Re: Destruction

Re:destruction is a sound and video performance created by smashing a computer with a sledge hammer. It is the fourth piece in a series entitled Work.

In re:destruction, a computer is smashed by a microphoned sledge hammer, and a single sample of the first hit to the computer serves as the source for all of the audio of the piece.  Once sampled, the sound is amplified and played in real time.

Like the preceding pieces in the series, re:destruction is created by a single real-time sample of the sound of the act of labor, mixed with the real-time use of the tool upon objects.

In re:destruction, there is the addition of projected color video. This video is also generated by a single still image of the computer being smashed, and is manipulated by the audio in real-time.

Edited video is below. Original performance length 45 minutes

The Work series attempts to examine the implications of sound, noise and music in the processes of the building of physical structures. The fourth performance piece in the series, re: destruction was performed at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, and dovetails with re: drill performed at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gallery, re:construction 1 performed at Studio X and re:construction 2 P.S.1, New York.

I have the pleasure of being an organizer of Postopolis in Mexico City. Working as an independent curator and producer alongside Storefront For Art and Architecture, Domus, Tomo and El Eco museum, we have assembled 10 bloggers from around the world, each of whom selects 5 local participants they would like to have either speak or interview. These selected participants will be presenting their thoughts, works and ideas over a 5 day period in Mexico City. I have been fortunate enough to have been one of the curators selecting the bloggers, as well as an organizer of the various events, programs and activities (including performances) that surround Postopolis!DF. Below is the description from the postopolis.org website

About Postopolis!
From 8-12 June 2010, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine, will host the third edition of Postopolis!, a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design. 10 world-renowned bloggers from Los Angeles, New York, Turin, Barcelona, London and elsewhere will convene in one location in Mexico City to host a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, presentations, films and panels fusing the informal and interdisciplinary approach of the architecture blogosphere with rare face-to-face interaction.

Each day, the 10 participating bloggers will meet in the magnificent courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, designed by Matthias Goeritz, to conduct back-to-back interviews of some of Mexico City’s most influential thinkers and practitioners – including architects, city planners, artists and urban theorists but also military historians, filmmakers, photographers, activists and musicians. The talks will be conducted in either Spanish or English, and translations will be available. Each day of talks will end with an after-party hosted by some of Mexico City’s most influential music blogs.

I have had the fortune of working with the radical software group to create Kriegspiel, a video game based off of the board game designed by Guy Debord. The game is still active, please feel free to download and play!

The game is a networked software, meant to educate as well as be entertaining. Despite Debord’s situationist roots, his estate did disagree with the production of the game, based off of intellectual property rights, as this article in the New Yorker describes. The case was never pursued, but is quite interesting in itself, as a point of articulation of the status of situationism in contemporary culture.

Below is an abbreviated description of the project from the Kriegspiel Website.

In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company “Strategic and Historical Games.” This company had an immediate goal: to produce the “Kriegspiel,” a “game of war” that Debord had already designed in his head years before. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord’s game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.

The RSG computer game “Kriegspiel” is an attempt to reinterpret Debord’s ideas in the contemporary landscape, while maintaining a fidelity to his original thinking.

In his letters Debord referred to the game as the “Kriegspiel,” borrowing the German term meaning “war game.” When the game was fabricated and released in France, Debord officially titled it “Le Jeu de la guerre.” Since the phrasing “The Game of War” is slightly awkward in English, we opted to title the RSG game using the original word favored by Debord: Kriegspiel.

Debord fashioned the game as a tool for learning strategic thought in the face of real antagonists. Hence the computer edition is played online against a single opponent. There is no single-player mode.

In Debord’s view the game represents the totality of factors at play in wartime maneuvers, what he called “the dialectic of all conflicts.”

Listening Studio, a video installation permanently installed in the Center for Hearing and Communication in Manhattan, New York.

The Studio is a collaboration between POD DESIGN+MEDIA and Perlin Studios in conjunction with the Center for Hearing and Communication, New York.

The Listening Studio is an audio and video installation used as an audio test within a custom designed laboratory space. The Studio is permanently installed in the Center for Hearing and Communication in lower Manhattan, New York.

