You Do (it) You(rself)
Personal and Social Narratives of System Design in Electronic Arts
Curated by Ezra Teboul with Avant.org
Hosted by the School for Poetic Computation
155 Bank St., New York, NY 10014
ABOUT THE EVENT
How can electronic circuits and software design act as a canvas for artists to express both personal stories and wider societal concerns? What can we do with technical objects that expresses our wish to care, for others and ourselves? As a continuation of Avant’s 2016 Circuit Score program, You Do (It) You(rself) asks how contemporary artists use technical work in sound as a medium with explicitly social potentials. It presents three projects by Anastasia Clarke, Bonnie Jones, and Asha Tamirisa as personal visions of electric sound at an intersection of technics, art, and activism, documenting some unique definitions of “technical work” practitioners develop along the way.
Each on their own terms, these snapshots question some of the power structures underlying the material culture of electronic music. They offer a unique opportunity to learn about and discuss how abstract ideals about gender, technology, access and personal ideas can interact with sonic and physical materials in the making of time-based arts. Going from specific designs — Tamirisa’s Matrixharp, Jones’ live bending of feedbacking delay pedals, and Clarke’s Cracklepads — each artist presents some of the ways in which these ideals, mediated by thoughts and experiences, influence their technical decisions, in turn affecting artistic results. Presentations will be followed by demonstrations/improvisations, and conclude with a group discussion open to audience questions.
EVENT STRUCTURE
Event Date: December 8, 2018
Event Time: 3:00–6:00 PM
Artists
Anastasia Clarke is a composer, performer, and sound engineer focusing on live embodied electronic music performance. Solo and collaborative projects serve as sites for research and meaning-making. Anastasia’s sound works have been premiered at MoMA PS1, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, HERE Arts, Triskelion, and Incubator Arts Project. Anastasia studied Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. Anastasia’s projects use electronic hardware and software to forge active relationships between performer, gesture, light, and sound.
Website: https://anastasiaclarke.info/
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. Bonnie’s work explores the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). Her art seeks opportunities within different mediums to expose the fluid nature of individual identity, history, form, and meaning. As an arts organizer, Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, she co-founded TECHNE https://technesound.org/, an organization that introduces young female-identified women to technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. Bonnie received her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia, including the LA MOCA, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, and REDCAT. Her collaborative sound works have been shown at the Swiss Institute, Whitney Museum, and Hunter College. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Website: https://bonnie-jones.com/ | https://technesound.org/
Asha Tamirisa works with sound and image and researches media histories. Particular interests include tool-building with both software and hardware, experimental music and film, and intermedia composition & installation. Asha’s research integrates media archeological methods with feminist science and technology studies perspectives, looking closely and critically at often forgotten elements and conditions of media. Currently, Asha is a doctoral student at Brown University in the Computer Music and Multimedia department, and is concurrently pursuing an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media. Asha is a founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music/art practices. MATRIXHARP is a prototype controller that rethinks modular interfaces. The interface utilizes stretch sensors to modulate parameters and capacitive sensors to make patch connections. Through this interface, patching and moving through the spectra of parameters becomes a tactile and embodied action, one less concerned with metrics. Patch connections are felt throughout the system through the physical tension of the stretch sensors being pulled and pushed. This interface also evades the “male” and “female” language of standard modular patching.
Website: https://ashatamirisa.net/
Organizers
This program is organized/curated by Ezra Teboul with Avant.org. We thank the School for Poetic Computation in serving as Host. This program is the second in the Avant.org CIRCUIT SCORES series. The first, Electronics After David Tudor, was hosted SFPC in April, 2016: http://avant.org/event/circuit-scores/
Ezra Teboul is an artist and researcher documenting the interplay of labor and materials in electronic sound. He’s obtained a BA from Hampshire College, and a MA from Dartmouth College. He has published in the International Journal of Zizek Studies (2015), the Guide to Unconventional Computing for Music (Springer, 2017), and Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). He presented on various topics at the Alternative Histories of Electronic Music conference, the Reembodied Sound Symposium, the Music and the Moving Image conference, the meeting for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and at the Colloques Lutheries Electroniques held by the Philharmonie de Paris. In 2017, he was researcher in residence at Signal Culture in Owego, NY and at Sporobole in Sherbrooke, QC.
Website: http://redthunderaudio.com
Avant.org is a distributed project space for art and research. Avant.org is represented in this program by Charles Eppley and Sam Hart. Charles Eppley is an art and music historian from Brooklyn, NY. He has a PhD in Art History & Criticism from Stony Brook University, where he studied the history of sound in modern and contemporary art. Charles is Curator and Managing Editor at AVANT.org and his writings appear in Art in America, Rhizome, and Brooklyn Rail. Charles teaches courses in art history, music, and media studies at NYU, Fordham University, The New School, and Pratt Institute. Sam Hart is a scientist, publisher, and artist from New York. As a bioinformatician at the Sloan Kettering Institute, Sam works across cancer genomics and cellular engineering. He is Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Avant.org, and curator of the online technical catalog, Research Tactics.
Website: http://www.avant.org
