The FETA Prize in Sound Art was established in 2013 to promote a broad range of contemporary American sound and installation artists. This page serves as a compendium of winners, finalists, and judges that represent a wonderfully diverse collection of contemporary sound art.
Tentacule
Nolan Lem
2019 Winner
Tentacule is a site-specific sound sculpture that examines the sonic materiality of Velcro as it is situated within the ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) and BDSM (bondage, dominance, slave, master) communities. This machine houses 10 speakers that are mechanically driven by Velcro extrications that occur on top of the speakers’ paper cones. The kinetic dynamics of the velcro becoming hooked and unfastened is transmitted through large plastic tubes that resonate and transfer the acoustic energy into different parts of the space.
This “BDSMR” object complicates our awareness of sound and sensuality by casting materiality as an erotic fetish, one that derives from our darker, more lurid impulses. The imposing cephalopodic presence of the black machine suggests a cyborgian instrument somewhere in between an organ, a music box, and a Luigi Russolo noise machine.
Nolan Lem is an artist and researcher whose work reflects a broad range of influences and mediums particularly those related to sound and kinetic motion. His work focuses on the dynamics of emergent systems, machine intelligence, and the synchronization of auditory phenomena.
copy|wright
Joe Cantrell
2019 Finalist
copy|wright is an installation that addresses the nebulous nature of sound ownership, and the role the human body can play in this relationship. In the piece, the waveforms of a hit song are printed onto rolls of receipt paper, which are then traced by hand back into the computer via a tablet interface, and recorded with stop-motion photography. The resulting sound file is a version of the original material, but reinterpreted by the involuntary errors inherent to handmade processes. This change in audio data is made possible by a series of transcodings— from a digital audio file to the physical paper spools, and through the body back into the digital. In doing so, the effect of the human body on this data transformation is imprinted onto the final sound file, providing an audible insight into how bodies can act as transformational agents for digital data and commerce.
Joe Cantrell is a musician and sound artist specializing in installations, compositions, and performances inspired by the implications and consequences of technological objects and practices. His work examines the incessant acceleration of technology and media production, its ownership, and the waste it produces. Joe’s live musical performances involve the creation and manipulation of electronic feedback soundscapes using only discarded, obsolete and/or broken technology.
Red Noise Visit
YoungEun Kim
2019 Finalist
Red Noise Visit spotlights two characteristic sounds at the backdrop of Korea’s modernization. The first sound is of the siren: over the course of 36 years, the curfew siren gradually instilled within the nation a strict temporal discipline, dominating the space, time, and minds of individuals. The story within this work begins with the memory of local residents, recalling the siren in tandem with the rigid visuality of the red brick tower.
The second sound is the radio, which carried deliberate propaganda and ordinary transmissions to and from each side of the border: the north and the south. At that time, the perceived sound of all radio signals was labeled by a press as “Red Noise.”
Two vexed sounds—two ‘red noises’—one oppressively striking down upon the flow of time, the other permeating across spatial borders. Towards creating the work, the artist utilized news articles, interviews, and essays describing echoic memories of the siren and radio.
At the beginning of her practice, YoungEun Kim (b. Seoul; lives and works in Los Angeles) focused on studying sound as a medium in various ways and questioned the sensory bias of visual-centered human beings. She has used ethnographic research methods to develop the projects that she has been working on since her immigration to the U.S. in 2017. These projects examine the sociopolitical significance of specific sounds in society and dissect them through sound-based multimedia.
Piece for Fog Space
Asha Tamirisa
2019 Finalist
Piece for Fog Space was a site-specific performance that was presented in conjunction with installation artist Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture, “Fog x Island” installed in during September and October of 2018 in Olmstead Park in Boston. Nakaya describes her fog sculptures as a means of making the immaterial conditions of the environment visible and palpable—depending on the temperature, humidity, and wind conditions, the piece changes, elucidating these conditions through the ephemeral medium of fog. For the performance, sound was propagated at the site of the installation with four large speaker woofers, placed around the performer. Large circular mirrors placed on top of the speaker cones reflected the natural setting back to the audience, and obscured the technology from sight.The mirrors would vibrate with the movement of the speaker cones. Just as Nakaya uses fog as a material to make palpable the invisible conditions of the environment, these physical materials made visible and palpable the immaterial condition of sound. The performance lasted just over one hour, allowing the public to observe the performance in varying degrees of engagement.
