arthur

September 9 – October 2, 2011 

featuring artists:

 Jill Auckenthaler, Jesse Boardman Kauppila, Brian Caraway, Veronica Graham & Jesse Eisenhower, Wayne Grim & Carey Lin & Kate O’Donnell, Farley Gwazda, Matt Ingalls, Jeff Kaiser, Michael Kelly, Scott Kiernan, Michelle King, Katrina Lamb, Andy Lambert, Colin McKelvey, Joel St. Julien & Jesus Beltran, Chris Vogel, Audra Wolowiec

a found score to a silent hymn

2011-09-04T20:08:00.000-07:00

1. [silence] RE: Hmmmm
2. [silence] Re: Hmmmm
3. [silence] Re: Re: Hmmmm
4. [silence] Re: Re: Hmmmm
5. [silence] Re: Re: Re: Hmmmm
6. [silence] Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmmm
7. [silence] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmmm
8. [silence] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmmm

this is a shortened thread from silence digest, a mailing list dedicated to the work of john cage. i love how it reads as a silent score. some interviews with john cage HERE and HERE.

—i do my best to make each moment like something that i am not familiar with

—to reach the impossibility of transferring from one like image to another

—i want something i don't yet know

found (in the blue august moon)

2011-08-30T14:46:00.000-07:00

on a clear moonless night in august, among the numberless faint and bright stars strewn all over the darkness of the summer sky, a delicately luminescent band of light, without sharp outlines, stretches overhead, rising from the northeast and approaching the horizon.

the oscillating universe by ernst j. opik

title by brian eno

found (thoughts left unsaid)

2011-08-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

towards poetic activism

2011-08-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL

AND

SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC

francis alÿs

poetic activism promotes provocative and compelling ways of talking and writing, ways that unsettle the common sense, taken for granted realities, and invite others into new dialogic spaces.

poetic activism is based on the appreciation of the power of language to make new and different things possible and important—an appreciation which becomes possible only when one's aim becomes an expanding repertoire of alternative descriptions rather than 'the one right description'.

from language and ecology online magazine

by arran stibbe

group show at A.I.R. Gallery

2011-08-02T22:30:00.000-07:00

i'm pleased to announce a group show at A.I.R. gallery that opens this thursday. artists include: mary billyou, amanda browder, caroline burghardt, lisa caccioppoli, david coyle, martin esteves, jamie kim, deirdre mcconnell, katherin mcinnis, christopher rose, stephanie rothenberg with dan s. wang, janos stone and audra wolowiec. A.I.R. (artists in residence) gallery has a rich history of supporting women artists—it was founded in 1972 as the first artist-run gallery solely for women in the united states and has served as a model for other alternative organizations to follow.

artist presentations are scheduled on thursday evenings starting at 7 pm:

Aug 11 - caroline burghardt, martin esteves, and katherin mcinnis

Aug 18 - mary billyou, deirdre mcconnell, stephanie rothenberg, and janos stone

Aug 25 - amanda browder, christopher rose, and audra wolowiec

mixed use, a selection of videos and films on the alternative use of public space, organized by mary billyou, will screen on tuesday, aug 16, 6-8 pm.

A.I.R. gallery

111 front St, 2nd floor

brooklyn, NY 11201

august 5th through august 27th

opening: thursday, august 4th from 6-9pm

weavers of speech

2011-07-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

truly the telephone operators have been called "weavers of speech." their swift, skilled fingers intertwine the voices and activities of communities and continents. for daily, as upon a magic loom, the world is bound together by telephone.

bell telephone system advertisement

national geographic magazine

oct 1935

the music of the city is free

2011-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

you need not leave your room.

remain sitting at your table and listen.

you need not even listen,

simply wait.

don't even wait;

just learn to become quiet,

and still,

and solitary.

the world will offer itself to you freely,

to be unmasked.

it has no choice;

it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-franz kafka

title from my recent text installation

on view at A.I.R. gallery in august

from the ear to the page

2011-07-23T15:34:00.001-07:00

a few weeks ago i led a children's workshop in upstate new york at the wassaic project artist residency. taking note from christian marclay's graffiti composition, we talked about what sounds might look like, listened very closely, and drew sounds on blank music composition sheets. we also experimented with making tin can telephones. the kids were great, sofie drew an amazing volanco, and the telephones actually worked!

my work is currently being shown as part of the wassaic summer exhibition on view through the end of august with a three day free music festival august 5-7th.

a dabblerist manifesto

2011-07-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

i just received this publication in the mail from los angeles based artist, adam overton, founder of upload..download..perform, an experimental performance score database. from the library of sacred technologies, here is an excerpt from a dabblerist manifesto:

the DABBLER is decidedly humble, enjoying the unknown, wed to experimentation of various scales.

the DABBLER believes in starting as much as in stopping, in speeding up as much as slowing down, in pausing and waiting awhile as much as in enduring.

the DABBLER sees FICTION as a portal to Truth, and witnesses NONSENSE GALORE abounding around us as proof of mankind's innate poetic predilection - FICTION as a means to temporarily disobey CERTAINTY, to briefly engage with the unseen, the impure, the off-limits, the unseemly, as a means to momentarily invert one's existence and beliefs - SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF is rather the practice of TEMPORARY BELIEF, the beloved disposition of DIPPING!

an instruction from his current project invisible and subtle performances for the walker, composed for visitors at the walker art museum on behalf of machine project:

at any point

today or any other day

publicly or privately

subtly, undrammatically

as genuinely as possible

for as long as necessary

some, all, or [n]one

if on a winter's (summer) night

2011-07-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

the novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of a chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. there is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by dust of coal. the pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. it is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him; a whistle dies away along tracks that are glistening with rain, as far as the eye can see.

if on a winter's night a traveller

by italo calvino

eraser

2011-06-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

i have a few pieces in this group show opening tonight at magnan-metz in chelsea. listed as a must-see at wnyc.

together, these artists explore the limits of what is visible, legible, or audible. facing off with absence, the exhibited artists mine the potential of empty space to represent radical negation and remaking. they do this through literal acts of erasure that involve intensely physical processes such as bleaching, redaction, or defacement; but they also deal with the idea metaphorically and allude to the ways abstraction is a form of erasure itself. the incomplete or attenuated forms on view are invitations to confront the unknown or the invisible, but also to fill in the blanks or make the picture whole again. everyday experience is filled with acts of erasure, from the traumatic to the simply puzzling, from the personal to the historical. names unintentionally vanish from our memories and we purposefully forget an ex-lover. censors shape the television we watch and there's a ready-and-waiting delete button on your computer. meanwhile, clandestine military action, secret prisons, disappearing bodies in juarez and political disenfranchisement point to a much darker side of this idea. the artists in this exhibition are exploring the process of erasure and the texture of the experience; in doing so they remind us of what's at stake.

...redactions are aural in an audra wolowiec sound piece that intimately registers the sibilant breaks between words and the material qualities of silence.

eraser at magnan-metz

featuring work by artists vincent dermody, shanti grumbine, sheree hovsepian, curtis mann, christopher michlig, maximilian schubert, pedro velez and audra wolowiec, curated by rachel furnari.

521 w 26th st

new york city 10001

june 2 - july 8

opening: june 16 from 6-8pm

a few notes on text

2011-06-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

a quick list as a reminder of the many ways language-based work can begin to exist outside, in public, and off the page.

subtitles

liner notes

scores

instructions

murals

billboards

posters

maps

meet me at the market

2011-06-02T23:40:00.000-07:00

 this weekend please MEET ME AT THE MARKET for a series of events and installations hosted by austin thomas as part of bushwick open studios, an event the L magazine describes as "the best new york city art event of the year. hundreds of artists welcome the public into their workspaces, virtually every empty space in the neighborhood becomes a spontaneous exhibition, and nightly performances, screenings and parties help the art-saturated crowds unwind."

using the moore street market as muse, 7 artists combine art and food for a series of weekend events during bushwick open studios: liz atzberger, sharon butler, brece honeycutt, lars kremer, austin thomas, julie torres and audra wolowiec, with music by the push pops and food by FARMCART.

i'll be showing a series of take-away prints, please stop by.

moore street market

110 moore street

 brooklyn, ny 

saturday june 4 from 10am - 8pm

sunday june 5 from 11am - 5pm

it takes two

2011-06-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

a few announcements from studio AND, my collaborative project with designer niels cosman. we have work in {SUPERPOSITION}, a show that opens tomorrow in seattle, and are so proud to be featured in thresholds magazine, issue 38: future, themed around speculations and ideas informing what is yet to come. a note from the editor, orkan telhan:

future never arrives 'as is.' writing for and with future increases awareness of what it is now. it improves the capacity to deal with the fear of the unknown; not the one that is probable now, but rather the one that is to come—the one that can suspend its image from the present.

cities are always known best from their fictional artifacts. but one needs to be really lucky to find an urban meteorite imagined by studio AND. in times when it is easy to lose oneself in the nausea of cities, urban meteorites are like mysterious street diamonds—the contemporary bread crumbs—perhaps our only hope to imagine a way back home.

the entire issue is currently available to read online HERE

{SUPERPOSITION} is a juried show of sculptural glass and glass related sculpture that will be held concurrent with the Glass Art Society Conference.

this show features artists whose works inhabit so many places simultaneously that they might not fit into any of theme. {SUPERPOSITION} consists of works that directly address this condition of being in multiple places at once, as well as projects produced by artists who inhabit the fringes of genres. this chaos and uncertainty result in extremely fertile ground for the growth of new ideas.

