Tomorrow is the first day of the Uncaged Toy Piano Festival, organized and curated by Phyllis Chen. I don’t know how I can share a stage with heroes of toy piano like Phyllis and Margaret Leng Tan, but I’ll be doing a few pieces with toy player pianos that I developed at the Queens Museum Sound Art Residency this summer. I’ll also be bringing my robot toy piano to perform Satie’s “Vexations“, and demoing the Resistor JelTone, a working toy piano made of Jello. The festival runs tomorrow (Tuesday 11/29), Thursday (12/1) and Saturday (12/3) at three different venues in Manhattan, and you can get all the details at uncagedtoypiano.org.
In a week or so I’ll be going back to New Orleans to see a performance at the sound sculpture shantytown I worked on in September. The New Orleans Airlift brought a bunch of artists to build a little village of musical instruments out of the wreckage of an 18th century house, and invited local musicians to perform with/on/in them! There’s a teaser video from the first performance — you can hear & see my piece, a set of amplified squeaky floorboards, providing the bass line starting at about 1:22. The project was covered in the New York Times last week, and you can read all about it at dithyrambalina.com. Next week will be my first chance to hear and see the completed shantytown!
In October I set up a show of my greenmarket scanography images at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, along with two amazing photographers in the (Un)Still Life exhibit. There’s just one week left before the show comes down after this weekend, so please visit if you’re in Brooklyn. I had some of my images printed huge for the first time – more than 5 feet tall for one of them! And I had fun putting together a grid of almost 200 little tiny prints – check out the installation timelapse. By the way, all the prints are for sale, and a portion goes to benefit the library.
…and then I went to Europe, to talk about my work at VU Amsterdam’s lecture series with the Metamatic Research Initiative, and to show a piece I made for Artbots in Gent, Belgium. I haven’t really had time to collect my thoughts – or my photos – since I got back, but you can see a recording of my talk at metamaticresearch.info, and I have a silly video demonstrating the Voice Extruder, an installation which translates visitors’ voices into little sculptures, which are immediately fabricated for the visitor to take home. The Voice Extruder is an offshoot of my work for Metamatic, about which I’ll have much more to say soon! The day after I got back from Europe, I took the Voice Extruder to Baltimore for the Exploratorium’s Tinkerers’ Ball.
And what are you up to? Keep in touch!
* shantytown photo by Mellissa Strkyer — see lots more photos from the New Orleans project at the dithyrambalina blog.
“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”
That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”
In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.
Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.
Here’s a teaser video of the New Orleans Airlift’s Music Box Orchestra, a big crazy sound art/architecture project I helped out with. My contribution was the squeaky moving floor, which you can see providing the bass line as the performance starts.
Video: Adam Mayer helps test an almost-finished version of my project for Artbots Gent: the Voice Extruder makes a shape from your voice, and then prints it out for you on a 3d printer.
A selection of my prints from the greenmarket produce scan series – ranging in size from 3 inches to 5 feet! – will be in the (Un)Still Life show at BPL’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, opening tomorrow! The show will be up through December 3.
Many of the fruits and vegetables I use in my images came from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, just a few steps from the library, so it’s especially nice to see them in the beautiful lobby gallery there.
In September, I’ll be making a wave-powered sound sculpture for the Dumbo Arts Festival (September 23-25). Also showing a bunch of big prints from my produce scan series in the show “(Un)Still Life” at the lobby gallery at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch (September-December). And going to New Orleans to install a sound sculpture in Swoon’s musical house project (opening October 15th). Hopefully I’ll have time for Maker Faire in there somewhere (September 17-18). And I’ll be sending good vibes (and probably laser whistles) to the Festival of Music for People and Thingamajigs in the Bay Area (September 22-25). Then in October, I’ll be going to the Netherlands to speak at VU University Amsterdam and to show a piece at Artbots Gent (October 7-9), and in December, I’ll have a couple of pieces and maybe an installation in Phyllis Chen’s Uncaged Toy Piano Festival in NYC.
Over at NYC Resistor, we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui, and Catarina Mota. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). The Resistor JelTone tied for the Creativity Prize, and you can see it in the videos below.
That same weekend, I took some of my homemade instruments, including the 8-bit violin and a second JelTone (built in haste at the last possible minute), to the Solid Sound Music Festival for the CDM/Moog Handmade Lounge. After all my jello melted, on the second day of the festival I rebuilt the JelTone with fruit salad instead, and here it is:
I saw a firefly a few days ago, so it’s summer now, whatever the calendar says. Last weekend was the annual Figment Festival on Governors Island, and I brought back my 2008 wind-powered sound sculpture in a new cyborg body. Here’s a video:
I was lucky to be chosen as one of the Queens Museum of Art‘s sound art residents this month, so I’ve been working with my collection of vintage automatic music toys, and I’ll give a presentation/performance this Saturday (June 18th) at 5pm. The performance is free, but come early and check out the rest of the museum, including the famous Panorama of the City of New York! Event into: facebook.com/event.php?eid=229965507015603
Here’s the toy collection:
The following weekend, I’ll be at the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) as part of Peter Kirn’s Handmade Music Lounge: solidsoundfestival.com/exhibits
Coming up in July: a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, the Sketching in Hardware conference in Philadelphia, and a field trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico!
In a week or so I’ll be going back to New Orleans to see a performance at the sound sculpture shantytown I worked on in September. The New Orleans Airlift brought a bunch of artists to build a little village of musical instruments out of the wreckage of an 18th century house, and invited local musicians to perform with/on/in them! There’s a teaser video from the first performance — you can hear & see my piece, a set of amplified squeaky floorboards, providing the bass line starting at about 1:22. The project was covered in the New York Times last week, and you can read all about it at dithyrambalina.com. Next week will be my first chance to hear and see the completed shantytown!