Asha Tamirisa [she/her/hers] works with sound, video, film, and researches media histories. Asha’s work has been mentioned in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and the 5th Edition of Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. She now works with the organization TECHNE. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College in Maine, USA.
Microcosmos
Alba Fernanda Triana
2019 Master Judge
Microcosmos is a vibrational sculpture where energy is used to explore a fundamental notion: all physical bodies are perpetually vibrating, even when they appear to be perfectly still. For the piece, a cymbal is stimulated to activate the natural and characteristic patterns in which it vibrates, which are known as intrinsic resonance modes.Using mechanical energy, the resonance modes of the cymbal are audibly and visually activated,revealing a hidden microcosm of vibration. This becomes the material of the composition. Like many of Triana’s artworks, Microcosmos explores a fundamental physical phenomenon through musical installation.Behind the sculpture, the shadow of the vibrating cymbal is seen on a luminous circle of projected light. This references two-dimensional art, like painting and photography, except it is animated by the cymbal’s vibration. This communicates the multidimensional nature of the piece: it is musical, sculptural, and exists on a flat plane. The work unfolds across the temporal, the visual, and the spatial realms.
Alba Triana’s artistic practice focuses on exploring the inherent intelligence of nature. Her artworks—which include sound and light sculptures, vibrational objects, and resonating spaces—are hybrid and cross the boundaries of a diverse set of fields. ArtburstMagazinedescribes her as a “sound sculptor explor[ing] the interface between natural science and music… she combines rigor and poetic finesse.”Triana has received numerous honors, including the Civitella Foundation Fellowship(worldwide), South Arts State Fellowship (U.S.), and was the winner of awards inColombia, such as IDCT National Composition Contest, National Electroacoustic MusicContest, “Otto de Greiff” National Contest, and French Alliance Best Exhibition of theYear Award. She has obtained commissions, residences, and grants from Kronos Quartet,Pro Helvetia (Switzerland), American Composers Forum, Oolite Arts (U.S.), GMEB(France), and Ministry of Culture (Colombia).
Caracoles IV
Jaime Oliver La Rosa
2018 Winner
Caracoles IV is an installation that uses interactive feedback systems to sonically explore modified conch shells known as a pututus. A pututu or pututo, is an andean musical instrument fashioned out of a conch shell by cutting the apex of its spire and shaping it like a cornet embouchure. These instruments existed far before colonial occupation in the 15th century and are thoroughly represented in pre-columbian andean visual art. This musical instrument is thus co-created by both a human maker and the non-human large snail which once inhabited it; it is the mollusc’s exoskeleton and home, and it is shaped by its existence. Emptied of its organic body it is appropriated by the instrument maker. In this installation, I perform a third appropriation by placing a microphone in the embouchure and a speaker at the end of the spiral canal and connect them through a software-mediated feedback system running on a raspberry pi zero micro-computer that hangs above the shell.
Jaime Oliver La Rosa (Lima, 1979) is a music composer and sound artist working in various ares of computer music and electronic arts. His work includes music for instruments, interactive sistems, live sound performance, as well as sound objects and installations, computer musical instruments and open source software development.
Urban Intonation
Brian House
2018 Finalist
2016 Finalist
Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them—rattus norvegicus burrows through the human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography.
We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech.