{SUPERPOSITION}

hypertopia projects

619 western building

seattle, WA

june 2-23

opening june 2, 5-8pm

from here to here

2011-05-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

this postcard is currently in transit to hyperallergic for the upcoming mail art bulletin taking place at their blogging headquarters in brooklyn. "postcards are the tweets of the mail art world," they say, "pithy, quick and often clever, they communicate without the ceremony of unveiling that most other mail art exploits."

the text on the back is from the opening scene in permanent vacation, an early jim jarmusch film from 1981.

to contribute, send your mail art to (deadline june 8th):

HYPERALLERGIC HQ

181 north 11th street

suite 302

brooklyn, ny 11211

on a side note, check out the current issue of esopus magazine with articles and images by one of the main founders of mail art, ray johnson.

sonata in primordial sounds

2011-05-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

on a recent visit to the kurt schwitters exhibition at the princeton art museum (on view through june 26th), i was so taken with the way his work crossed disciplines. from collage, sculpture, architecture, sound and performance, he seamlessly jumped from medium to medium, often traversing the boundaries by use of language.

the artist's great theoretical contribution was "merz", derived from the german work "kommerz" (commerce). more than a genre or a medium, "merz" was a method, and it involved the selection, organization, and "entformung" (transformation) of found materials: literally, the creation of the new out of the old, of art out of waste. "merz" was also a brand that schwitters promoted diligently throughout his life.

my favorite piece on view was ursonate (sonata in primordial sounds), 1923-32. a phonetic poem based on dadaist raoul hasmann's fmbwtäzäu, it consisted of nonsensical yet rhythmic utterances referred to as "the archaic, the primitive, the prelinguistic"—vocal combinations that precede the conventions of formal language.

more than a text to be read, "ursonate" is a score to be performed, its phonetic combinations uttered at various speeds and in a variety of keys. schwitters and hausman were among many artists in the early to mid-twentieth century to experiment with concrete poetry on the one hand, and to liberate language from syntax, meaning, and communication on the other.

more on kurt schwitters (ursonate) and raoul hasmann (phonemes) can be found on the ubuweb sound archive.

a ballet in three movements

2011-05-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

a wonderful review in the brooklyn rail for in the use of others for the change, a recent collaboration with choreographer julia gleich, by thomas micchelli. click HERE to read the full article, a short excerpt below:

Sunny lighting, mauve tunics, and galloping leaps gave way to enveloping shadow, gray leotards, and lurches, tics, and scissor-like chops. Four of the six dancers—Michelle Buckley, Brittany Fridenstine, Kate Kelley, and Morgan Claire McEwen—skittered across the stage, as if on rollers, to the pops, clicks, elided words and deep breathing of Audra Wolowiec’s highly effective concrete score.

Or they would snap upward from all fours and just as abruptly collapse. I thought of Hans Bellmer and the Brothers Quay. The other two dancers, Claire McKeveny and Mary Jane Ward, sat on the floor on either side of the performance space (and so far downstage they were virtually part of the audience), working with markers and stencils on sheets of paper, surrounded by scatterings of colored scraps.

This activity recalled the working process of Austin Thomas, who created the visual design of the first movement (“Vectors”), which consisted of dual projections from what appeared to be pages of the artist’s sketchbooks. These projected abstractions, angled into the corners of the Center for Performance Research’s wide, clean, box-like space, acted as a diptych (in fact, as slides of double-page spreads, they were diptychs-within-a-diptych) and signaled the form of the entire work.

another review (with a few notes on collaboration) in the new criterion by james panero. to read the full article click HERE.

After intermission came “In the Use of Others,” a ballet in three movements. Austin Thomas along with the artists Kevin Regan and Andrew Hurst each supplied designs, and Audra Wolowiec added sound to Thomas’s program. Collaborations work when artists wander together, taken in by each other’s art. Perhaps Bushwick has a particular sensibility that tends to be less armored, less ironic than other scenes, and therefore more willing to give over one’s work to a collaborative end. For “Parade,” Cocteau said that his “dream was to hear the music of Picasso’s guitars.” Here, through the addition of each artist’s work, in the form of projections, readings, and mechanical and recorded sounds, the dancers became the art, with images projected on them and their silhouettes carved out of the projections on the back wall.

The collaborations exposed new depths of each of the artists’ practices: angular dances accentuated the “vectors” of Thomas’s stenciled works; dancers gradually entered the stage as Kevin Regan read, repeated, and echoed Lilly’s text in the mantra-like use of mirroring and repetition; dancers whipped up a frenzy for the cyclone of debris in Hurst’s collages and assemblages. For the culmination, or “decumulation” as it was called, Hurst himself performed a harmonica blues riff as he entered and exited the stage, with a lone dancer snapping alongside him.

a language made of string

2011-04-29T13:04:00.001-07:00

cat's cradle, here an adult pastime, forms symbolic designs that tell island myths. stringed figures help ameila de pakarati to narate the story of hotu matu'a, easter island's legendary first king, and his long canoe voyage in search of a new land for his people. often amelia chants as she weaves. her husband (above), stares through one of her designs.

from the article easter island and its mysterious monuments

national geographic magazine, january 1962, vol. 121, no. 1

what must a language sound like told through a line of string?

upon asking myself that question, i came across easter island: the rapanui speech and the peopling of southeast polynesia, by william churchill and hippolyte roussel. published in 1912, this little gem, now part of the google online public domain archive, provides a dictionary of the language of easter island. onomatopoetic meanderings, an excerpt from page 95:

kukina sound when one swallows with difficulty, sound of an object when struck, sound of running water. _uina, sound of a gun, of a whip, of snapped fingers.

kuku mother of pearl tool. _uu, a shell knife, netting needle.

kukui to wipe off.

kukumu to close the fist.

kukuororagi a dove.

kumia a fish.

kumukumu to prepare small portions of food pressed with the hand. _umua, to make into balls, to press, to wring. kumu-hei, a small bundle of fragrant herbs. _kumu, to bring in the hollow of the hand.

a few notes on (taking one's) time

2011-04-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

date paintings by on kawara

"perhaps art is simply a particular way of taking time and primarily, for us art-lovers, viewers, and strollers who keep company with works of art, artists, and art venues, follow events and let ourselves go to slip into the right rhythm for discovering surprises, a sensual tempo sustained by feverish or drifting attention depending on when and where we are. but perhaps this time taken is only possible because it replies to time offered, displayed, to a special relationship with duration, another way of taking time where works of art are its crafted exploration and crystallization, its sedimentation at a particular moment. ultimately, this is the art we love, that goes on living inside us by transforming us, appealing to us: a kind of leafing through time which finds ways of popping-up and joining us in all manner of objects, forms, and gestures. taking time is therefore seizing reality alone, facing up to what nobody can deny, what inescapably forms us, unremittingly announcing our human condition."

- thierry davila from on kawara: the 90's

reading this today brought to mind an interview between meredith monk and bjork where they talk about various interstices between the body, time, and the voice as its own language. at a moment when the two singers were discussing landscape and working outside, bjork mentioned that she often writes music while walking, resulting in most of her music keeping a pace of 80 bpm—a sensual tempo sustained by feverish or drifting attention depending on when and where we are—a rhythm based on internal measurement, one the body can not escape—a haptic time.

site / sound / space

2011-04-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

the other week, writer and photographer katarina hybenova came by for a studio visit and wrote about our meeting on her blog, the bushwick daily, where she brought up some interesting questions about the connections between sculpture and sound. after giving it some thought, one of the convergences between the two would have to be an experience surrounding the body. it might be something like this, from the sight of sound: music, representation, and the body by richard leppert:

"the body, simultaneously site, sight, and possessing sight, is an object of tactile sensation and an aural phenomenon. the body sounds: it is audible; it hears."

katarina mainly came by to talk about my new sound piece for in the use of others for the change, a ballet performance by london-based choreographer julia gleich and jason andrew of brooklyn's norte maar. the performance, a collaborative effort featuring work by austin thomas, kevin regan, and andrew hurst, took place over the course of three evenings this past weekend at the center for performance research.

dancers include michelle buckley, brittany fridenstine-keefe, kate kelley, morgan mcewen, claire mckeveny, and mary jane ward. there's a nice interview explaining the process with julia featured on hyperallergic by writer and blogger hrag vartanian.

concrete sound

2011-04-04T22:59:00.000-07:00

new sculpture studies part of a series of sound foam formations cast in concrete. these wedge forms are often used in anechoic chambers.

l'espace m'a toujours rendu silencieux.

(space has always reduced me to silence.)

