Untitled Phone Booth Project #1
This is a continuation of my fascination with the telephone as a site for intentional listening, and the first iteration of my play with the phone booth as a space. I want to imagine what this object - that has only recently left its commonplace status - could be when it returns. For now, I want it to be a space for story, to continue to be a site for reaching out, to be a place to share your story, to give you a moment, to listen, to speak as quietly or as loudly as you need.
Throughout the course of this piece’s initial showing, new stories and new voices were added to the phone, and visitors’ messages were archived and collaged in a continuous practice of this work.
You are still able access messages from the phone and leave your own messages by calling these numbers:
914-768-1242
706-979-2948
Collaborators & Contributors
Anooj Bhandari
Begum Inal
Chaesong Kim
Char Jeré
Julia Melfi
Katherine Patterson
Laura Killeen
Merry Sun
Robin Virginie
Sergio Maggiolo
you
Resistentialism
One February evening I was put on hold for 30 minutes, and it changed my life.
I am fascinated with the telephone as an art medium. In today’s society, the telephone has come to mean so much, but with its expansion, we may be losing the meaningful, innovative, and unique connections made through more traditional telephony.
My audio installations challenge our relationship with telephones, mediated connection, and the aggravation/joy of forced art
In addition to the installations and art surrounding telephony, I have also conducted research into the performativity, history, and impact of Music on Hold.
I am developing a new staging of the original installation as well as a follow-up installation called Pick Me Up
mothbox
what are we pulled toward?
when we get there, how are we changed?
what sound does that make?
what did we miss along the way?
This new work comes from my studying of how moths make sounds, and how those sounds are used to form connections, find direction, and stay safe. Through scientific conversations with entomologists and allegorical conversations with poets, we developed these cross-speicies understandings of attraction, gravitation, and transformation, which led to the narratives in this piece. The 4-channel audio work is comprised of ultrasonic sounds produced by moths, woven with personal stories. The sculpture of the box and cocoon is a result of my gravitation toward these details of insect beauty and transformation, with the engravings tracing the wing patterns of hawkwing moths.
Many thanks to the entomologists at Barber Sensory Ecology Lab & Migratory Insect Pests and Advanced Control Technology Group at NARO. And many thanks to Annie, Cy, Julia, Michaela, Miranda, Rob, Robin, Shelton for the conversations, stories, and voices in the piece.
Here is an excerpt of the composition in a stereo mix
On Our Street
A series of sculptures and miniatures examining sonic histories of place paired with audio and lighting. This process is a type of temporal/sonic map making, focussing on the overlaps - overlaps of community, architecture, story, sound, and space.
The first showing of this work was presented at Fridman Gallery in Lower Manhattan, using that location as inspiration for the work, looking at the many lives and sounds of this site on The Bowery.
This series also began my in-depth pursuits of oral history as a key tool in my sound art practice. This project features the voices of a dozen New Yorkers who have lived on The Bowery, in the neighborhood, made intimate connections with the people and these streets, seen them change over time, and tangibly felt the energy of these areas shift, blossom, morph, cement.
Acousmappings
acousmatic - sound one hears without seeing an originating cause
mapping - the act or process of making a representation, usually on a flat surface, as of the features of an area
Acousmappings - a series of sound installations currently in development
The intention of the project is to generate re-imagined soundscapes for unique locations through site-based composition.
Middletown Sound (September 2017) was a sonic re-imagining of four sites around Middletown, CT. This project portrayed new thoughts about these places in late summer. The sounds heard included recordings of locations throughout the city over the last few weeks of summer, musical compositions written specifically for these places, and sounds I have grown to strongly associate with Middletown - soundmarks. Each location had its own recorded score, played within listening helmets, which joined with the sounds occurring live around the listener to create an experience unique to that time and place.