Brian House is an artist who investigates the politics of time in human and nonhuman systems. Incorporating sound, computation, and multidisciplinary research, his practice has traversed subjects from geolocation infrastructure to urban rats. House has exhibited at MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica, ZKM, Madrid CentroCentro, Stockholm Kulturhuset, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Science Gallery Bengaluru, among others. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, Neural, Creative Applications, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his essays and articles have been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Sonic Studies, and e-flux Architecture. He holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Art at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Background
Stephen Lilly
2018 Finalist
Background re-envisions Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (furnishing or, more commonly, furniture music) as an electronic installation. Background was designed to run as a sonic backdrop for long periods of time. I envisioned it accompanying cocktail parties or playing as an audience is milling about before or after a concert. There are three distinct sound worlds in the work: non-metric jazz-influenced music, metric dance-oriented music, and field recordings taken from public spaces (parks, playgrounds, public gardens). The installation avoids anything that would draw attention to itself—large dynamic contrasts, harsh dissonances, frequency extremes, and excessive repetition. The musical sections are constructed in real time, concatenating short samples (in the non-metric sections, this amounts to single notes and chords while in the metric sections this extends to single measures) designed to fit together in a variety of ways, ensuring that the installation contains enough variation to sustain itself for hours.
Stephen Lilly is a DC-based composer, performer, audio engineer, and amateur poet. His music ranges from “dark” and “demanding” (The Retriever) to “‘performance art’…the sort of thing you are glad to have experienced without wanting to revisit” (The Washington Post). He can be microtonally abstract or theatrically satiric; he composes chamber music for friends and friends of friends as well as fixed media works for nobody in particular. Publications: Computer Music Journal, ink&coda, Organised Sound, Performance Research, and Perspectives of New Music.
DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance)
Jenny Olivia Johnson
2018 Judge
DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) is the installation version of THE AFTER TIME, a headphones opera-in-progress by composer and sound artist Jenny Olivia Johnson. DIVE is a room-sized reconstruction of a dive bar, one of the most important settings in the opera’s story. Upon entry, visitors will immediately find themselves transported to another world: a dark, shadowy dive whose wooden bar, empty stools, and rickety cocktail tables invite them to sit and survey a haunted, hole-in-the-wall atmosphere festooned with ambient lighting, 18 mysterious and cartoonish illuminated-manuscript paintings representing each of the scenes of the opera, and myriad trinkets, memorabilia, and photographs strewn all about, all of which are related to the story.
Jenny Olivia Johnson (b. 1978 in Santa Monica, CA) is a composer, sound artist, and music scholar, as well as an Associate Professor of Music at Wellesley College. Her compositions and artwork range from electroacoustic chamber songs and contemplative solo works to short amplified operas and interactive sound sculptures with lighting.
Seven Bird Watchers
Joo Won Park
2018 Judge
Seven Bird Watchers is an electronic ensemble piece featuring synchronized tempo change and graphical notation. The pre-recorded audio file syncs all drum machines to seven sections of accelerando and ritardando. The performers’ task is to change the parameters of the drum machine according to the notation.
Joo Won Park makes music with electronics, toys, and other sources that he can record or synthesize. He is the recipient of Knight Arts Challenge Detroit (2019) and the Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020). His music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS, and No Remixes labels. He currently teaches Music Technology at Wayne State University.
Frequency Test
Gustavo Matamoros
2018 Master Judge
This video (a piece created from the original hour-and-a-half-long session) was created by Gustavo Matamoros. It documents the process he utilizes for fishing resonances from architecture. This Frequency Test not only generated the piece that you hear/see, but also the information used by Matamoros to curate and fine tune the various works included in his exhibition, SOUND, at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.
Gustavo Matamoros is a prominent American experimentalist, composer, sound artist and the founding Artistic Director of the Subtropics Festival, who has worked with some of the most preeminent experimental artists of our time. Born in 1957 in Caracas, Venezuela, he has lived and worked in Miami since 1979, a place he describes as “the perfect laboratory for experiments in sound art.” He has forged new, innovative boundaries in the fields of sound art and music, and has been a leader in developing interest in these art forms from general audiences through the various collectives, public art projects and festivals he has founded.
Night study 3
Felipe Otondo
2017 Finalist
“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night…”
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
This piece is the last of three works exploring real and imaginary nocturnal soundscapes. It is inspired by subtle rhythmic and timbral relationships found in gamelan music and structured as a fictional journey through various nocturnal sonic landscapes. The composition was created using re-synthesized samples, carefully blended and contrasted with field recordings made in Chile, Kenya and Mexico. This work was premiered at the 2018 Sonorities Festival and will be included in a new CD release by the British label Sargasso.
