EXPO Sound 2018

CURATED BY DAATA EDITIONS

The Afterlife Will Have Everything

Installed on the /Dialogues Stage within the exposition hall, the EXPO Sound program featured a curated election of works by Daata Editions (https://daata-editions.com)—an online platform for the sale of commissioned artist video, sound, and web art editions—launching new artworks by select international artists. Additionally, a select group of artists of the School of the Art Institute Chicago were included in the 2018 program.

Program Statement

The capacity of voice is in flux. Powered by the rise of artificial intelligence and a growing aspiration for human embodiment, the role of voice requires us to shift perspective. To go beyond the human. Acknowledging the role of speech as it exists from new perspectives, from that of the machine. The first work, Maria Antelman’s Sin-Taks, represents a key node in this trajectory. Using spoken word, Antelman represents the perspective of search engine information processors, demonstrating a piece composed of stop-words and non-words, filtered out by search engines to help accelerate the process of harvesting information. Highlighting this distinctive method of processing information is Stephen Vitiello’s piece The Waves, which obliterates any component of human speech. The narrative—a reading of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous book—is methodically translated into a floating atmosphere of drone sounds, terminating arrays of soft distortion.

Of course, soon the afterlife will too have everything. From this vantage, young perspectives on the role of birth and death are woven together in Thora Dolven Balke’s YD4. The artist presents an introspection, driven by a selection of voices that bear semblance with one’s internal monologue, to offer both comforting and disruptive ideas to the listener. The absence of oral communication and its reconstitution within the somatic discourse of performance is reflected in Main Tool is Dummy by artist duo FlucT. The corporeal exchange draws on rhythm and nonlinearity, as commonly exerted in their work. Confronting the listener with a rich visual picture, as if embedded within the arrangement of sounds, the performative aspect of the duo is within touching distance.

The involuntary politicized voice is a facet that emerges within Matt Copson’s audio pieces. Exposing hate speech within the concealed environment of a phone call, Copson illuminates the anonymity of the perpetrator to reawaken memories about acts of discrimination; those often captured on video and spread through social media platforms.

The nature of a place solely captured by the voices that take place inside of it is John Skoog’s work. His exclusive approach to field recording within Marijuana Mars and Marlboro, rejecting the traditional execution of the medium to capture both environmental and human sounds. This selection is woven together through an explorative composition by Marina Rosenfeld that revisits ‘perceptual sound field reconstruction’ as developed in the AT&T Bell Laboratories. This technique pursues an authentic reproduction of sound as it was experienced live with a calculated array of microphones to capture spatial sound. Siting the past of today’s urbanized Bermondsey as a place of retreat, tidal rhythms of flooding and burning, polyphony, and palimpsest is surveyed in Fay Nicolson’s work Spa Songs. Drawing on concepts of Swiss Composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who established the musical experience through movement, she crystallizes an integrated musical encounter between eight performers into the fabric of vocal history.

These recently commissioned works for Daata Editions are paired with sound pieces produced by current students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—Jenna Boyles, Xiaolong Fang, Jack E Jacob, Anthony Janas, Yitong Lu, Kevin McGrath / Yu Nong Lin, and Andy Slater. Installed at the /Dialogues Stage within the exposition hall, the EXPO Sound program will provide a dynamic interlude to the panel programming at the 2018 edition.

Curated for Daata Editions by Saskia Hubert & David Gryn

Participating Artists