-jules valles

the tension in between

2011-03-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

austin thomas listens to abitare. photo by jennifer galatioto.

these images are of a new audio piece installed in a short, one day only show: landing jam, curated by martin esteves. the show also featured work by erica baclawski, joe ballweg, erik dalzen, rosy keyser, david malek, douglas melini and jamisen ogg. my piece, abitare, consisted of two tracks of sound heard as you walked up the stairway into the main space, a landing at the top of an apartment building. the first track was a repetitive, nostalgic loop compiled from recordings at the end of vinyl records. the second, a set of breathing exercises, explored a mediated proximity where two breaths synchronized and diverged in a series of intimate, lapsed movements.

abitare (v.)

to dwell, to live in, to inhabit, to occupy

dwell (v.)

1. to live or stay as a resident.

2. to live or continue in a condition or state.

3. to linger over, emphasize or ponder in thought, speech or writing.

the tension in between: a landing jam in greenpoint review by hrag vartanian on hyperallergic

from the press release:

it's not just that an image or thing exists only within it's own content, rather, it hums with it's own inverted perpetual motion as a necessary result of it's insular self awareness.

referring to the "landing" in the subtitle of the show is not meant to imply an installation. it is a reference to the landscape provided for the works. the top landing, the last floor, is an "almost there" area, at once implying a next step, but capitalizing on the tension of the space.

the exhibition took place in brooklyn on february 27th and was sponsored by the ugly art room.

how to form a line

2011-03-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

i was so struck by this image today. amidst the almost unimaginable disaster in japan, people waiting in (an uncertain) line for water on the grounds of a school in sendai. image new york times.

to find meaning in the smallest of details. a line to draw. a line to say.

a line to stand in.

love is a river

2011-03-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

my postcard series start where you are is being shown in estuary gallery, a new artist-run exhibition space located in a former hat factory in beacon, new york. the exhibition is on view march 12th through may 1st and features 26 artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, video and poetry. the opening reception will take place saturday, march 12th from 3-9pm.

less like an object and more like the weather

2011-03-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

just like so /

/ at times

by way of /

/ from one to another

fragments from a certain coincidence in the bookstore, a poem by paul d'agostino

below is an excerpt loosely transcribed from chance conversations: an interview with merce cunningham and john cage recorded at the walker art center in 1981. (i can't help but think when they talk about the difference between music and dance, they are actually talking about themselves, the inseparable nature of living and working together.)

(merce cunningham) ...the idea of having a music which was not dependent upon the dance, nor the dance dependent upon the music, but which were separate identities which could in a sense coexist. we worked at that time within something called a rhythmic structure. we thought the common denominator between the two acts was time and we had devised a form where we agreed upon certain points. but within those structure points, the time within the structure points, we were free to do as the dance went and as the music might go. and that was more or less the first time that we began to work together. and then we've continued, and now, the structure points in a way have disappeared. or, its a little bit like instead of going from minneapolis to st. paul, you go from minneapolis to the moon.

(laughter)

and there's a different thing about time.

(john cage) it's less like an object and more like the weather. because in an object you can tell where the boundaries are but in the weather, it's impossible to say when something begins or ends. we hope that the weather will continue, and we trust that our way of relating dance and music will also continue.

sounding sculptures

2011-03-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

sound sculpture, 1975

a beautiful series of essays and images by artists surveying the techniques, applications, and future directions of sound sculpture. with essay titles like structures sonores, sounding sculptures, variations on the theme for listening to door knobs, no barriers, sound sewage, the collection is both playful, serious, and if nothing else, inspiring.

download the 208 page pdf file on ubuweb HERE

language / architecture (straight lines intersecting)

2011-02-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

audio data visualization

textile grid, spray paint on board, 2011

concrete sound, sound foam cast in concrete, 2010

phoneme (n.)

from phonema "a sound uttered"

the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.

/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/

/p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/

architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. there it begins.

- mies van der rohe

twice removed: a survey of take away work

2011-02-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

i'm thrilled to have a small piece in this show at golden age in chicago (thanks to kevin curran at the laundromat gallery in brooklyn):

twice removed: a survey of take away work

28 january - 6 march 2011

you can see installation images here

encountering the “take away" artwork, consisting of unlimited or large-run editions whose individual pieces are free for the taking, has become a common occurrence in contemporary art exhibitions. a strategy notably employed in félix gonzález-torres’ “stack” works, the take away has been used by many other artists with a variety of intents and forms. the spirit of generosity, an exploration of dispersion and the attempt to circumvent the art market are just a few of the potential motivations cited for generating take away works. twice removed aims to provide a venue where the multiplicity of meanings and post-exhibition life implied by the take away model can be considered by exhibiting single units of these works together.

the project will take form as an exhibition, website and pamphlet to be published by golden age at the conclusion of the show. organized by karly wildenhaus, a creative administrator and independent curator living in chicago.

golden age
119 n peoria st #2D
chicago il 60607

wheeze whine whir whisper

2011-01-30T21:30:00.001-08:00

handbook of noise measurement by arnold p. g. peterson, general radio company 1972

on the road to collaboration . . .

2011-01-25T17:04:00.001-08:00

notes on collaboration thanks to mary billyou

guest blog posts

2011-01-23T17:57:00.000-08:00

i contributed a few blog posts for studio fuse, a studio critique group with a large roster of roving participants. the first entry is about the new alternative space janus project and the other is a review of a studio visit with the norwegian sound artist ricardo del pozo.

nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones

2011-01-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

my postcard series start where you are will be on view in the group show detroit: a brooklyn case study at SUPERFRONT LA through may 2011. a catalog from the exhibition with essays by curators chloe bass and mitch mcewen is available at blurb.com. a short excerpt from the essay other people's cities: the epistemological danger of detroit by mitch mcewen:

just as rem koolhaas' "delirious new york" implied not only a study of a city but, also, a new methodology of how to conceive of a city, detroit forces an investigator to re-tool the methods of investigation. "detroit: a brooklyn case study" aims to aggregate not just pieces of analysis or experience, but also methods of producing and distributing knowledge about an urban condition and a place.

the postcards from brooklyn-based artist audra wolowiec operate along the lines of this epistemological game. her "start where you are" series of postcards appropriates found postcards of idyllic landscapes, onto which the artist silk screens the statement "start where you are" in white ink. with this text applied, the depicted landscape shifts from photograph of a specifically located place to abstract mental image, from landscape to mental-scape. this suggests the possibility that what might define the circumstance of where "you are" (say, brooklyn) may be produced not only by the existing environment, but also by the desire for its antithesis.

some links to recent articles on art and architecture in detroit:

artists in residence in the new york times

matthew barney makes a new film in detroit on bad at sports

in detroit, a fight over iconic school's future on national public radio

mies van der rohe, lafayette park in dwell magazine

detroit: a brooklyn case study

SUPERFRONT LA

pacific design center, ca 90069

opens thursday, january 20 from 5-8:30pm

title by ludwig wittgenstein from culture and value

artist in residence at 491

2011-01-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

for the next month my work will be on view at the monthly online magazine 491 run by bret schneider and jamie keesling. the images are from a new series of proposals and scale models for acoustic installations in public spaces.

the listening act

2011-01-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

when one person cannot find her way, often we say that she is lost. if two people cannot find the way, they took a detour.

"getting lost" is a relative term. it is regarded in relation to something else; to the road you were moving on, the direction you have taken, the one you were supposed to find, or the road other people walked on. this way you could say that you can never really get lost; you just find another place to move upon.

when listening, similarities can be found that suggests that "getting lost" is not just a product of a visual experience, rather a furthering of a spatial experience, which can have extensive aural qualities. sound meet us constantly. evidently when communicating between each other we form sound into speech. however, sound also happens outside of us and this is largely responsible for how we discover the world and learn things that happen outside our control. both kinds of audible phenomena affect us, they construct our consciousness: if we say that we did not understand something that was said, the fault may be on our side as we give-in to habits of the mind. but as always depending on the situation, we can surely say we understood something even if the speaker is bad at communicating or even if they speak a different language.

i thought i heard something by ursula nistrup from the publication the listening act

image from course in general linguistics by ferdinand de saussure

in pursuit of lightness

2010-12-31T09:26:00.000-08:00

"lightness is the flexible, the weightless, the mobile, the connective, vectors as distinct from structures." italo calvino

moon /

berlin //

duoon ////

music by alva noto and ryuichi sakamoto

the architecture of travel

2010-12-28T21:01:00.000-08:00

few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. there is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. the mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks—charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. the music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness...

from the art of travel by alain de botton

images taken at the detroit metro airport

you can fly over a city or walk through it

2010-12-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

you can fly over a city or walk through it: your movement influences what you see and how. your body cannot help but chart the shape of a building, the time it will take to reach the other side of the intersection, spaces and gaps. it generates a personal narrative, entangled in the endless stories of the city.

this also happens in books, although we rarely think about it. if the reader's movement is made explicit from one word to the next, from page to page, from a while ago to two minutes from now, time assumes a key role in our reading experience. the gaps in-between words and pages—all of the book that isn't black ink—resonate.

this is precisely what happens in "tree of codes," an extraordinary journey that activates the layers of time and space involved in the handling of a book and its heap of words. jonathan safran foer deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. in our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers it actually has a body.

olafur eliasson

from tree of codes by jonathan safran foer

call me on the line / call me call me any anytime

2010-12-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

bell telephone ad from a 1960s national geographic

title by blondie

the fine art adoption network

2010-12-05T20:24:00.000-08:00

Last year, Class 808 at M.S. 131 in Manhattan’s Chinatown wrote to artist Audra Wolowiec asking if they might “adopt” her uneditioned multiple, pocket cloud, a square of recycled metallic film, sky blue on one side and silver on the other, with attached instructions to crumple the film into a ball, “place in pocket,” and “open when needed.” In their joint letter to Wolowiec, the seventh and eighth graders wrote that they liked that the piece was portable and smooth and would “feel like we had a real cloud with us.” Charmed by the letter, Wolowiec gave each classmate a pocket cloud to customize and look after.