Felipe Otondo is a composer and researcher based in Valdivia, Chile. He is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Acoustics and Director of the Arts and Technology Lab (LATE) at Universidad Austral de Chile. His music is published by Sargasso Records.
Vida Lunar
Rodrigo Sigal
2017 Master Judge
Throughout the composition of the work the sounds were defining at the same time the real and virtual spaces for the piece. The flute’s potential as a sound source is endless (bass flute and a 2.5 meter long double bass flute were used). These possibilities together with technology made me feel in a trip that could sometimes go beyond our senses. I hope this can be shared through the work. I would like to thank Dr. Alejnadro Escuer who helped with the sounds used. Lunar Life was a commission by Alejandro Lavanderos and it is dedicated to him. It was composed with funding from the Arts Department of the Catholic University of Chile.
(Mexico City – 1971). Composer, cultural manager and full time professor since 2017 at ENES, UNAM, Morelia, where he is also the coordinator for the Music and Artistic Technology undergraduate program. Since 2006, Sigal has been the director of the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts where he coordinates numerous initiatives of creation, education, research and cultural management in relation to sound and music.
Cremation Project, Confessional
Michael Boyd
2016 Winner
2018 Judge
Inspired by John Baldessari’s Cremation Project, Confessional is a user-driven installation that provides the opportunity for composers to briefly take pleasure in and then (symbolically) destroy one of their less-than-fantastic creations. Accomplished in real-time with a computer and a sound recording, the installation’s audio processing mirrors phases of animal decomposition, ultimately rendering the user’s piece into imperceptible bits of noise.
Michael Boyd, Associate Professor of Music at Chatham University, is a composer, scholar, and experimental improviser. His music embraces experimental practices such as installation, multimedia, and performance art, and has been performed in a variety of venues throughout the United States and abroad. Boyd has published articles in Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, and Notes. He is active in his community, currently serving a third elected term on the Wilkins Township Board of Commissioners. Boyd often bikes to work and competes in mountain bike races.
Quadrilateral Starfield Symmety A:L Base 11:273
Randy Gibson
2016 Finalist
63 Minutes of Gibson’s Quadrilateral Starfield Symmety A:L Base 11:273 sped up 9 times and colorized.
The work, inspired by the quadrilateral symmetries of the pinoeering light artist Marian Zazeela, consists of three gradients of spirals, mirrored quadrilaterally, and crossing glacially. The original work is projected through pure blue dichroic filters and last a total of 9 hour and 6 minutes.
The sound accompanying the video is Gibson’s The 72:81:88 Differential Apparition a static representation of a single chord from his ongoing theoretical work Apparitions of The Four Pillars.
Randy Gibson composes with sound, time, light, and space. Through performances, objects, and installations Gibson’s work confronts the edges of perception and memory.
In 2016, Gibson was awarded a NYFA fellowship in Music and Sound. His work has been described as “Luxuriantly unhurried, intensely focused” (Thought Catalog), “offering a glimpse of time outside of time” (I Care If You Listen), and “arresting overtone clouds” (NY Times).
A long-time student of seminal pioneers of Minimal art La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Gibson rigorously explores the potential of a precise set of numerical relationships while inviting stasis and reflection.
45 Bell Ringers
Erik DeLuca
2016 Finalist
Power ringing is a telecommunication signal that entails sending a high-voltage alternating current over a telephone line to ring an electromagnetic bell attached to a phone. I built a power supply that transformed a 12-volt DC car battery into this unique ringing voltage to ring bells from the 1950s. This sound sculpture is a new interface for musical expression that literally plays history. This work is a point of contact between old and new technology that reimagines, and re-sounds these bells to transcend the rings historical meaning of regulation and control. When the installation was complete, each bell’s cedar podium was used to build raised garden beds by a local Omaha Nebraska farmer. This work was developed at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
Erik DeLuca is an artist and musician working with performance, sculpture, text and social practice. He has lectured, performed, and exhibited at a variety of places including MASS MoCA, School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, The Contemporary Austin, The Living Art Museum (Iceland), Columbia School of the Arts, Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, CalArts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Fieldwork: Marfa, and Yale University School of Art. He received a PhD from the University of Virginia, lectured at the Iceland University of the Arts (2016-18) and was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music and Multimedia at Brown University (2018-20). He currently teaches in Experimental and Foundation Studies at RISD.
