Piet-Jan van Rossum with Paul Clipson (Photos by Louie Metzner)

Subtwine – Entwine’s speakeasy-like downstairs space that has hosted musical-artists-in-residence such as Toucan (as profiled in the New York Times), video art exhibitions curated by CoWorkers Projects— for a limited time is home to the West Village’s only ongoing experimental sound art event, KINEMATIC Thursdays. Presented by Yulia Topchiy of CoWorker Projects, Kinematic Thursdays is curated by Helen Homan Wu of Opalnest. This is such a unique series of events blending video art, experimental music and sound art that I asked Helen for a bit of the backstory.

Noveller

Heike Baranowsky 'Monfahrt' (courtesy of Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin)

Helen founded Opalnest to provide exposure for artists — artists who work with time-based media — that do not necessarily fit into the typical art gallery structure here in the U.S.  She explains that in European cities like Berlin, interdisciplinary contemporary art such as sound art is a robust, thriving genre regularly reviewed and written about by theorists in the same manner of the traditional fine art disciplines of painting or sculpture.

Gill Arno

Opalnest produces events both locally and internationally. Recent projects include satellite events for the New York Armory Show (including an event with Audio Visual Arts for Passing Stranger, an East Village “soundwalk” created Pejk Malinovski, narrated by Jim Jarmusch), a group exhibition of new media artists in Hong Kong, and an experimental sound art event in Mainland China. The daughter of a classical musician (father, flute) who spent her childhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Helen steeps herself in the worlds of contemporary (and often interdisciplinary) video and sound artists, frequenting gallery openings, music and sound performances at venues like Roulette,  Issue Project Room and The Kitchen, and regularly schedules in-person studio visits.

Paul Clipson

Why create this sound exploration showcase at Entwine? Helen thrives on mixing diverse artists and audiences, creating events that cross boundaries, offering innovative, of-the-moment art that engages, startles, delights and surprises. Helen also mentioned that as Subtwine is a somewhat under-the-radar spot (and literally, under Entwine) at the nexus of the West Village/Meatpacking District, it feels organic to the overall Kinematic experience.

JUNE 14 – JULY 19, 2012
7:30pm Thursdays
Subtwine @Entwine, 765 Washington Street

Check here for a complete schedule and links to the participating artists.

"Shared Frequencies"

Kabir Carter is a performance and installation artist based in NY. His work could be described as an eloquent study on the interactions and interpolations between sound, space and the body.  I was introduced to his work while doing research for the book Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves and I was intrigued by the physicality of his creative method as well as his attentiveness to the spaces he uses for his work.  Kabir Carter will be performing tomorrow Tuesday, October 18th, at the Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves book celebration at Issue Project Room.

"Report"

When did you start to develop a sensibility about space in all its different manifestations (public, private, indoors and outdoors). What was the first interaction/experiment or project that sparked this idea in your head and consequently in your work?

What set me to actively consider space in my own work was Shared Frequencies. Several years ago, I received a grant to go out on New York City sidewalks and set up a loose array of radio scanners, signal routers, and analog synthesizer modules atop a pair of folding tables. My first few realizations of the work required me to rethink my relationship to sound in space on the fly.

I determined ways to make small monitors project reflective and resonant sound that could be heard within and alongside the energizing high SPL auditory events that blanket urban locales. These and other challenges that I faced while presenting Shared Frequencies in public outdoor spaces led me to better consider architectural acoustics, and how our bodies move through sound and space.

The correlation between sound and space plays a very important role in your work. In the equation between a sounding space and a transformative sound, which of the two is more prevalent?

My use of sound requires space – or at least the idea of space as it applies to a medium – in order to be tangible and concrete. And in terms of sound, space is largely perceived by what it carries, or what demarcates it. I’m interested in how both sound and space can be shaped by transformative energies, and I look for ways to highlight how a signal chain can extend into architecture, and in and out of one’s body.

"Report"

Space would need to be included in such a chain as well. So signal, space, landscape, architecture, and body would all fall along in a variably arranged series of modulated possibilities. Additionally, I feel that sound in the visual arts is at once liberated by its mutable nature, and complicated by its partially formed discursive condition – as something that historically grows out of mostly experimental music practices, and is inscribed with artists’ wholly or partly decoupling from that history and adopting trends originating from late twentieth century visual art practices. Returning to the question, such a correlation will yield very different values depending on where one chooses to stand in relation to these two histories.

Do the advances of technology corrupt our relation to our surrounding environments, the spaces we inhabit and interact with or even reality to some extend?

That’s a rather complicated question – if we are considering acoustic technology, I think it remains a concern that media technology is, historically speaking, partly bequeathed to us through the military. In this light, one might appreciate experimental music practices that are centered on what Friedrich Kittler termed the “abuse” of such technological systems. Part of media arts collective Mobile Image’s eighties era manifesto also merits repeating here: “the counterforce to the scale of destruction is the scale of communication, and… our legacy or epitaph will be determined in many ways by our ability to creatively employ informal, multimedia, multi-cultural, conversational, telecommunications and information technologies.”  Today, we seem to be very much enmeshed in a struggle with and against media technology, and perhaps that is the least that we can hope for – a doubled movement with and against technology.

"Soft Errs"

You have at times used  radio as a source material in your installation work and performances. What is it that you find appealing in this sound source?

While I’ve mostly stopped using radio in my work, my initial attraction to it was as both a source and a site. So in Shared Frequencies, radiophonic signals and radiophonic space are both considered as performative materials that can be worked with over time. I gradually extracted bodily behaviors from my experiences with Shared Frequencies to generate a series of works that focus on how one’s body can be used to move radiophonic sound events through multiple sites or physical locations. And after working on a few projects without using radio technology, it became clear to me that my interests were more closely aligned with sound and space in general, and not so much with a particular and singular kind of signal source or set of propagating conditions. If anything, I attend to spaces that are inhabited by bodies, and among these, spaces for listening to dance music tend to excite me as a listener far more than radio does. But I do expect that I will continue to try and work with its airchain in the future.

Artist Website: kabircarter.com

Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves Book Launch Event:  free103point9.org/events/3657

Photos: Gabriella Radujko

In an extraordinary performance of “Inuksuit” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, composer John Luther Adams turned noise into “site-determined” music.  Describing the Armory as an environment like no other, Adams accepted the challenge of scaling a performance, which originally premiered outdoors at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies, for the “pristine emptiness” of the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

Musicians commenced by playing simple instruments, some made of paper or wood, sensitizing the ears of the audience as sandpaper discs were rubbed, conch shells and megaphones blown, whirly tubes twisted, and bullroarers whipped. In sharp contrast to the stationary stone sentinels scattered throughout the Arctic, which are believed to have been used for navigation and for which the work is named, the audience, unencumbered with fixed seating, was free to walk, sit, or lie on the hardwood floor.  Exhibiting interest in the musicians, their eyes tracked them as they slowly walked, instruments in hand, from the hall’s center to hallways and staircases of the first and second floors.

Over 70 percussionists, similarly scattered throughout the Armory, advanced the performance with thunderous noise – frighteningly strident at times; beating multi-tiered cymbals, tom-toms and tam-tams with increasing intensity, sound rising into the balloon shed, musicians engulfed by an ever moving audience that listened, looked, and learned kinesthetically.

A softened light via clerestories synchronized an approaching dusk with piccolos, glockenspiels and triangles, twinkling as they summoned night. Anticipation of the end of yet another day grew as did recognition of transformation.  Adams had not only found the music “in the armory” but the spirit of communitas as well.