so, what are you doing these days?
I tend to gloss over what I've been working on these days, largely due to the fact that it's required so much time that I don't have much left to write.
Yesterday (day): put the final touches on the electronics necessary to sonify the lovely box instrument developed by Kunsole's Deric Carner to be played live at the Bridge Art Fair in New York this week.
Yesterday (night): Updated the software and sounds to be used in Dot Dot Knock, a sound installation currently up at Grove Street Window space, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of the Kunsole residency. The updated version will be installed tonight around 5:00
I don't talk enough about this installation. I'm really proud of it. Deric and Rebecca, the two visual artists in Kunsole, designed this amazing and ghostly tableau in the gallery space, to be viewed through the window, as though you were looking into an empty pool. The lighting works best at dusk, with the images and sculptures sort of glowing lightly. My sound installation is controlled by two large pieces of blue plexiglass anchored into the brick at the front of the building. When you knock on the slices, the sounds reactively morph and rhythhmicize. The official version:
Working with three generalized catalogs of sound, text, avant-pop compositions, and electro-percussion, Dot Dot Knock reacts to knocking in different ways. It pulls from its archive at will, depending on where one knocks and what mood it is in at the moment. Knocking on the left top slice results in chopped up text, sometimes understandable, other times not. Knocking on the bottom right hand slice produces hesitant percussive riffs. The installation sometimes stutters, occasionally lectures, once-in-a-while shouts and other times won't answer at all.
And it's very loud, very present, you can hear it blocks away! You know something's happening ahead but you're not quite sure what.
The whole project is a kind of exploration of emptiness, references that point in all directions at once but never quite hit their mark, made from semantically vertiginous alters. Come check it out!