Waves, A Witching Stick, A Space for Melting Bells
Stephen Vitiello
2016 Judge
Waves, A Witching Stick, A Space for Melting Bells is a site-specific sound installation, presented at the Baptistère Saint-Jean (Baptistery of St. John) an ancient space (dating to the 4th century) in Poitiers, France in 2019-2020.
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. CD releases have been published by 12k, Room 40, Sub Rosa, and White Paddy Mountain. His sound installations and multi-channel works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon. Exhibitions include a site-specific work for NYC’s High Line, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” at the Museum of Modern Art; the 2002 Whitney Biennial; and the 2006 Biennial of Sydney. Over the last 25 years, Vitiello has collaborated with such artists and musicians as Pauline Oliveros, Taylor Deupree, Ryuichi Sakamoto,, Steve Roden and Scanner. Vitiello has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for “Fine Arts,” a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert/Ucross Award for Music. Originally from New York, Vitiello is now based in Richmond, VA where he is a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Ghost Line
Jeff Snyder
2016 Judge
All sound is created by directly converting the video pixels into an audio waveform. Different pitches arise from changes in the scan rate of the “line” scanning the pixels. Each performer uses a joystick to control several parameters of the video, including the speed of the moving scan line, the color space, brightness, contrast, and saturation, and X and Y resolution. All of these video alterations will also have an effect on the sound, since it is simply the brightness (of the red channel only) of the current pixel read as a sound.
Jeff Snyder (b.1978) is a composer, improviser and instrument-designer living in Princeton, New Jersey, and active in the New York City area. He currently is the Director of Electronic Music at Princeton University, and the Director of PLOrk , the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.
Subwhistle
Bryan Jacobs
2015 Winner
Subwhistle is a sound installation that uses low frequency sound to play slide whistles. The air forced out of each of 4 subwoofers is connected to a slide whistle, directing it into the mouth piece. It oscillates at the frequency of the the speaker, usually between 10 and 30 hertz.
All the sound we hear in this video is generated acoustically from the slide whistles. Low rumblings of the subwoofers can occasionally be heard.
The works of composer/guitarist Bryan Jacobs have been performed in the US and internationally by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Talea Ensemble, the pianist Xenia Pestova and more. He has received awards and commissions from La Muse en Circuit, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bourges International Electroacoustic Music competition, MATA, Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music, and RTÉ Lyric FM, and his work is available on a recording put out by La Muse en Circuit. Jacobs’ teachers include Denys Bouliane, Fred Lerdahl, Fabien Lévy, George Lewis, and Tristan Murail. He holds graduate degrees from McGill University and Columbia University.
The sound of empty space
Adam Basanta
2015 Finalist
“The sound of empty space” explores relationships between microphones, speakers, and surrounding acoustic environments through controlled, self-generating microphone feedback.
Amplifying and aestheticizing the acoustic inactivity between technological “inputs” and “outputs” – stand-ins for their corporeal correlates, the ear and mouth – the notion of a causal sound producing object is challenged, and questions are posed as to the status of the ‘amplified’.
By building flawed technological systems and nullifying their intended potential for communication, the ear is turned towards the empty space between components; to the unique configurations of each amplifying assemblage.
In each of the interrelated works – pieces which are equal parts banal, inventive, and absurd – sound is revealed not as a distinct object or autonomous event, but rather as a mutable product of interdependent networks of physical, cultural and economic relations.
Born in Tel-Aviv (ISR) and raised in Vancouver (BC), Basanta has lived and worked in Montreal since 2010. Originally studying contemporary music composition, he has developed an artistic practice in mixed-media installations. Remaining active as an experimental composer and performer, his concert music, live performances, and sound recordings are presented worldwide.