The exchange between Wolowiec and Class 808 was made possible by the Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN), a website where artists post works they are willing to donate to whomever makes the most compelling case for ownership. FAAN visitors can browse available artworks by artist name and discipline and, if they see a piece they would like to own, email the artist through the site to explain why the work resonates with them. Artists choose which, if any, of the would-be adopters will receive their work, and can ask as many questions as they wish before making their choice.

Adam Simon conceived of FAAN when faced with a problem familiar to many visual artists: what to do with old, unsold artworks. Most artists, regardless of their degree of commercial success, create more work than they can sell or exhibit. It occurred to Simon that “by assigning works either enormous value or none at all, the art market makes a lot of significant art invisible.” He envisioned FAAN as an alternative to the conventional art market, connecting artworks “with people for whom the works will have great value.” Simon pitched his project to Art in General’s New Commissions Program in 2005; it was accepted, and launched in 2006.

In Lewis Hyde’s seminal book, The Gift, a touchstone for the curators at Art in General who commissioned and helped shape FAAN, Hyde suggests that the isolation and sense of entitlement that accompany market exchange can diminish, and even destroy, art. To be art, Hyde writes, not only must a work be an emanation of its maker’s gift, e.g. a gift of intuition or inspiration, but the audience must also feel the gift it carries. “Where there is no gift there is no art,” he writes.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY DANIEL WENTWORTH ON THE NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS HERE

when materials of the actual become materials for the possible

2010-12-03T23:16:00.000-08:00

entirely of crystal glass

colored in snow and glacier region

devout. unutterable. silence.

out of the valley crystal masts

glitter in the sun, in the light

crystal standards

plateaus for air landings

inseparable opposites

every human thought

should grow silent

where the highest love

where art speaks

surfaces. edges. vaults. space.

fragments from alpine architecture by bruno taut

title from the night sky by ann lauterbach

for they thought that the music was within them

2010-11-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

he looked into her eyes, which mirrored the whole rose-colored sunset and green shores. then they heard music, like a glass-harmonica, but in strange keys - such as only those dreamed who wished to do something new in the world! but it did not occur to them to seek outside themselves, for they thought that the music was within them.

august stringberg, the big gravel screen

translated by velma howard, 1912

this is a re-post of a blog entry from airform archives - a blog by steve roden that i am completely in love with. steve roden is an artist primarily known for his sound-based work but also paints and writes and is an avid collector of books, images and ephemera that he regularly posts on his blog. this entry in particular reminds me of john cage's experience in an anechoic chamber where he, in a space devoid of external sound, was able to hear sounds lying just beneath the surface:

a song to write a film to

2010-11-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

this afternoon i came across two audio clips of a man i've heard singing several times while waiting for the L train. it's from a small collection recorded on my phone of people i hear singing in public places. i love how through pause and pace his voice begins to synch with the recorded announcement. it becomes a chance collaboration, live and recorded then recorded again. they are beautiful—his voice, the train, the sense of longing—it reminds me of a score to the beginning of an imaginary film.

TXT FST

2010-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

i visited the reanimation library the other night for TXT FST (text fest), a series of sound and spoken word performances curated by two brooklyn based sound artists, kurt gottschalk and tamara yadao. the three night series was composed of artists and musicians who explore language, voice and music through performative text works.

"TXT FST" provides an opportunity for writer musician artists and/or writers, musicians, and artists to find ways to approach the use of the written word (or non-written, or non-word) in performance. Riffing on how we comprehend the use of speech, writing and functionality of words in general, "TXT FST" aims to express the mutability of language within conundrums it may fall prey to.

the night closed with a sound performance, a sparse and somewhat difficult one, using intonations recorded from the library itself: murmurs, scanners electronically moving from side to side, the turning pages of books. these amplified sounds seemed to transpire the interior voice of the library. it was as if the stacks of books, quietly filled with lines of words, were able to communicate acoustically through their innate physicality.

the final performance of TXT FST can be heard november 23rd at 7:30pm at the reanimation library located inside proteus gowanus at 543 union street, brooklyn.

start where you are

2010-11-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

from my new postcard series start where you are

silkscreen ink on found postcard

3.5 x 5 in

2010

pocket cloud at the new york art book fair

2010-11-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

the printed matter book fair is probably one of my favorite yearly events - hundreds and hundreds of books, zines, posters and artist editions all in one place. it's overwhelming eye candy! my multiple pocket cloud is featured at the proteus gowanus booth, please go check it out this weekend at PS1. the fair is free and open through sunday november 7th. for more information click here.

muted objects and spaces

2010-10-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

the images above are of various sound absorbing foam. i love how the panels resemble architecture and landscapes. the white foam tubes are from a hotel in barcelona and the grey room is an anechoic chamber in germany, a space designed to absorb all sound frequencies.

studio visit in wassaic

2010-10-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

the residency in wassaic was a great experience - having a huge amount of space to work and think. everyone there seemed to participate in creating a sense of community, from the CSA farm onsite to the open studios to the local general store. the images above are of the barn that houses more than 10 artist studios, a woodshop, silkscreen studio, food project space, auction ring and more (it's an enormous converted 1875 livestock auction house) and the other images are from my studio - text pieces, concrete casts and plaster stencils experimenting with objects that convey a physicality derived from an interior language of voice and sound.

The Wassaic Project is an artist-run sustainable, multidisciplinary arts organization that focuses on community engagement and facilitates artists and participants to exhibit, discuss, and connect with art, each other, our unique site, and the surrounding area. www.wassaicproject.org

ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee

2010-10-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

in the new york times article found in translation the writer michael cunningham describes how multiple translations lead to an unlimited number of reads as he gives us lessons on how to create for an audience. through decoding the first sentence in moby dick, he describes how each translated version contains new meaning and, additionally, how each reader invites new understanding through ones own idiosyncratic interpretation, drawing our attention to the often overlooked mutability of the written word. a lovely article on writing and listening.

Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound. Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.

Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.

“Chiamami Ismaele.” That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced. If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.

he'll be speaking at 192 books on monday, october 18th at 7pm about his new book by nightfall.

revolutions in public practice

2010-10-11T14:57:00.001-07:00

i've been listening to clips from the creative time summit: revolutions in public practice, an ambitious panel of social practitioners who spoke last weekend in new york city. my favorite speaker by far was julia bryan-wilson. listen to her buoyantly tie in themes as seemingly diverse as air, our environment, exchange and the market. if cabinet magazine did an edition themed around the subject, her speech would be fitting as an inventory. a short excerpt below:

I start here because talking about the market, the theme of this morning's panel, is like talking about air. We coexist inside it, it both enables and limits our activities, and often it alludes our precise investigation. You could say that market economies are the oxygen we breathe — capitalism expands to fill the space around us.

Indeed within the twentieth century, many artists have utilized air to think about economies of exchange. From the artist's breath, a balloon inflated by Piero Manzoni's own exhalations, a literalization of the commodification of the artist's expression, to Michael Rakowitz's installation of duct works and fans that changed the humidity and temperature of the PS1 gallery space.

Air, like the various markets that complexly define our relationship to value, class and worth, is an often unacknowledged matter, a structuring substance that however elusive, has real, heavy effects.

soapbox

2010-10-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

The modern form of the soapbox is a blog: a website on which a user publishes one's thoughts to whoever reads the page.

Piero Manzoni's Base Magica - Scultura vivente (Magic base - Living sculpture), 1961

Throughout its history, soapboxing has been tied to the right to speak. From the period 1907 to approximately 1916, the Industrial Workers of the World conducted dozens of free speech fights in the United States. A skilled and effective "soapboxer" had to be quick on his feet, figuratively and sometimes literally, having the ability to express political opinions with clarity, to have ready answers for common objections, to be able to deflect hostility with humor or satire, and to be able to face difficulty or danger with fortitude. (from wikipedia)

for a contemporary model of the soapbox speech, listen to people speak their minds for one minute at the soapbox event by pia lindman.

when the sky is gray

2010-10-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

text by fellow Wassaic Artist in Residence Alee Peoples

delusion

2010-10-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

i snuck into the city for an evening to see laurie anderson perform her new work delusion at brooklyn's BAM theater - it was a bit darker than her other performances and deeply personal. using her voice, the violin, synthesizers and video projections, she spoke of her mother, the future of the moon, the passage of time, iceland, and ended with a moving lullaby over a loud, palpable base that sent vibrations through the room, permeating the pores of the body. she has a dynamic way of tapping into the collective experience, a dream-like state that we all know but perhaps don't quite have the words for.