The installation/test consists of immersive video and audio environments. These environments contain a series of conversations that switch backgrounds and ambient audio in real time. These environments challenge the spectator/patient to listen closely and try to understand the conversations.

The test, run by a trained laboratory technician, is intended first as therapy for those who have hearing aids or cochlear implants, so that they may test their hearing in varying situations. They may choose to have their hearing adjusted based upon their results.

The test is open to the public as well, and will be available for anyone to experience as a spectator/patient. The room contains a 5.1 surround-sound system, 16 HD videos on a flat screen monitor and a custom musical keyboard which serves as the testing interface.

The Listening Studio is located in the Center for Hearing and Communication on 50 Broadway, 6th floor, in lower Manhattan, New York.

As the Listening Studio contained within a medical practice within an office building, If you wish to take the test after the opening event, it is by appointment only. Please call +1 917-305-7700 or email appointments@chchearing.org to schedule a visit.

Click here for the full article on the Listening Studio from the New York Times.

CENTER FOR HEARING AND COMMUNICATION
50 BROADWAY 6TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10004
http://www.chchearing.org

Photo stills from listening studio videos:

Landscapes of Quarantine
Mar 10 2010 – Apr 17 2010
Opening reception: Tuesday, March 9, 7pm

Group exhibition exploring the spaces of quarantine, from Level 4 biocontainment labs to underground nuclear waste repositories.

Curated by: Future Plural
Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography

Designed by:
Glen Cummings, MTWTF

Landscapes of Quarantine features new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine.

At its most basic, quarantine is a strategy of separation and containment—the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty. From Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion and the artificial quarantine islands of the New York archipelago to camp beds set up to house HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo and the modified Airstream trailer from within which Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins once waved at President Nixon, the landscapes of quarantine are various, mutable, and often unexpected.

Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control. It is used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria and, as a result, may (or may not) be carrying the infection themselves. But quarantine does not apply only to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native—however those labels are defined.

As a result, the practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.

Landscapes of Quarantine began with an eight-week independent design studio directed by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley of Future Plural. Each Tuesday evening, from October to December 2009, a multi-disciplinary group of studio participants met to discuss the spatial implications of quarantine and develop their own creative response: the resulting work forms the core of the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition.

Works on display:

Pages 179 – 187, Joe Alterio

Q-CITY: An Investigation, Front Studio | Yen Ha & Michi Yanagishita

MAP 002 QUARANTINE, David Garcia Studio

Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed?, Scott Geiger

Field Notes from Quarantine, Katie Holten

Hotel III, Camp II, Lab IV, Cell V, Mimi Lien

Cordon Sanitaire, Kevin Slavin

Context/Shift, Brian Slocum

Containing Uncertainty, Smudge Studio | Jamie Kruse & Elizabeth Ellsworth

NYCQ, Amanda Spielman & Jordan Spielman

Quick, Richard Mosse

Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System, Daniel Perlin

Precious Isolation: A Pair of Invasive Species, Thomas Pollman

Design Consultant and Installation oversight of a 26 speaker 9 simultaneous vide projections onto custom handheld screens built into 3000sq ft platform in Beijing Center for the Arts, Beijing China.

Full Project description here

photos courtesy Maya Lin Studios, Matthew Neiderhauser

P.S.1 announces Saturday Sessions, a new program of emerging performance art that will take place on the second Saturday of each month. Designed to introduce new performance artists to New York audiences, the events will range from music to site-specific actions.

The December and January Saturday Sessions are presented in conjunction with open studios and discussions with participants in Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with P.S.1, Rising Currents will include a residency for teams of architects and designers at P.S.1 this fall and an exhibition at MoMA next spring. The residency at P.S.1 is part of Free Space, a new project with artists and nonprofit arts institutions in which P.S.1 provides collaborative use of its gallery space for events, rehearsals, and other live presentations.

An artist and sound designer who often collaborates with architects, Daniel Perlin performs Re: construction, an attempt to simultaneously build a model house and create an audio composition based on the sounds of its construction. Referencing both Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) and the sampling work of Matthew Herbert, Perlin makes full use of hammers, screw drivers, and other tools for their physical and sonic capabilities.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 784-2084

House as Speaking Organ. In “House as Speaking Organ/Casa como Órgano Parlante”, Daniel Perlin has transformed Mexico City’s Yautepec gallery into a house-as-speaking-organ (HSO). The unique layout of the space has inspired a series of site-specific pieces, in which Perlin has created networked works that treat the house as organ, works as cells and tissues, tissues as foundations for an organ, and organ as a political force within social bodies.

