Photo © Victoria Murillo, via Biomuseo

My recordings of Panamanian Neoropical rainforests will be a part of a new biodiversity museum in Panama. Designed by Frank Gehry, the Biomuseo features many perminant exhibits. The Panamarama, is a 3 story immersive audiovisual space depicts the natural history of the region and the creation of the Isthmus of Panama. Smithsonian has a small write up about the project.

The Panamarama is a riff on IMAX but without seats. Visitors literally enter a 3 story room that is an immersive projection and sound space, even the floor has images. The 7 min. film is still in post production and I promise to post images soon.  This is a very interesting project that has been a long time in the making. 

Museum display has always interested me a great deal, especially natural history exhibits and the history taxidermy. Noted exhibit designer Bruce Mau has created a very nice series of exhibits for the Biomuseo. I'll write more about this project soon. Must get ready for the holidays.

I am delighted to be traveling to Darmstadt Germany next week for The Global Composition, conference on Sound, Media and the Environment. The conference has partnered with the iconic Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt for a concert on July 27th. I will be performing my new work, Chronography:animal that evening in collaboration with Eric Leonardson. I'm honored to be sharing the program with featured artist and seminal acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. Her work, Kits Beach Soundwalk will be on the bill along with two other works. Join us for an evening of soundscape inspired sounds and performances.  Event details here.

A bit of background about Chronography:animal. The piece is an extension of the work I have been creating centered on and around Antarctica. Part of this work has taken the form of an initiative on my campus entitled Antartica:Imagined Geographies.

Chronography:animal was completed unintentionally during the centeneray year of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica (1910–1912). The expedition is best known for the worst end to an adventure; a tragedy that became well worn into the Brittish psyche and perhaps the last chord of the Edwardian era. 

Some might not know about how much science was actually accomplished during that ill fated trip. 40,000 specimens were collected during the expedition and at the time the team of 12 scientists, 2 biologists, 3 geologists and 1 meteorologist was the largest ever to visit the continent. England's Natural History Museum cuated an exhibition that includes many of the specimens collected. My favorite object/idea is a fossil, found near Scott's body. Glossopteris indica was an ancient shrub once found all over the supercontinent Gondwana. For a differnt take, hit the gift shop for Terra Nova inspired wares. (something really odd there, more later)

My real inspiration came from a picture that is all about sound, people, animals and the machines that speak to us.  

Dog Chris Listening to the gramophone, Antarctica, Herbert Pointing 1911. Used with permission from the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington New Zealand.

Scott took two gramophones to Antarctica on his 1910 expedition, on loan from Victor along with 100 or so records. His capable photographer Herbert Ponting created the image that depicts one of the expedition’s husky dogs standing next to the gramophone as if listening.  The image, staged as a bit of comic relief on the ice, is a riff on His Master’s Voice, as well as a historic artifact from a classic era of exploration. This image is a telling expression of how music served as an aid for the maintenance of a specific kind of mission time. The leash is taught, held fast by someone off frame. In various reproductions, the leash is often erased, rendering Dog Chris a bit off balance. The gramophone, a tension instrument not unlike a chronometer served as a cultural sextant for those who wandered off leash.

I have been re-purposeing antique gramophone horns for sculptural sound installations and also as amplified instruments, percussive bells that resonate, clang and chime. The work is intended as an audible exploration, a pseudo –scientific demonstration where the sounds of ship propellers, penguin colonies and ice fractures gather to express an epistemology of field recordings and the role that sound technologies played in exploration and musical performance. Chronography: animal is conceived of as a bridge to connect practices of improvised music and sound art that evoke a sense of place.

Still from This is a Recording, Jay Needham 2009. 

 I will be in Riga Latvia this week giving a lecture on memory, war and the Shoah during A Virtual Memorial 2012 - Commenorative Interventions. My video This is a Recording will be screened and is the framework for the talk. Curator and friend Wilfried Cologne has put a great deal of energy into this event and I am honored to be a part of the program. My talk and visit talk are sponsored with generous support from the U.S. embassy. 

