My new sound installation Still Space (video) opened Friday September 14th at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was commissioned for the Asian American Arts Alliance’s Locating the Sacred Festival.
Still Space is part of the festival exhibition The Space Within. You can see it daily between 3:30 and 7pm until Sunday, September 23.
Update: Steven Speliotis made this nice video of the installation: vimeo.com/49657504
Things are happening!
* My robot toy piano has a couple of gigs coming up:
This coming Wednesday, June 6, at Roulette in Brooklyn:
SATIEfaction!
Satie and Satie-inspired music from John Cage, Federico Mompou, Toby Twining and Milos Raickovich
Margaret Leng Tan, piano and toy piano
Roberto Rossi, narrator
Ranjit Bhatnagar, sound artist
http://roulette.org/events/margaret-leng-tan-6/
And then on Thursday, August 9, at the Museum of Modern Art’s John Cage Day:
Celebrate the centenary of legendary artist, composer, philosopher, and writer John Cage with a series of readings, performances, musical compositions, and personal reflections by poets, writers, musicians, and scholars. Participants include writer and editor Richard Kostelantez; Joan Retallack, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, Bard College; pianist and toy-piano virtuoso Margaret Leng Tan; and poet, editor, and curator Roger van Voorhees.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/15360
* The Music Box, the sound sculpture shantytown I worked on in New Orleans last year, is open to visitors again this summer, and the final performances there are happening soon. If you’re going to be in New Orleans, check it out: http://www.dithyrambalina.com
* My wind-powered sound sculpture, “Trumpet Marine”, will be hanging out in Williamsburg’s East River Park this summer as part of BWAC’s Outdoor Sculpture Show, probably starting in July. More on that soon! Meanwhile, here’s a video of the thing at the Figment Festival last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjit/5840234686/
* I made a little algorithm that uses Twitter’s Streaming API to read millions of tweets per day (about 500 per second!) in search of the tiny fraction that happen to be in iambic pentameter. Out of those, it selects rhymed couplets and retweets them in an endless crowdsourced sonnet. You can follow it at http://twitter.com/pentametron and http://pentametron.com
Pentametron got some nice coverage from the Poetry Foundation -
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/some-conceptual-literature-on-twitter/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/05/algorithm-turns-tweets-into-poetry/
And this interview in Gawker explains how it works: http://gawker.com/pentametron/
It even got a tweet from the Globe Theater! https://twitter.com/The_Globe/status/202377080820871168
* In September I’ll have an installation in the Asian American Arts Alliance’s “Locating the Sacred” Festival, and I’ll be doing a residency at Albuquerque Open Space as part of the ISEA electronic arts festival.
* …and I discovered that Electric Violin Lutherie has created a real violin inspired by my amateur 8-bit violin. That’s the kind of thing that makes me love open source design. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:23103
The Music Box: Winter from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo.
Here’s a beautiful video from the Music Box in New Orleans, documenting the rehearsals and performances in November and December. I was just one of many artists and musicians who put the whole thing together.
Here’s a nice New York Times article about the big crazy sound sculpture shantytown I helped out with in New Orleans:
A Symphony of Floorboards, Pipes and Stairs
(My nightingale floors made it into the title! Whoo!)
“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”
That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”
In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.
Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.
Be sure to check out the slide show.
There’s also a brief video about the first performance. (You can hear my floorboards starting at 1:22 or so)
Here’s a teaser video of the New Orleans Airlift’s Music Box Orchestra, a big crazy sound art/architecture project I helped out with. My contribution was the squeaky moving floor, which you can see providing the bass line as the performance starts.
The Music Box – Oct 22 from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo.
A selection of my prints from the greenmarket produce scan series – ranging in size from 3 inches to 5 feet! – will be in the (Un)Still Life show at BPL’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, opening tomorrow! The show will be up through December 3.
Many of the fruits and vegetables I use in my images came from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, just a few steps from the library, so it’s especially nice to see them in the beautiful lobby gallery there.
More information at brooklynpubliclibrary.org
Some guy checks out the biggest print moments after we hung it
Timelapse: installing almost 200 tiny prints covering 9 years of veggie scanography
Over at NYC Resistor, we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui, and Catarina Mota. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). The Resistor JelTone tied for the Creativity Prize, and you can see it in the videos below.
That same weekend, I took some of my homemade instruments, including the 8-bit violin and a second JelTone (built in haste at the last possible minute), to the Solid Sound Music Festival for the CDM/Moog Handmade Lounge. After all my jello melted, on the second day of the festival I rebuilt the JelTone with fruit salad instead, and here it is:
I saw a firefly a few days ago, so it’s summer now, whatever the calendar says. Last weekend was the annual Figment Festival on Governors Island, and I brought back my 2008 wind-powered sound sculpture in a new cyborg body. Here’s a video:
I was lucky to be chosen as one of the Queens Museum of Art‘s sound art residents this month, so I’ve been working with my collection of vintage automatic music toys, and I’ll give a presentation/performance this Saturday (June 18th) at 5pm. The performance is free, but come early and check out the rest of the museum, including the famous Panorama of the City of New York! Event into: facebook.com/event.php?eid=229965507015603
Here’s the toy collection:
The following weekend, I’ll be at the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) as part of Peter Kirn’s Handmade Music Lounge: solidsoundfestival.com/exhibits
Coming up in July: a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, the Sketching in Hardware conference in Philadelphia, and a field trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico!
What are you up to?
These guys at the Thingamajigs DIY Instruments Tailgate Party really know how to operate a pointy rectangular fiddle!
Thanks, CTP, for the videos.
The lobby at 55 Washington was a perfect setting for the accordion robot, with its brushed steel walls and blue neon.