Wet/Dry Mix
Audiovisual improvisation.
Author Archives: Chris
Aggressively Bashful
Audiovisual improvisation.
Self Portrait
Drawing with code demo in Foundations Digital Media. (more…)
Take A Nap With an Artist
In 2015 I was invited to participate in a happening at the Ann Arbor Art Center, where a group of artists took over what was supposed to be a painting exhibition. I wanted to make artwork that was decidedly not labor-intensive and that gave me an excuse to do something I wanted to do anyway, while still responding to the painting exhibition. The Art Center is a local community center focused more towards craft and is not known to have the most adventurous take on contemporary art.
So I decided to take a nap in the gallery and invite other viewers to join me. The day of the happening, I bought an air mattress, some earplugs and a sleep mask and arrived at the gallery in my pajamas with a little poster inviting patrons to Take A Nap With An Artist (with the promise that it would improve creativity). I was aiming for a balance between the playful irreverence of asking viewers to do something backwards in a public art gallery and a more serious question of whether to lay down with a young, decidedly masculine, not-totally-unthreatening male artist. The response was great, with a healthy number of people actually climbing into bed with me. I was wearing the eye mask the whole time, so I didn’t get to see much reaction from abstainers, but the secondhand reports I got seemed to indicate a healthy mix of viewers being made to feel amused, dismissive, uncomfortable or regretful at not seizing the opportunity. I’m happy when a participatory artwork can still have an impact on viewers who choose not to participate in the way the artist asks.
Read more about this project in Island Thinking.
Beautiful Trespass
In October 2015, Detroit’s Picnic Club hosted a picnic and auditory meditation titled Beautiful Trespass. The ad-hoc group convened at a parking lot at the intersection of Carpenter and Gallagher. Just before sunset they caravanned to the end of a defunct and overgrown service drive. When the pavement stopped they took off on foot down a gravel path, over a set of train tracks, through the deep, coarse grass, and onto the top of a monumental mound. This traffic island—situated within the archipelago of unused lawn at the intersection of the I75 and M8 freeways—was their destination. Surrounded by highways on three sides and a train track on the fourth, the mound was nicknamed The Invisible Island, for the fact that it is constantly passed by but seemingly unexplored.
The experience of Detroit’s landscape has a great deal to do with personal perspective. The idea of walking into a place that would normally only be seen (or unseen) while driving past seemed like a promising method to gain new perspectives and new connections to space. To activate our experience and perceptions of The Invisible Island, members formed impromptu groups of twos, threes, and fours—we call these groups the Traffic Chorus—to explore the island’s sonic landscape with audio devices designed for group listening and recording. With a prompt to harmonize with ambient traffic sounds through collaborative vocal improvisation, the Traffic Chorus joined with the rushing cars, clanking trains, and rumbling trucks, weaving their attention, bodies, and voices into the fabric of a place seemingly intended to be ignored, bypassed, and drown out.