Harmonibots
Sky Macklay
2015 Finalist
Imagine what it would sound like to be surrounded by seventy gigantic-mouthed harmonica players who could each play ten notes at once without ever needing to breathe. This is the sonic image I had in mind as I conceived my installation: Harmonibots. My first germ of inspiration came from watching the flexible plastic wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube people sometimes seen along the highway advertising car dealerships. I wondered, what would it sound like if the air blowing through the wacky creature’s limbs was channeled through a harmonica? It could create an otherworldly harmonica sound that no human player could make. Many of these musical creatures “playing” together could create rich and continuous walls of sound. Harmonibots uses plastic, fans, and harmonica parts to bring these creatures to life in an interactive kinetic and sonic sculpture that is whimsical yet intense.
Sky Macklay (b. 1988) is a composer, oboist, and installation artist based in Chicago. Her music is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound. She has been commissioned by Chamber Music America (with Splinter Reeds), the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (with Ensemble Dal Niente), the Barlow Endowment (with andPlay), and The Jerome Fund for New Music (with ICE saxophonist Ryan Muncy). Sky’s work has also been recognized with awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, The International Alliance for Women in Music, and Civitella Ranieri. Recent projects include an opera set in a uterus and three interactive installations of harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures. Sky completed her D.M.A. at Columbia University and her music is published by C. F. Peters. She will spend much of 2021 living in Paris as a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking
Navid Navab
2015 Finalist
A culinary concert orchestrated around a chef, an enchanted kitchenette, and sonified ingredients.
Throughout the concert a multitude of av performance paradigms are evoked and reinvented through Navab’s responsive mise-en-musique, allowing the composer to retain an aesthetic nostalgia for and yet mash many realms such as ritualized sound art, videomusic, music actuelle, dronescape, glitch, microsound, music concrete, vaporwave, techno, and plunderphonics.
Navid Navab (IR/CA) is a media alchemist, multidisciplinary composer, audiovisual sculptor, phono-menologist, perSonifier, gestureBender, and interdisciplinary artist-researcher. Interested in the poetics of schizophonia, gesture, materiality, and embodiment, his work investigates the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its inherent performative qualities. Making the imperceptible palpable, Navid uses gestures, rhythms and vibration from everyday life as basis for realtime compositions, resulting in augmented acoustical poetry and painterly light that enchants improvisational, and pedestrian movements.
Six Accompaniments for Solo Voice
Stephan Moore
2015 Judge
Stephan Moore’s “Six Accompaniments for Solo Voice,” is comprised of six stereo soundtracks created for the University of Chicago’s Snell-Hitchcock Quadrangle. This piece was commissioned and presented as part of “The Chicago Sound Show” (September 27–December 29, 2019) at the University of Chicago, curated by Laura Steward and Sam Pluta. More information on the show can be found here: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/the-chicago-sound-show/
In this piece, six benches are outfitted with weatherproof speakers, each providing a different accompaniment for the ceaseless vocalization of the nearby Searle Chemistry Laboratory’s ventilation system. Played back at a level just under that of the ambient sound environment, these accompaniments draw out and emphasize the pitches, harmonies, and rhythms embedded within this dense mass of industrial noise. The artist also created an idealized, manipulated soundwalk through the layers of the piece: https://stephanmoore.bandcamp.com/album/dreamwalk-with-solo-voice
Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, coder, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a senior lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.
frequencies (synthetic variations)
Nicolas Bernier
2014 Winner
Audiovisual variations establishing dialogues between three artificial matters : synthetic sound, synthetic light and synthetic materials. The piece is made out of a series of sequences that are organized and unorganized in real-time, disruptively articulating the discourse. In a synesthetic way, sound and light are bursting within acrylic structures, bringing a sense of extreme precision where one can either hear the light or see the sound.
Nicolas Bernier creates audiovisual performances and installations aiming to carve a dialogue between sound and tangible matter. Shaped by his work within the fields of cinema, literature, dance and theatre companies, his own language blend together elements of music, photography, design, science, video art, architecture, light design and scenography. In the midst of this eclecticism, his artistic concerns remain constant: the balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sources and digital processing.
