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.
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.
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!
If you’re in the Boston area, you might like this show about art, technology, and spiritualism. My microradio sound art piece “Songs from the Portuguese” is in it. The opening reception is Friday, Jan 28.
They’ve borrowed a bunch of my homemade instruments for this musical adaptation of Peter Pan. I’ll be there for the Thursday night show!
September 19 (Sunday noon-6pm) Move About Myrtle Festival along Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, between Clermont Ave & Hall St.
The Case of the Curious Pedestrian is a one-day exhibition of performance art and ephemeral installations as part of the Myrtle neighborhood festival. I’ll be hiding a bunch of little mechanical music machines along (above) the avenue- can you find them all?
August 2010-June 2011 Wind through the Trees – an outdoor sculpture exhibition of sound & motion at Jenkins Arboretum, Devon, PA
I’ve got two pieces in this show of environmental and kinetic sculpture – good old Trumpet Marine and a new one, Spiracles, that’ll twist its way all the way up into the treetops. The opening party will be the evening of Saturday October 2.
This year I’m helping to curate this festival of handmade instruments and alternate tunings, but I’ll probably have some sort of noisemaker in there too!
January 20-30, 2011 Pulse Art and Technology Festival, Telfair Museum of Art,, Savannah, GA
I’ll be conducting some instrument-building workshops, and possibly performing. Don’t know the exact dates yet.
January 24-February 25, 2011 Artistic Mediums at the New Art Center, Newton, MA.
My sound and micro-radio installation Songs from the Portugese will be part of this exhibit about mysterious phenomena and things that go bump in the night
I’m building a piano-tickling machine for Zachary James Watkins’ piece “Moveable,” which pianist Tiffany Lin will premiere in Seattle on April 2. More info within.
Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings
Friday April 2nd, 2010 8PM
Performance by pianist Tiffany Lin of a new evening length composition scored for retuned piano and a new mechanical extension called the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 MIDI triggered voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings.
Wayward Music Series
The Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Avenue N., 4th Floor, Seattle, Washington
Tickets: Suggested Scale $5-$15
Tickets will be available at the door on the evening of the performance.
Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings is the elusive yet evocative title for the new composition by bay area composer Zachary James Watkins. This new evening length work is scored for retuned piano and a new mechanical extension called the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 MIDI triggered voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings. The April 2nd premiere performance by pianist Tiffany Lin is presented by Nonsequitur as part of the Wayward Music Series at Seattle’s Chapel Performance Space. The title can be read many ways. Literal interpretations evoke the daily reality of so many modern day workers who must travel long distances to reach the work place or the distances traveled when in love. This title also touches upon the collaborative process between three artists who reside on two coasts and separated by thousands of miles. Trust, vulnerability and the creation of rich new works drive collaborations along distances. In our every day lives, the harmonic series is the fundamental building block of all sounds in constant collision transformed creating language, noise, and the plethora of instrumental timbres, which shape our aural, cultural and sensual experience. Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings celebrates diverse sounds combining electrical current hum, pure intonation, equal temperament and percussive noises into a vibrant sonic tapestry creating new imaginative narratives.
Good old Flux Factory is having a show called Housebroken to inaugurate their new home in Long Island City. They invited artists to come in and mess with the space. I grabbed a few sacks of dishes and cookware from their kitchen, engraved them with various texts and images, and gave them back. They’ll be eating off this “installation” for years – or at least months, until it’s all broken.
Housebroken opens this Friday at 8pm – go!
Here’s some pictures of bits of my contribution. More at flickr.
Vegevision!
We owe that awesome headline to Brooklyn artist Ranjit Bhatnagar, who sometimes uses the term for his flatbed scanner images of Greenmarket produce, a project he’s been working on since 2000. His carrots graced the cover of Edible Brooklyn’s Spring 2007 issue, and selections from his scans–lovely little sprays of garlic chives, slices of okra that look like stars, and of course, bacon–are being shown through the month of December at the Baby Grand (world’s smallest) karaoke bar in a show called Greenmarket Scanography. For those who’ve been to this tiny Soho spot on Lafayette St., you know the key component of that name is Baby: This is but a sliver of a space, and thus Bhatnagar’s work, like others previewed at the bar, is being shown in slide format. Literally–the slides, shown below, are displayed on the wall, lit from behind, and viewed using the provided magnifying glass. Oh yeah, should you miss the show, you can see some of his recent work on Flickr, too.
This month I’ll be the “artist in residence” on the Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans Twitter Art Feed. Through Twitter, I’ll be conducting variations on the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, in which participants make a collaborative work of art by alternating to add pieces to it. I’m reviving a game I first organized in 1992, back in the dark ages of the web!
You’ll have to join the 1stfans membership program to play the game, but it’s a worthy cause! And I’ll post the results of the game at the end of the month.
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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!