"the porous border between history and myth"

I'm trying to make a kind of trance-like situation really, with images and sound so that your mind can float and can kind of do the type of jump cutting that this piece requires you to do.

- Laurie Anderson

studio notes

2010-09-28T20:29:00.000-07:00

notes from my last brooklyn studio visit from the beginning of august with my studio critique group studio fuse - a great group of artists who always keep the dialog going. lots of thanks to amanda lechner for her thoughtful notes.

Much of Audra Wolowiec’s work is related to sound, often considering sound in relation to understanding language. At times Audra creates silence and absence where there was sound or content. In her audio piece, "private space in a public time", Audra recorded Vito Acconci’s text, "Public Space in a Private Time", read it aloud, and then edited out the middle of each spoken word. The result is a sound piece of breathy noises separated by short intervals of quiet. In a simlilar vein, for the "Sounds of Silence" Audra has sanded smooth the Simon and Garfunkel single rendering it recording-less.

Often Audra’s work does not implicitly utilize sound but is indexical to it. In some of her sculptures she has created objects from spaces that hold, carry, or buffer sound. She cast the negative space within a megaphone and cast squares of sound absorbing foam in concrete, a material that has been used to reflect sound in military and industrial applications. During her studio visit, Audra also presented works on paper featuring shapes similar to these sculptures. The screened concrete prints seemed to function as supporting material for the sculptures or as quiet notes on their own.

In another project Audra clipped images of lips from a daily newspaper reconfiguring the mouth gestures as small collages. These pieces are meant to be read as musical sound scores as much as they are visual compositions. As scores, the compositions have been performed by singers, musicians and acted out by the artist. During the studio visit they were presented as visual context only. When collaborating with others Audra likes to give over as much control as possible to her collaborators laving the experiences and outcomes open-ended. The group discussed interpretation when discussing this work; “Where is the work - in the instruction or in the interpretation of a given project?”

Audra is moving towards inviting or creating experiences in a space. There is a fine line between what is given by the artist and what is required of the viewer. The group discussed the delayed experience of the slow read of some of Audra’s work and questioned whether her approach involves a building up or paring down when conceiving and creating her projects. She responded that her process involves paring down her ideas and methods; she is aiming for a point that is just enough information to communicate an idea or feeling.

During the studio visit and discussion participants brought up a range of other topics and ideas that are related to communication such as reading micro-expressions, speech analysis, coding, ransom notes and transcription.

-Amanda Lechner

going to market

2010-09-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

below is a short video clip of market - my experimental pop-up shop in the garment district that just ended a few weeks ago. i loved having a space of my own. and i like how the sewing table becomes akin to the kitchen table (i wonder if the table is some sort of icon for a meeting place, perhaps why marina abramovic originally used it in her performance? and not to forget rachel whiteread's casts of the spaces beneath a table). the interactions went well, lots of foot traffic and i found myself asking questions on a daily basis - how is it effecting the neighborhood, is this service needed? it was sort of absurd in a way - cutting and exchanging parts of clothing. people occasionally had requests on how they wanted their garment to be altered (specifying the neckline, shorter sleeves, a hole that needed attention) but this was not a mending service. when meeting one another, we are never really sure the way things will go. we are constantly being altered by proximity, by encounter.

sub terrain / paradise

2010-09-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

a sub terrain paradise? two exhibitions in one evening and sadly i am unable to attend either as i am typing this from wassaic projects, an artist residency program in a very small but very beautiful town in upstate new york. it's my first time being on a residency and so far so good. more on that soon as well as photos and video clips from market, the participatory pop-up shop that took place in the garment district - in 10 days there were 40 garments, 20 exchanges, and countless interactions. i enjoyed it so much and hope to do a similar project again soon.

Sub Terrain

Curated by Andrew Thompson
Work: Ann Arbor
306 State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Exhibition runs September 10th – October 5th
Opening Reception: September 10th 6-9 pm

What lies below the surface of the physical, the perceptible, and the quantifiable? Invisible forces of the subconscious simmer until they come to a head in subtle circumstances of serendipity or in violent disruption, sparring with the perceived logic of life.

Sub Terrain is an all-media exhibition that invites artists to give vision to the invisible and explore the landscape of the immaterial and its convergence with the physical realm.

Participants include:
Amanda Lechner, Amanda Thatch, Amy Sacksteder, Audra Wolowiec, Audrey Russell, Barbara Neri, BJ Vogt, Cedric Tai, Christopher Ulivo, Debra Broz, Ginger Chase, Graem Whyte, Judy Rushin, Julie Lambert, Lauren Harlowe, Madeline Stillwell, Manisha Patel, Matt Frieburghaus, Megan Heeres, Melissa Jones, Mira Burack, Rachel Frank, Ryan Molloy, Sally Schluter Tardella, Scotty Wagner, Susan Evans.

view of audio installation and score

the audio for this is private space in a public time from my art in general audio in the elevator project exhibited earlier this year. i am very curious how it will be received, taken from its original context of the elevator into a very private listening experience. i made a visual score to accompany the work, using the same method as the audio of removing the words from vito acconci's text public space in a private time to leave beginnings and endings, a visual thread of non-language.

studio AND, my collaborative project with the very talented niels cosman, will be showing new work at proteus gowanus for the yearlong exhibition paradise. we're excited to present a new urban meteorite field kit—complete with field guides, tools, and accessories all in a very stylish yet utilitarian messenger bag for urban explorers on the run. proteus is also home to the reanimation library, morbid anatomy, study hall, fixers collective and many other interesting projects. my favorite part of the press release reads: Jorge Luis Borges, explorer of imaginary worlds, said, "I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." me too.

Please join us for the opening of our new yearlong theme, Paradise

Proteus Gowanus

543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Friday, September 10, 6:3-8:30pm

Whether conceived as the birthplace of innocence or a final destination that only the chosen few can enter, the concept of paradise has entranced us across cultures and eras. For some it is the stillness of absolute peace, for others a zone of sensual delight with fountains, fruit, naked virgins, kindly animals and melodious music.

As spiritual ascent or sensual escape, Paradise calls to us and we respond with our imaginations. From the hanging gardens of Nebuchadnezzar to the gardens in our own backyards, we seek to create accessible approximations of an unattainable realm of tranquility. Jorge Luis Borges, explorer of imaginary worlds, said, "I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." For less cerebral seekers, the tropics abound with sun-drenched resorts, open to anyone with a bank account, and amusement parks across the globe offer countless varieties of ecstatic experience.

Whether commercially, spiritually or artistically derived, all paradises thrive by providing stark contrast to the daily grind. Pliny the Great added to his idyllic description of the Islands of the Gods (also known as the Fortunate Isles): "These islands, however, are greatly annoyed by the putrefying bodies of monsters, which are constantly thrown up by the sea." And this is, indeed, the secret of paradise: for every heaven, there must be a hell.

This year, Proteus explores the theme of Paradise, examining the light and the dark sides of this alluring word and inviting our friends and visitors to join us as we roam with irony, sensuality and longing in search of paradise.

Participating artists:

Angelo Bellfatto, Diane Bertolo, Svetlana Boym, Dominique Cooper, Ernst Haeckel, John Hudak, Okay Karadiyalar, KS Lack, Eva Melas, Lado Pochkua, Lance Rutledge, Adine Sagalyn, Erik Schurink, Suzan Shutan, Suzanne Silver, Joshua Stern, Robert The, Friese Undine, Studio AND (Audra Wolowiec and Niels Cosman).

market

2010-08-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

market

an interactive installation by Audra Wolowiec

August 26 - Sept 27, 2010

Opening Reception: August 27, 6-9pm

Hours: 11am - 6pm daily

Closed: Sept 1-2

chashama 266

266 West 37th Street

New York, NY 10018

www.chashama.org

it's lonely living in the modern world - exchange!

"market," an interactive installation at chashama 266 by Audra Wolowiec, invites individuals to participate in an intimate micro-economy by brining garments to be altered through the process of exchange. Located in the Garment District of New York City, this site-specific project stems from a desire to connect with people and draw attention to the labor embedded in the garments we wear.

Acting as a "mercer," or "textile trader," the artist will provide a service that involves cutting out corresponding swatches from each item of clothing, transferring and sewing them in place of the other. Through this process of direct relations, a market is created based not on commerce but on tactile interaction.

To participate, please visit the space during open hours and remember to bring an item of clothing. Participants will kindly be asked to leave their garments on display throughout the duration of the project and can retrieve them when the show closes on September 7th. The artist will be available for exchange daily from 11am - 6pm.

roundtable

2010-08-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

Last week Yuka Otani and I co-organized a roundtable discussion on artist residencies in conjunction with Studio Fuse, a studio critique group whose mission is to foster dialog and to share resources among artists. The panelists included: Laura Braciale, Rachel Frank, James Huang, Stephanie Lempert, Christopher Robbins, and Yuka Otani. The artists presented their work and shared images taken on various residencies to show the grounds and to talk about the possibilities (and impossibilities) that living and working on-site can cultivate. It was an informative talk with lots of questions and very candid answers.