Negative Differential Resistance
Matthew Ostrowski
2014 Finalist
his installation for computer-controlled and amplified fluorescent lights was premiered at the {TEMP} artspace in New York City in July of 2013. Structured around generative sets of numerically encoded gestures and scenes, Negative Differential Resistance is a study in temporal relationships of stability and instability, both visual and sonic. Deriving from the idea of the binary — a lamp is either on or off — and using a minimalist palette of white light and 60-cycle hum, this work creates an optical and aural theater whose ultimate topic of investigation is our own awareness: as patternmaker, cognitive agent, and embodiment of time.
A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer and installation artist. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials — sonic, physical, and cultural — Ostrowski explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds. Engaged with tropes of interruption and flux, his works function as environments in a constant state of change, exploring the process of consciousness in its constant state of collision with the world.
His work includes live digital improvisations, multichannel compositions, and installations for video, sound, and robotically-controlled objects. It has been seen on six continents, including the Wien Modern Festival, Transmediale and Maerz Musik,the Kraków Audio Art Festival, Sonic Acts, PS 1 and The Kitchen in New York, Mass MOCA in North Adams, and Unyazi in Johannesburg. He has received numerous grants and awards, and his essays have been published in the Performance Art Journal and Leonardo.
ALL YELLOW
Mark Hirsch
2014 Finalist
ALL YELLOW: the town we live in is an invitation to reimagine familiar aspects of every-day experience. From a collection of suspended music boxes, an unrecognizably slow version of The Beatles’ classic song Yellow Submarine greets the visitors. The tune softly fills the space as each box plays at a variety of under-tempo rates–rendering a sonic constellation that is both familiar yet elusive in origin.
Through an array of sensors, the music boxes seem to sense the viewer’s presence. As one moves through the space, the tempo of the boxes slow as each is approached in turn, as if inviting us to take some time to listen.
All Yellow offers a moment of awareness and reflection–a place to go where one can check their day at the door and listen. With just a small adjustment to the way we perceive our world, the familiar can once again be wonderfully unfamiliar.
Mark Hirsch is an artist and researcher currently based in Santa Barbara, California. His work investigates:
. novel materials for fabrication, design, and sculpture
. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence as tools for creative practice
. data-driven approaches to making art that connect form and information
A native of the American Midwest, Hirsch is currently a PhD candidate in the Media Arts & Technology program at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to his doctoral studies, Hirsch completed a bachelor of music at Lawrence University’s Conservatory of Music and a master of music at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.
Going/Staying
Sara Dittrich
2014 Finalist
Going/Staying is an installation/performance work which investigates the unconscious everyday rhythm of walking by wirelessly connecting the artist’s footsteps to a kick drum. The work uses long range bluetooth technology to send signals from pressure sensors in the artist’s shoes to the drum when the artist is within a one-mile range of the drum. This technology enables an immediate real-time connection between the artist’s footsteps and the drum beating. Going/Staying allows one to be more conscious of where they are and where they are going, and creates a new awareness and appreciation of these unconscious movements.
“He listens—and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome.”
—Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis
Sara Dittrich is an interdisciplinary sculpture artist who builds introspective experiences that shift perspective from passive seeing to active looking, from passive hearing to active listening. Using musical thinking, Dittrich illuminates the dynamic and unconscious rhythms of the body and environments, employing diverse mediums that have included sculptural objects, musical performance, video, and interactive electronic technologies. From placing a cellist in a 9ft. tall chair or performing with bio sensors that match breath to tidal movement, the work is both absurd and meditative.
Dittrich’s studio practice is located in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been exhibited and performed in numerous venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Washington Project for the Arts; and Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts.
recollection
Seth Cluett
2014 Judge
a single image of the boundary between cleared, inhabited space, and dense forest. the close sound of feet walking slowly from left to right just beyond the edge of the trees is recorded in mono by a shotgun microphone pointed at my feet. The framing of the wide-angle HD video makes locating the subject difficult, despite the high resolution audio, pointing up the dialect of distance between the heard and seen experience of nature.