Individual works are centered around networked and remote communication within the organ. Mini FM transceivers, fm radios, a single monitor with multiple keyboards for input, telegraphy, cables, internal telephony, cups and lines, and other works serve as conditions of possibility for bodies to work within and beyond the house, as sites as residues of potential communicative actions.

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Below are listed four of the nine works in this show.

four humors

Four Humors from daniel perlin on Vimeo.

tapped lines
(photos from opening)

Tapped Lines as part of the House as Speaking Organ show from daniel perlin on Vimeo.

‘bye

(stills)

House As Speaking Organ Solo Show: ‘Bye installation from daniel perlin on Vimeo.

and mother always told me

and mother always told me from daniel perlin on Vimeo.

Weathersound is an installation designed for Belvedere Castle in Central Park, Manhattan, New York City.

The belvedere weather castle currently acts as the central location and weather station for New York City. It’s data is used by the national weather service to calculate all aspects of New York’s climate, including temperature, wind and rainfall.

Weathersound is a proposed redesign of the current installation from the 1980′s in place at the castle. It attempts to address weather through the interpretation of sunlight as sound.

It uses real-time satellite feed, combined with real-time local video of the park itself, to generate sound based upon the amount of sunlight.

The realtime video of the park generates tones based on how much sunlight (shades of yellow) are present.
The realtime loops of satellite information on the earth uses cloudcover (shades of white) to generate percussive rhythm sounds
The spectator can decide the amount of balance of each of these they would like to hear.

from this video, the following sound piece was generated in real time.
weathersound: belvedere

AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ]

Presents A New Group Exhibition:

Tone and Temperament

Curated by Sophie Landres
June 18 – July 18, 2009 / Opening: Thursday, June 18, 6-8pm

AC [Institute Direct Chapel] is pleased to present Tone and Temperament, a group-exhibition that considers the temporal and expandable material of sound. Curated by Sophie Landres and in collaboration with the eight participating artists, this exhibition concentrates on sound as a condition for personal, social, political and metaphysical experience. In addition to the permanent fixtures in the gallery, performances will be scheduled to occur throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Tone and Temperament was conceived as an opportunity to explore literal and conceptual ideas of harmony versus discordance and innocence versus criminality that subsist within the framework of conflicting social norms and art historical precedents. The exhibition was regarded as a conduit for inconclusive experiments in redistricting discursive boundaries and expanding aesthetic properties. Despite sound’s reflexive predilection for interference, the participants created pieces either in response to the exhibition site or with the ambition that their work could co-exist within spatial proximity, without jeopardizing individual content. Though many of the pieces violate prevailing notions of harmony and composition, the refusal to abide is a victimless crime, motivated by a congenial faith in plurality. Allowing sound to flow without bleeding or hemorrhaging, we hope to maintain numerous elements in a constellate connection, free to generate their own alliance of possible meanings.

Chris Bors complicates the act of listening by juxtaposing pop-psychology relaxation techniques with a pop-cultural response to trauma. Jennie C. Jones stretches notes and manipulates tones to reconfigure musical history and exhume emotional content. In a sculpture that references both the harmony of the spheres and the politics of knowledge, Zach Layton uses looping phase structures to create an internally conflicting “chamber music” of the self. Audio recordings and corresponding images by Terry Nauheim describe imagined and site-specific geographies and measure the physical form of sounds against their content, examining how memory and objects are equally subject to decay. Exploring the theory of electronic voice phenomena Daniel Perlin utilizes Thomas Edison’s lost schemata to build a telephone that can speak with the dead. Through the visualization and sonification of Arctic data and electromagnetic lightening transmissions, Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore express the fragility and interconnectedness of the global ecosystem. Mike Skinner enlists the viewer’s body in acts of compositional terrorism, working with mirrors and parabolic reverberating sine waves to demonstrate how the occupation of space can be an oppositional force.

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