A list of great resources when searching for residencies below:

Nuture Art Deadline Calendar

"Phonebook" by Green Lantern Press

College Art Association

I will soon be reporting on my own experience as an artist in residence—I was accepted into The Wassaic Project for the month of September where I'll be living and working in a lovely barn upstate in the small Hamlet of Wassaic, New York, just east of the Hudson River. It's my first residency, there is a lot to plan for: organizing, research, packing up tools, transportation, new bicycle tires! I'm really looking forward to the focused time and the unknown possibility of new places.

2010-07-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

(found in a pair of jeans from the thrift store)

school of the future

2010-07-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Studio AND recently participated in a project held in a small park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn called School of the Future. Created by Cassie Thornton and Christopher Kennedy, two fantastic artists and renegade educators, School of the Future was a series of free workshops and events dedicated to pushing the idea of what school can be. Studio AND presented Urban Geological Study, a course that taught how to identify, classify, and tell the story of objects found in the local urban environment. In the workshop we introduced the study of Urban Geology by discussing the formation of rocks and minerals and various methods of classification. We led a group on an Urban Geological Exploration to gather samples from the local environment and completed worksheets with drawings, maps, and writing. Each participant created a sample narrative that described their material's formation by combining geological history with a personal relationship formed with the object. At the end, each gave their sample a new name. It was an exciting event with lots of great discoveries. And to top it off, a Japanese television crew was there filming! Which could only lead us to believe that in the future, school will not only be more fun, it will be televised, in Japan.

There is a nice write-up of School of the Future in the New York Post: If this is 'school' sign us up! and another in Metro: Easy-to-draw dictators and other courses for all ages

Christopher explains his discovery of the "Vander-Tranductor"

Niels discusses Urban Geology / School of the Future schedule

Studio AND is the collaboration between Audra Wolowiec and Niels Cosman. In 2009 Studio AND discovered a curious material unique to the urban landscape called Urban Meteorites. Soon after this discovery, The Department of Mineral Science was established to further investigate Urban Meteorites and to promote the exploration of the urban environment. You can learn more about this curious phenomenon at www.andindustries.org

the democracy of objects

2010-06-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks in preparation for a major renovation, I assisted with the deinstallation at 101 Spring Street. A location often overlooked, hidden behind layers of scaffold and industrial screen, was once the residence of the artist, sculptor and collector Donald Judd. In 1968 the pioneer of permanent installation moved into his five story home, now a foundation, that remains one of the last, if not only, glimpses into SoHo living of the time.

I was a docent at the Judd Foundation for several years, spending afternoons leading tours, an hour here and hour there, basking in the light from the floor to ceiling windows—intrigued. I can’t say it was love at first sight, however, Judd’s sense of order and specificity seemed too rigid, his writing distant. I felt a disconnect between his artistic sensibilities and being inside his home—the warmth of being enveloped between the wooden floor and mirroring wood-planked ceiling, the creosote soaked plaster walls from the building’s previous life as a textile factory, and the enormous, imperfect, weathered Texas pine tables and shelves that seemed as inseparable from the architecture as the walls themselves. Who is this Donald Judd I often wondered? Perhaps it was because I hadn’t been to Marfa (Judd’s other home in Texas where his legacy remains preserved through permanently installed work), or perhaps because he belonged to a different generation of artists, a time that I will never know.

Wearing gloves and fully stocked with any archival material one could imagine, the collection was dissected and packed, piece by piece. Tagged, dated and classified: rock, spherical rock, hair band, rusty nail, fur coat. Each piece was accounted for. A pebble was given as much consideration as a Chamberlain. The natural, industrial, and the artistic were without rank—each present as a reminder of its own individual purpose. Thought, aesthetic, and function knew no order. Was Donald Judd sentimental? Or perhaps some sort of Zen pioneer? Beneath the perfect right angles of steel and anodized aluminum, Judd had heart.

Rainer, his daughter, gave a speech on the last day the building was open before renovation. It was an emotional invocation, commemorating what would have been Judd’s 82nd birthday and a life lived in and out of a family home that would be soon dismantled and eventually, turned into a museum. Later I learned that her concerns included not only preserving the integrity of the building structurally, but atmospherically—how the light entered the pressed glass windows, and the smell, slightly tangy and wooden (descriptions that might read like the contents of a perfume designed by Comme des Garcons: electricity, metal, mineral, the smell of dust on a hot light bulb, freshly welded steel, ink from a fountain pen, fresh pencil shavings). It was as if, by describing these intangible but ever-present atmospherics, she was in fact describing Judd himself, permeating the pores of the architecture.

In the book The Spiral Jetta, Erin Hogan’s account of traveling the American West in search of Land Art (including a visit to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in a little Jetta that could), she speaks eloquently of "deep time." Quoting the geologist, John McPhee from Annals of the Former World, “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time.” By preserving his legacy with such tenacity, perhaps Judd wanted to exist within the annals of deep time—a slippery concept to grasp, thousands and millions of years, accumulation and erosion measuring up to moments beyond the physical—the trace of a scent, the flicker of buoyant light—where round, square, earth, body, and sky all intermingle. Neither painting nor sculpture*. Nor clothing nor textile nor utensil. All remain quite rigorously, yet simply, objects, existing side by side, clinging dearly to space and time, democratically existing on the same plane.

view of the Judd Foundation at 101 Spring Street

*from Judd's essay Specific Objects available as a .pdf download here

science fair update!

2010-06-11T19:22:00.001-07:00

last weekend at the science fair, eliza strickland from discover magazine stopped by and wrote a lovely article and posted many images from the show that can be seen HERE

science fair

2010-06-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

for two weekends only, studio AND will be featuring urban meteorites at the flux factory's science fair—a quirky project that explores the boundaries between art and science through the lens of grade-school aesthetics.

flux factory
june 5-6 and 12-13
saturday and sunday from 12-6pm
special flux thursday awards ceremony: june 10, 8pm

studio AND is a collaborative project i've been working on with my studio mate (and designer extraordinaire), niels cosman. it began about a year ago as a conversation and has developed into its own research division. please come see us and find out how you can obtain a DIY field guide kit to become a member of our growing team of future geologists:

from the press release:

Flux Factory and The Metric System are proud to present Science Fair, an exhibition of works by artist-scientists and scientist-artists!

Inspired by grade-school education fairs, Science Fair is a collaborative effort that examines science-based projects and concepts through the lens of art. Artists will create their own presentation booths and interactive experiments to be on display at the Fair. The exhibition explores the potential for science as a breeding ground for art: a way to inform and inspire art as a springboard for creative thought.

The Fair will showcase over two dozen projects including an artist-run weather station, robots that draw, urban meteorites, a cabinet of curiosities, and electro-magnetic field mapping.

Participating artists: Robin Brehm, Daupo, Lisa Glauer & Kaethe Wenzel, Fred Forest, Samwell Freeman, Hope Ginsburg & Colablablab, Kate Hartman, Jay Henderson, Jaime Iglehart, Scott Kildall, Rafael Hidalgo Múgica, Julia Oldham, James Rouvelle & Lili Maya, Daniel Schludi, SP Weather Station, Chad Stayrook, Studio AND, Flint Weisser, Elizabeth Whalley, Jing YuThe Metric System is a New York-based collective that encourages cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, thinkers, scientists, and political activists.

audio in the elevator

2010-05-24T23:44:00.000-07:00

my audio piece, private space in a public time, based on vito acconci's text, public space in a private time, will be installed through next friday, june 4th at art in general. please stop by to ride the elevator to the 6th floor, and back again. you can listen to a short excerpt of the piece below:

materialogy

2010-05-14T10:06:00.001-07:00

my dear friend and studio mate, niels cosman, will have new work up this weekend at model citizen's in conjunction with new york design week and the international furniture fair. a mix of industrial and the natural, space age and farm age, his new work is truly a labor of love. please stop by to see his work and other RISD talents such as GRAIN design and the collective Hello. We Are __

featured at hosfelt gallery
531 west 36th st, 2nd floor
new york, ny 10018
opening reception: saturday may 15, 5-8pm
hours: saturday may 15 - monday may 17, 11am - 7pm

niels cosman, acorn pod, wood and glass, 2010

you can stay up to date with niels' ongoing process on his aptly titled blog: materialogy

private space in a public time

2010-04-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

last friday was the opening for my new audio work commissioned by art in general for the a/v elevator project space. a unique space to inhabit—6 floors of slightly awkward yet intimate encounters layered through constant motion. in an elevator, you are always waiting to be somewhere else. up or down. if a building were a body, an elevator might be like an artery, or a nerve, carrying impulses to inform other parts of its dependent system (yuka said it was like being in the throat of the building). it brings to mind foucault's heteorotopia: an undefined space that is neither here nor there, other spaces that are simultaneously interior and exterior, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.

the work is titled private space in a public time, taken from vito acconci's 1990 essay public space in a private time. i read aloud the first four sections and afterwards, removed the words. what remains are starts and stops, glottal blips, breaths and consonant murmurs. the text was inverted in a way—time was removed along with language to reveal a part of the voice that carries words along like a bridge or a string, the thread of the voice.

joan la barbara came up in conversation
as did vito acconci's early writings: language to cover a page

this project leaves me wondering how the voice is used to mediate a visceral experience—how it internally affects the body and the way in which we move through a space, causing one to linger or to leave. phonemes as pheromones. voice clouds.