Seth Cluett is a composer, visual artist, and writer. With work ranging from photography and drawing to installation, performance, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. Cluett is a Lecturer in Music (Computer Music and Sound Studies), the Assistant Director of the Computer Music Center and Sound Art Program at Columbia University, and is Artist-in-Residence with Experiments in Art and Technology at Nokia Bell Labs.
Quicksilver
Maggi Payne
2014 Master Judge
In the late night water droplets on my car’s windshield remind me of the beauty of liquid mercury which alluringly beads and flows so sinuously while reflecting light as if it were a silvered mirror. Grainy images shot in near darkness are accompanied by gritty, crunchy, sizzling, sputtering sounds, ending with sonifications of data collected by the Cassini spacecraft from Dr. Don Gurnett (with permission). Quicksilver finds elegance and mystery in reflected car lights in raindrops on a windshield at night, the sunlight reflecting in a two-inch wide area of a draining bathtub, and the frail tendrils of burning incense.
Maggi Payne is a composer primarily of electronic and electroacoustic music, a flutist, and a video artist. She is a recording engineer/editor, archivist, and historical remastering engineer. She is the recipient of several awards from the National Endowment and the Arts, Prix Ars Electronica, and Bourges. Her works are presented world-wide. Works appear on Aguirre, Air Texture, The Lab, Lovely Music, Innova, Starkland, Music and Arts, New World Records (CRI), Root Strata, Ubuibi, Asphodel, and/OAR, Centaur, MMC, Digital Narcis, Capstone, Mills, and Frog Peak labels. She was Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (1992-2018), teaching recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She began teaching at Mills in 1972.
Call and Resonance
Ted Apel
2013 Winner
Five very large test tubes are used to impart strong resonances on hand made sound making circuits in each tube. Each circuit independently alternates between recording sound and playing back its recording. The sounds recorded are a combination of the sounds produced by the other tubes, the ambient sounds of the space, and the resonance of the tube. In this way, the combined soundfield is an emergent property of the five tubes, that is, each tubes sound is dependent on the contributions of the others.
Ted Apel is a sound artist whose sculptures and installations focus on the audio transducing element as the source of visual and sonic material.
He has exhibited his work at sound art festivals and exhibits including the SoundCulture festival in San Francisco; the Ussachevsky Festival in Claremont, California; the Audio Art Festival in Krakow, Poland; the Sound Symposium in St. John’s Newfoundland; the O.K. Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria; and the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
Ted Apel received his M.A. in electroacoustic music at Dartmouth College studying with Jon Appleton, Larry Polansky, Kathryn Alexander, and Christian Wolff. He received his Ph.D. in computer music at the University of California, San Diego studying with Miller Puckette, Shlomo Dubnov, Haim Steinbach, Charles Curtis, and F. Richard Moore. He has been a Lecturer in Sonic Arts and Electronic Music at The University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile Technology (GIMM) program at Boise State University.
Gain Stage
Ed Osborn
2013 Judge
Gain Stage is a kinetic sound installation that sounds out and shapes acoustic space in relation to a series of physical and mechanical tableaus. Each tableau focuses on a single device or object which involves a process of mechanical amplification or motion. The movements in each tableau are amplified so that their sounds are heard in varying combinations from speakers spread throughout the space. The sounds are processed to produce an elliptical relationship between the tableau and the sound of the movements it shows: they are filtered or delayed, and often heard at a distance. This processing changes over time, so as each tableau unfolds the sounds associated with it move in and out of acoustic focus. The title comes from the technical term for electronic signal amplification. Here it refers both to the forms of mechanical amplification on display and it describes the situation of the piece itself as a platform for multiple experiences of gain staging.
Ed Osborn works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. His pieces show a tactile sense of space, movement, image and aurality combined with a precise economy of materials. Osborn has received grants and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, STEIM (Amsterdam), and the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at UC San Diego. He has presented his work worldwide and is on the faculty of the Visual Art Department at Brown University.