Sirens Taken For WondersPaul Elliman
| Nov ’09 |
| 17 |
| 10:00 pm |
| Nov ’09 |
| 21 |
| 4:00 pm |
The field trips will gather experts and amateurs alike for a siren-watch across the city, applying the observation and audio surveillance techniques of local wildlife groups and the sonic analysis of a New York City department of environmental acoustics. Participants will include artists Natalie Jeremijenko, following the impact of the sirens on city pigeons, bats and other local species, Maximilian Goldfarb, for whom the emergency cry is an entirely ambivalent signal for both safety and danger, and Daisy Press, a New York-based operatic singer who uses the siren sounds as model for her own repertoire of non-verbal voice exercises.
The radio panel session (Nov. 21, 4pm), featuring Arline Bronzaft (Chair of Noise Committee, Mayor’s Committee on the Environment of New York City), Raviv Ganchrow (artist and faculty, The Hague Institute of Sonology), Laura Kurgan (Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia School of Architecture), Daisy Press (siren vocalist), and Lázaro Valiente (artist, musician and Sirenader), will address the apparently unambiguous meaning of the sirens through a range of sometimes contradictory perspectives – from the physics and acoustic materiality of their sound, to its auditory role in the production of urban space as a form of audio signage capable of initiating levels of both fear and excitement.
Join us at the Van Alen Institute (Nov. 21, 4pm; Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor) for an extraordinary sonic discussion, or sign up now for one of the field trips. FREE
Field trip exercises:
Maximilian Goldfarb, based in Hudson, New York, works with improvised electronics, radio transmissions and performances often concerned with emergency situations and the fragile margins between safety and danger. The project Jumpkit involves a list of essential components, tools and food useful in preparing for any unexpected or dangerous circumstances. His recent work utilizes the Mobile49, a retrofit emergency communications vehicle conceived for area-specific mobile broadcast, and specializing in occupying interstices of the radio spectrum. Deep Cycle, a long term project during which the M49 will become permanently embedded into the landscape as a radio emergency field station, is included in the recent Transmission Arts issue of Performance Art Journal (MIT Press). Goldfarb is affiliated with WGXC.org, a community-run media project in the Hudson Valley, NY. Trained as a police radio dispatcher, he is a member of the Amateur Radio Relay League, and co-instigator of The Incident Report Viewing Station.
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist and engineer whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko’s projects have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the MASSMoCA, the Whitney Museum, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies—mostly through public experiments. Jeremijenko’s permanent installation OOZ, Inc (…for the birds), on the roof of Postmasters Gallery in New York, provides infrastructure and facilities for high-density bird cohabitation in an environmental experiment in interaction with the New York City bird population. A 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, Jeremijenko is the director of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Dept., and has affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies.
Radio panel discussion:
Dr. Arline Bronzaft is Professor Emerita of the City University of New York and Chair of the Noise Committee as part of the Mayor’s Council on the Environment of New York City. She has given testimony on the hazards of noise to government and health organizations and has served as an expert witness in court cases. Dr. Bronzaft frequently lectures on noise in the United States and abroad and has been interviewed in the media internationally. She also advises anti-noise organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and has served as an advisor to public officials locally and nationally. Among Dr. Bronzaft’s academic and professional honors: Senator of Phi Beta Kappa, Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Hunter Hall of Fame Honoree, Recipient of a Certificate of Appreciation from Region 2 of the United States Environmental Protection Agency for her achievements in the protection of the environment.
Raviv Ganchrow’s work focuses on interrelations between sound and space, aspects of which are explored through sound installations, writing and the development of sound forming technologies such as Wave Field Synthesis. His work addresses an ambiguous status of sound that is at once material-spatial as well as phenomena-event. Recent installations directly engage the everyday acoustic environment, plumbing notions of ‘place’ that are constructed by way of frequency interdependencies between sound, location and listener. Ganchrow completed his architectural studies at the Cooper Union, New York and received a second degree from the Institute of Sonology at The Royal Conservatory, The Hague. He has been teaching architectural design in the graduate program at TU Delft, and is currently a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, The Hague.
Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is Director of Visual Studies and the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL). SIDL is currently collaborating with the Justice Mapping Center on a project called “Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping” in selected states—Arizona, Kansas, Los Angeles County, Louisiana, New York, and Rhode Island. She has followed the declassification of satellite imagery and GPS technology in a series of research projects across the significant political events of the last decade. This work, which has been exhibited internationally, is collected in You Are Here: Post-Military Technology and the New Landscape of Satellite Images, forthcoming from Zone Books.
Lázaro Valiente is a musician and sound artist based in Mexico City. He describes his first band as a collection of everyday objects from home, including children’s toys, a hair dryer and other electrical devices, plus guitars, xylophones, voices and water. Lázaro Valiente has played live on public transport, made musical interventions in other kinds of public spaces by incorporating the sounds found there, as well as appearing at international music festivals including Coachella, Lollapalooza, and SXSW. Police Car Quartet, a small scale symphony of sirens developed in collaboration with the Mexico City Police Department, is the first of a series of musical happenings dealing with the control of traffic in public space – others to include Tamal-Car Orchestra, muchos Mexican barrel organs, and visual concerts at red lights, along with a sequence of public radio interventions. Police Car Quartet was performed as a concert at Mexico City’s Bellas Artes Palace, and was the subject of a recent artist talk by Valiente at Flux Factory, called How To Make Music With Police Cars and Get Away With It.
Daisy Press is a vocalist and specialist in the field of contemporary music. She also plays the violin and guitar in addition to her solo and ensemble vocal work. Most recently, she was praised by the New York Times for her “winning subtlety and understatement” in her rendition of George Crumb’s new folk-based song cycle “Unto the Hills” at Miller Theater with the acclaimed group So Percussion. Previously, she has sung with them the works of Steve Reich, including “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Drumming,” which she has also performed as a guest artist at Juilliard. Additional credits include being the featured soloist for the New York premiere of Phillipe Leroux’s “Voi(rex)” at Miller Theater alongside IRCAM; “Apparition” by George Crumb at the Bang on a Can Marathon, where Ms. Press was for two years singer-in-residence; “Attila-Joszef Fragments” by Kurtag at Symphony Space; and excerpts, with the composer in attendance, for Elliot Carter’s “Of Challenge and of Love.”
Paul Elliman a London-based artist and designer. His work, often using typography and the human voice, as well as forms of audio signage that mediate a relationship between both, has been included in collections at London’s Tate Modern and Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and APAP in Anyang, Korea. Recent group exhibitions include If I When My… Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York; Word Event, Kunsthalle Basel; Around Max Bill, Swiss Cultural Centre, Paris; The World Is All That Is The Case, Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York; and Platform 2009, Seoul. During 2009 Elliman was an artist-in-residency at IASPIS, Stockholm. He has taught in the Yale School of Art since 1997, and is a thesis supervisor for Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands.
Curated by Defne Ayas. Coordination support from Virginie Bobin and Griffin Frazen. Commissioned by Performa. Presented by Performa. As part of Performa09, and Public School (for Architecture)
Nov. 17, 4pm (field trip 1)
Nov. 20, 10pm (field trip 2)
Nov. 21, 4pm (panel discussion)
FREE