PUBLIC SPACE IN A PRIVATE TIME
Vito Acconci, 1990 

1.

It used to be, you could walk down the streets of a city and always know what time it was. There was a clock in every store; all you had to do was look through the store window as you passed by. The business day came and went with its own time clock; after hours, if the store was dark, the street lights let you still see inside—you had the time not just for business but for pleasure. But then times changed, and time went away. Well, it didn't go away exactly, but it certainly did go out: time went out like a virus and spread through all those bodies walking the street. Time aimed straight not for the heart but for the arm, it fit around the wrist in the form of a watch: the quarts watch that was no trouble to make and no worry to wear, the cheap wristwatch you could buy for two or three dollars off-the-shelf and on-the-street. The wristwatch was no longer an expensive graduation present, no longer a reward for a lifetime of service to the corporation. Time came cheap now; you picked up a watch like a pack of matches as you walked down Canal Street, watches were instant fashion, you chose one to suit your every mood—take one with a built-in calculator, one that ran on a few drops of water, one whose hand were entangled in a spider's web. There was no need anymore for time to installed on the street, in a bank or a liquor store; no need for time to be set in place, to be in the place where you happened by, when all the while you were on your own time, you wore time on your sleeve, you had time (almost) in the palm of your hand. Public time was dead; there wasn't time anymore for public space; public space was the next to go. 

2.
Public space in an old habit. The words 'public space' are deceptive; when I hear the words, when I say the words, I'm forced to have an image of a physical place I can point to and be in. I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a city commons. Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is a place where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds of space. The first is a space that is public, a place where the public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a space that is made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn't have the right—a place made public by force.
3.
In the space that is public, the public whose space this is had agreed to be a public; these are people 'in the form on the city,' they are public when they act 'in the name of the city.' They 'own' the city only in quotes. The establishment of certain space in the city as 'public' is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us, and neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines.  Setting up a public space means setting aside a public space. Public space is a place in the middle of the city, but isolated from the city. Public space is the piazza, an open space separated from the closure of alleys and dead-ends; public space is the piazza, a space in the light, away from the plots and conspiracies in dark smokey rooms.
4. 
The space that is made public began as its own opposite. This was a space that was never meant to be public at all: a royal space, or a presidential space, or a corporate space. This private and privileged space has inherent in it, from its beginning, the seeds of public space: the fact of its existence provoked desire, its privacy functioned as a taunt to the public that felt left out. Once that space has been taken over by force and made public, it has inherent in it, in turn, the seeds of private space, the seeds of a re-defined and re-inhabited privacy: the public that takes it over is working its way up to the royalty or the presidency or the corporate office. Private space becomes public when the public that wants it won't give it up.

another review

2010-04-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

james wagner wrote a great review for the exhibition at st. cecilia's, he seems to really get the atmosphere of the space and the intentions of the artists involved. for the full article and installation images, click HERE

It's probably not technically a pop-up show. It's also not merely another spawn (if here a silver lining) of our continuing Great Recession, like most of the new spaces hosting new art in New York and elsewhere. Then could we be watching the birth of a Greenpoint Biannual, a shelter for the emerging artists' own periodic "cross section of contemporary art production", to borrow a phrase from the Whitney itself?

Barry and I were in the former Catholic St. Cecilia Convent last Sunday for the second time in six months. Once again Father Jim, the pastor of the parish had generously and visionarily turned the space over to some young curators and artists. The Round Robin Collecive's "ECSTATIC", both an exhibition and a series of events and performances, assembled by a group of invited artists, ends its four-week run this Sunday. An excerpt from the statement which appears on the show's website:

While some of the participating artists’ work deals directly with notions of ecstasy, the title of the show does not allude to an overt theme in the work presented; rather, it refers to the process of making and encountering art and the results produced from inspired relationships.

Yes!

Three floors of the formerly-empty rooms of the nearly century-old building are filled by underknown artists with interesting new work in virtually every medium. I had been eagerly anticipating a visit, because of the pleasures we had encountered last September in the show put together by a different group of artists, but almost as soon as we walked in I thought I had died and gone to heaven. There are certainly great pleasures to be found in visiting museums and galleries, but they are nothing like those associated with the immediacy and serendipity of sharing in the work of good artists in any medium when they decide to put on a show with only a minimum of structure or system provided from without.

While some of the work may not completely unfold while competing with the intrusiveness of the abandoned-convent environment (just about the opposite of the clean white box so associated with the exhibition of art in the late twentieth century), in many if not most cases the circumstances of the installations seem ideal, oddly better than what a gallery might provide.

review

2010-03-31T14:40:00.000-07:00

a nice review of the group show ecstatic in idiom magazine by daniel pearce.
please stop by for the last weekend and see films by jem cohen this saturday at 7pm.

ecstatic group show

2010-03-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

The Round Robin Collective presents:

ECSTATIC

March 13 – April 4, 2010

Opening reception: Friday, March 12, 7-9 pm

The former convent of St. Cecilia’s Parish

21 Monitor Street, Brooklyn, NY

Hours: Sat 12-10 pm, Sun-Mon 12-6 pm
with additional hours for special events
roundrobinbrooklyn.blogspot.com

The Round Robin Collective is pleased to announce ECSTATIC, an exhibition and series of events to be held in the former convent of St. Cecilia’s Parish in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

For four weeks, The Round Robin Collective - along with a group of invited artists - will populate the four-story maze of private rooms, living spaces, stairwells, and alcoves previously occupied by nuns. Taking varied approaches to the installation of their separate rooms, individual artists and collaborative teams will present recent works or will respond directly to the building, imbued with its unique history and sacrosanct aura. While some of the participating artists’ work deals directly with notions of ecstasy, the title of the show does not allude to an overt theme in the work presented; rather, it refers to the process of making and encountering art and the results produced from inspired relationships. Like the mental transport or rapture that can exist in the contemplation of the divine, the experience of creating and considering art can trigger moments of ecstasy.

Exhibiting artists will include: Lisa Boumstein-Smalley, Mary Billyou, Amanda Browder & Stuart Keeler, Caroline Burghardt, Lisa Caccioppoli, Ofri Cnaani, Chris Cobb, David Coyle, Jeff DeGollier, Martin Esteves, Gisela Insuaste, Jamie Kim, Stephanie Liner, Deirdre McConnell, Katherin McInnis, Emcee C.M., Master of None, Huong Ngo, Christopher Rose, Stephanie Rothenberg, Dorothy Royle, David B. Smith + Brina Thurston, Matthew Spiegelman, Janos Stone, Cassie Thorton + Action Club, Jenny Vogel & David McBride, and Audra Wolowiec.

Curated screenings, workshops, and performances will be held weekly in the former chapel of the convent. Events include: opening party music by Donny Hue and the Colors as well as Irvin Morazan’s “Musical Chair Performance,” an homage to Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians (3/12); an evening of sound performances with Lary 7, Flying Teeth, and Doom Trumpet (3/13); “Low-Resolution Stories,” live cinema with Jenny Vogel and Ofri Cnaani followed by music with Chatter Blip (3/19); “The Alternative Art Space Movement in NYC,” a panel discussion with Erin Sickler, Herb Tam, Rob de Oude, and EmCee C.M., Master of None moderated by Mary Billyou (3/20); music by Toys n Tiny Instruments followed by “Diamonds in the Sky,” a evening of film/video curated by John Passmore (3/20); “Escape from the Orgone Box: Houdini & Reich on Film,” an evening of film with live soundtracks by Séance presented by Bradley Eros and Marianne Shaneen (3/26); a collective sewing day with Amanda Browder for the construction of the public artwork, “Future Phenomena” (3/27); an empanada and tamale demonstration/potluck event hosted by Gisela Insuaste and Irvin Morazan (3/28); closing the exhibition, a film/video screening curated by Jem Cohen (4/3); additional events to be announced. Details and updates regarding all the events are available on our web site.

The Round Robin Collective is a Brooklyn-based group of artists established in 2008 to forge connections and create a space for dialogue in and out of the studio. Meeting for monthly studio visits, members of the collective work in all media, fostering a dynamic exchange across disciplines and outside the commercial sphere.

subway song

2010-02-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

bampehbambampa

a slow media movement

2010-02-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

a movement
a slow movement
slow movements

feeling a little bit analog (if that could be an emotion), i've been writing more letters than blog entries lately. a friend of mine turned me onto the slow media movement - a movement that encourages less mediated interactions, book reading, land lines, powering off, and doing one thing at a time. you can read more about it on slowmedia.typepad.com or listen to the excerpt from marketplace on public radio (and if you can stand the irony, join the slow media group on facebook).

faintly audible glances
honey
ships
and slugs

space is the place

2009-12-06T22:25:00.001-08:00

source

a plot, to plot

2009-12-01T20:02:00.000-08:00

plot (n)
1. a secret plan or scheme
2. a storyline
3. a small piece of area or ground

::thoughts
that a narrative (plot) has both place in language and site

yours in science

2009-11-27T13:48:00.000-08:00

niels and i love this letter. it's been a huge influence (and ongoing source of entertainment)
while working on our urban meteorite project:

Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 12:55:10 EST
Subject: Concerning your recent submission

Paleoanthropology Division
Smithsonian Institute
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled
"211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid
skull." We have given this specimen a careful and detailed
examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your
theory that it represents "conclusive proof of the presence of
Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago." Rather, it
appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of
the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to
be the "Malibu Barbie". It is evident that you have given a great
deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be
quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior
work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your
findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical
attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to
it's modern origin:

...continue to read the full article HERE

salt lake city utah, meteor 11/18/09

2009-11-22T18:10:00.000-08:00

index of sounds

2009-11-08T08:13:00.000-08:00

index of /sounds/powerfield is a collection of recordings made "in the field" with on-site processing such as pedals, laptops and acoustic phenomena. Traditional field recordings are made outside of the studio without the use of processing, just as sounds recorded through a microphone. This two disk compilation aims to give more creative control, allowing composers to bring additional equipment with them on-site. There is something romantic about this process—like a landscape painter walking out into the field to set up a nomadic studio, using what tools and limitations are at hand.

