Another installation that leaned into the more spiritual aspect of water is “Water the Sounds” by Ranjit Bhatnagar and Anne Hollænder. The piece lets spectators pour seawater into a bowl, which activates analog instruments as well as haunting audio of Hollænder’s singing to the crowd during the exhibit’s opening.
Soterakis best described the installation as “having a soul of its own.”
Two events this weekend! Saturday (June 8) is the opening of Water Stories, an exhibition at BioBAT Art Space in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. My friend Anne Hollænder and I are presenting a new version of our interactive musical installation Water the Sounds. The opening event is 5-8pm on Saturday, but if you can’t make it, the show will be up for almost a year. The venue can be hard to find, so check the directions! Sunday (June 9) is Soundscapes, the annual celebration of sound art at Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. Come out to see the latest sound sculpture commissions and visit the permanent ones like my Stone Song! Caramoor is a pleasant ride out of the city on Metro North, so you get to start at Grand Central Terminal.
Join me, sound artists Thessia Machado and John Roach, and violinist Concetta Abbate as we swarm from location to location in the vast, dark, and echoing ground floor spaces of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The show starts around 5, but come early to explore the exhibition – there’ll be some delicious honey ice cream available to sample courtesy of B-Line Ice Cream, honey mulled wine, and some other bee themed takeaways. John has posted some previews of the performance on Instagram here and here. We’re all working on weird new instruments for this gig!
The performance is part of the exhibition “Embodied Futures and the Ecology of Care” at BioBAT Art Space in Sunset Park and is an extension of John Roach’s installation “Scorched Honey Archive” that explores the complex ecological role of honeybees and other pollinators. BioBAT has more information about the exhibition and more upcoming events.
Getting to BioBAT Art Space can be confusing, because the Brooklyn Army Terminal is a vast maze! Do not enter BAT from 2nd Avenue – take 58th or 63rd St all the way to the parking lot on the river, and you’ll find BioBAT’s entrance facing the river towards the south end of the gigantic building. (Google will tell you it’s in the middle, and Apple will say it’s the north end. Lies!) You can even take the ferry to Sunset Park / BAT and you’re almost there!
To learn how to work with clay, I’ve been copying ancient animals that I find on the web. These were made, with air-dry clay and acrylic paint, between November 2021 and April 2022. Here they are, arranged from youngest to oldest.
Justin sent me some field recordings and a picture of this manuscript page from Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien #1. I used the page as a score to fade and trigger bits from Justin’s recordings.
I’ll post the video when flickr finishes updating their video servers, or you can watch it on instagram.