The program is organized by Culture & Arts Projects NOASS Riga in partnership with Riga Ghetto & Latvian Holocaust Museum - www.rgm.lv, association SHAMIR  and artvideoKOELN - the international curatorial initiative "art & moving images" from Cologne/Germany.

The events all take place around the International Conference of Holocaust Museums
4 & 5 June 2012 - organised by Riga Ghetto & Latvian Holocaust Museum.

"Testimony gives something to be interpreted”

Paul Ricoeur

I have been working with The Church of Contemporary Art (COCA) on a very special sound track for the RAPID PULSE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE ART.  Artists Angela Waters, Jessica Alee and Wago Kreider and my self have created a unique work, an art sermon that will inspire and re-allign your faith in contemporary art. If you are in Chicago on June 1st., this is the thing.... Read more.

 No matter what you identify as, “We are what you need.” Our communion ceremony consists of a diet of gourmet-cubed marshmallows and Kool-Aid spiked with vodka (the body and blood of art). Through performances, sound, video, sculpture, painting, and photography, CoCA pairs the rituals and relics of religion with the seductive allure of contemporary art...

2011: Air dates & Exhibitions 

ABC Radio National Australia's The Night Air will air a new radio feature about listening titled Listening In on April 17th. I was invited to create a segment for the producers from previously unheard elements from my work  Listening at the Border. The over-all program weaves together so many compelling aspects that make radio work. This piece is an amazing radiophonic work, listen in....

Featured are: "Oslo Davis a professional eavesdropper, various ear mechanics and a couple of people with unique perspectives on the world of sound; a former music retailer Greg Hartney, who suffers from nerve deafness and radio broadcaster Glen Morrow who is legally blind. 

 Brain waves, sound waves, shock waves....radio waves - angels and angst, memory and message."

Produced by Marian Blythe and John Tebbutt for ABC.

The Kharkov City Art Gallery in Ukraine screened my work OPENED on March 19 as a part of CologneOFF 2011. The seven day festival features 190 videos by 180 artists from 60 countries.

The festival is collaboration between Cologne International Videoart Festival,  artvideoKOELN, le Musee di-visioniste – the new museum of networked art & Goethe Institute Ukraine Kiev, Centre for Contemporary Art Foundation Kiev, Media Lab Kiev City Art Gallery Kharkiv, Nuremberg House Kharkiv  Kharkiv National University. CologneOFF 2011 – videoart in a global context designed, coordinated, curated and directed by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne.  

The ABC Radio National program 360 Documentaries  aired my piece Listening at the Border on Feb. 12^th.

Link over to the work they aired in a browser. The ABC produces and promotes a wide variety of documentary radio works, an inspiring mix of research and sound creation.  visit their site and listen in to some really amazing works from around the globe. 

The Third Coast Festival's ever wonderful Re:sound is airing and streaming THE TRANSMISSIONS SHOW.  Listening at the Border is a part of the hour long line-up as well as David Goren's haunting work titled Atencion: Seis Siete Tres Siete Cero: The Shortwave Numbers Mystery, Roman Mars work Max Neuhaus and Pirate Station by Emily Botein, Sherre DeLys, John Lurie, and Rick Moody. 

I had the pleasure giving an artists presentation on Feb. 18 at The Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology monthly meeting. The (New) Corpse hosted this event. The New Corpse is a performance space in Wicker Park. Thanks Caroline and Devin!

Thier mission:

"Through performances, lectures, and conversations with and against the site of the Green Lantern Gallery/The Paper Cave Bookstore/The Green Lantern Press, programming hopes to create a dynamic public entry point to the GL as an evolving confluence. Where possible, specific considerations will be made to work through the separately reflexive and coded language of the arts and humanities, sciences, and politics in the interest of creating an inclusive, learned, and politely speculative environment."

New Media curator Wilfried Agricola Cologne is featuring my piece OPENED during the month of February along with eight other US based artists. His Video Art Database is a wonderful online source for streaming video art works.