On the opposite spectrum is 1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich, an exhibition that just closed at Bitforms Gallery. Composed of a single circuit housed in a clear cd case, sounds are created from mathematical constructions that literally perform live when turned on. With titles like Repeat her, Electrophysical and Fall Front Fast, it is difficult to link the code with the track, allowing the sounds to have an autonomous life, extracted from their mathematical origins.

The layered tones in its score are synthesized by binary pulses of electricity, emphasizing the physical quality of sound. By reducing sound into primary units of digital measure, Perich’s musical compositions offer critique to overly produced and recorded media. Rather than use data to produce a representation of analogue phenomena, raw electrical pulses in these works create pitch and rhythm when played through a speaker—creating music that is, at its essence, electronic.

Perich’s visual compositions also explore texture, noise and order using recursive logic. Woven from geometric structures, his drawings contain layers of choreographed linear repetition. Executed with a pen connected to a machine, line in these images gives way to densely packed surfaces and planes.

The images above are from the exhibition taken using an iPhone application that simulates the effects of a Polaroid camera. ShakeItPhoto is the digital counterpart to its analog surrogate, almost rendered obsolete (Oct 9th marked the final expiration date of Polaroid film). However, with news for re-production of the film sometime in 2010, there is hope that digital and analog will continue to live happily together—side by side, measure by measure.

aaaarg

2009-11-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

I recently became aware of an amazing online resource featuring an overwhelming number of articles, essays and theory all relating to art.

AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.

Check it out, it will keep you busy for a very long time ////// http://a.aaaarg.org/ /////

post marathon debris

2009-11-01T15:09:00.000-08:00

in an incredible surge of energy, after 40,000 runners coming together from around the world hit the concrete - drawing a line through the boroughs of new york city - a trail of cups and clouds of water containers left behind an eerie residue.

ice house detroit

2009-10-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

Ice House is a project by my friend, photographer Greg Holm and his collaborator, Matthew Radune. It "involves the acquisition and recontextualization of one of the 80,000 abandoned houses in the city. The house will be sprayed with water in subzero temperatures, gradually building up layers of ice over the course of several days or weeks."

They need to raise $11,000 by the end of December - you can donate as little as a fiver to get them going here on Kickstarter (a great online resource for project funding). They've been getting some good press lately too - an article here on NPR.

late night listening

2009-09-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

i love listening to the radio late at night. there's an intimacy there, with less animated announcers who pause more and give the feeling you might be the only person listening. the creators of ((audience)) on-air are night owls too. they've created a a nine day radio program that's going on right now. you can tune in at redhouseartradio.org or download their free iPhone application. a note from the curator, Emmanuel Madan:

As late-night radio listeners well know, unusual things can happen on the radio after midnight. There is something about the solitude of night-time listening which brings out radio’s best and most original attributes. The densely-packed conventions of daytime programming are loosened, and can at times even fall away entirely. This second edition of SIMULCAST taps into these possibilities, asking the question: what if time – and specifically time on the radio – were to stand still, even for a just a few hours? The answers Prévost, Gauthier, i8u and Claude offer to the question are rich and diverse. Using a variety of strategies and techniques, their inhabitations of the airwaves are not only works of audio art or radio art, but interrogations about what it means to take one’s time.

a project for geological displacement

2009-09-22T21:22:00.000-07:00

a short film by francis alys (2002)
collaborating with rafael ortega and cuauhtemoc medina
duration: 15 min

On April 11th 2002, 500 voluntiers were called in order to form a line to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. This human comb progressed pushing forward a certain quantity of sand with shovels in order to move the dune from its original position. The actual displacement was of an infinitesimal proportion, but not its metaphorical resonance.

studio AND: urban geological expedition

2009-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

Studio AND has a featured project in the ConfluxCity Festival taking place in New York City from September 17 - 20, 2009. The AND Urban Geological Expedition will be featuring Urban Meteorites deposited in locations around Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Sunday, September 20th from 10am - 6pm.

Please visit the ConfluxCity 2009 Google Map to begin your expedition. However, as a true Urban Explorer, we encourage you to search the surrounding area for material evidence of Urban Meteorite impacts (note: look for sites containing small rock-like fusions of concrete and glass)

More information can be found on our website and at the Conflux HQ located at 32 Stuyvesant St in the NYU Barney Building, New York City.

chance operations

2009-09-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

today i found the spirit of john cage nestled in my studio plant. i'm leaving the country for a week - for another set of chance operations to take place - and for more growth in and outside the studio. cage's great collection of musical scores, notations, are now available in pdf form on ubuweb.

here is an excerpt from his composition in retrospect:

nonintention (the acceptance of silence) leading to nature; renunciation of control; let sounds be sounds.
a need for poetry.
purposeful purposefulness.
no beginning, middle, or end (process, not object).
indeterminacy.
adventure (newness) necessary to creative action.
mobility, immobility.
mind can change.
feet on the ground.

flexes jumps and stutters

2009-08-30T02:30:00.000-07:00

been thinking more than making lately. about sound. voice. those parts of speaking that are neither words nor silence. the difference between written word and spoken word. how language moves. intonation. how we make language individual through inarticulation.

fragments

2009-08-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

everyone alive wants answers is an album of sound noises and loops, existing in a space of sampling and bits. it's by someone named colleen - an anonymous girl, maybe someone you once knew. music as fragment, rhizomatic thought pattern. what if we read this way - read like listening to a record - like deleuze and guattari suggest in a thousand plateaus? fragments - an interweaving of parts, words and text, overlapping experiences mediated by internal interpretation. what was that? why didn't he call? odd bits, pieces, a scrap. detached. broken off.

we want to believe that language, as a vehicle of inclusion and closure, can somehow contain/reflect all of the it, which of course is not possible. or rather, language can and does contain all of it; one might say that what we know and perhaps what we believe is only because of the bearing of language, but we have learned that for every instance of this knowledge (of it) there is another, with another portion of it about to be. even in the seamlessness of the internet, in which "everything" rides into and out of view, there are still the determinants of scale, or relation, and emphasis, or inflection. and there are still the operations of choice, although these seem increasingly obscure. at the interstices of an environment of sameness and homogeneity (which purports to be variety and vitality) there is still the possibility of an organizing intelligence that must select one it/is over another. these selections or choices are what finally or eventually allow us to participate in the making of meaning, however flawed, however partial it is.

from night sky by ann lauterbach

i don't think i want answers right now. only moments. lingering fragments that are neither lost or incomplete but whole entities in themselves.

vocare

2009-07-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

score interpreted by maria johnson on flute and lauren edman on vocals. performed at dutch kills gallery on saturday july 11, 2009.

short clip:

in full:

the score above was made from mouths cut and arranged from the New York Times. vocare is a word related to the word voice that means to call or to summon. i worked with maria and lauren to give a voice to the silent mouths - to call on or summon the collective power of the voice. for this project i was really interested in trying to locate the communicative space that forms in the absence of language.

do good

2009-07-21T00:27:00.000-07:00

Some University of Michigan kids came up with a free iPhone application that has been getting some press lately called DoGood - by providing a good deed of the day, it hopes to inspire random acts of kindness. The application is like an altruistic conceptual art project - sort of like Sophie Calle's Gotham Handbook, only mobile. "We simply wanted to empower the 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch users to collectively do acts of kindness," said Jason Bornhorst, a senior computer science and engineering student. "I can go smile at a stranger, but what if we could get 300,000 people to do that?" Public space is forever changing.

the smile jetty

2009-07-16T00:17:00.001-07:00

performance tonight

2009-07-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

Please join me for a new performance series!

Dutch Kills Gallery is pleased to present Cast Shadows, a solo exhibition of new works by Niki Kriese. Among the grouping of sculpture and video, there will be a series of special performances featuring a score by Audra Wolowiec performed by Maria Johnson (flute) and Lauren Edman (vocals) and a set of cinematic projections by Yuka Otani.

The opening reception is Saturday July 11, from 6pm-10pm with performances starting at 9pm.

Dutch Kills Gallery
37-24 24th Street, Suite 402
Long Island City, NY 11101