I worked with calligrapher David Chang to make a score for the Brooklyn Ballet’s piece “Quilt / One Night Stand”, a set of structured improvisations. Here’s our video score, and a photo from the performance.
Quilt: a score for the Brooklyn Ballet from ranjit on Vimeo.
Here’s a nice recording of Short Ride in a Fast Chihuhua, performed live (by a toy chihuahua) at the Qubit Machine Music festival in February.
And here’s a video of another performance (also recorded at Qubit).
Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua from ranjit on Vimeo.
About Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua:
My toy dog always barks 26 times in a row. I asked composers to contribute microscores for piano, each 26 beats long, to be synchronized to the chihuahua’s voice. Fifteen composers wrote about sixty scores, which were performed by the mechanical dog at the Qubit Machine Music festival at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York in February 2014.
Composers: Ranjit Bhatnagar, Jason Charney, RP Collier, Langdon Crawford, Christi Denton, Rachael Forsyth, Ben Houge, Lem Jay Ignacio, Bryan Jacobs, James Joslin, Ari Lacenski, Tony Marasco, Kala Pierson, Erik Satie (adapted by Ranjit Bhatnagar), Isaac Schankler, and Schuyler Thum.
Fred Durieu, one of the artists on the Concert Hall installation in Paris, made this wonderful virtual tour of our monstrous creation.
(Click the picture for the tour!)
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
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 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.
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:
You can download construction plans and arduino code for the jeltone on thingiverse.
The jeltone was a finalist at the 2012 Guthman Musical Instrument competition.
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.