ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; Meet the Composer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Excerpt from Knots & Fields: Pierre Boulez on John Cage

The Darmstadt Institute is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Dedalus Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council

Image from Robert Longo's Pictures for Music (1979), to be shown alongside Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio

Jonathan Kane’s February, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, Stephen O’Malley, Zeena Parkins, Films by Robert Longo, Tyler Hubby, & Tony Conrad

May 12 – 14, 2011

Since 1993 the record label Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise, intending nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century, and beyond. Its projects have focused on musicians whose light shimmers outside the frames of convention, and comprise a vital contemporary archive of experimental, minimalist, improvised and outsider musics.

Jeff Hunt, visionary art director, packaging innovator, and enigmatic founder of table of the Elements, based the label on the finite concept of assigning a chemical element to each release. Now, 18 years and some 115 releases on, TotE nears the end of the assignable elements. While the label’s creative mission will carry on with its satellite imprint ‘Radium’, the remarkable Table of the Elements label nears its inevitable conclusion.

Party Time!

TotE recording artist Jonathan Kane has assembled a vast cross section of TotE and Radium artists, representing both the history and the future of the label, to celebrate Jeff Hunt and Table of the Elements’ accomplishments and contributions to the experimental music world. Also featured at all performances will be films of historic TotE artists in performance, and a video gallery of TotE’s ground breaking and influential artwork, design, and packaging concepts.

Still from Robert Longo's Pictures for Music (1979)

Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio sparked an electric guitar revolution with three guitars and a single chord. The 2008 Table of the Elements release Guitar Trio is My Life! is celebrated here with a much larger ensemble, the Lords of Tinnitus, anchored by drummer Jonathan Kane and accompanied by images by artist Robert Longo. The ensemble includes Ernie Brooks, Robert Longo, Jonathan Kane, Robert Poss, Bill Brovold, Zach Layton, Adam Wills, and Colin Langenus.

Text of Light (William Hooker, Alan Licht & Nels Cline) was initially formed to perform with American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s film The Text of Light. The group takes on various permutations, and at ISSUE will feature William Hooker, Alan Licht, and Nels Cline. The group has headlined both film and music festivals, and has toured European and USA club and cinema venues.

Jon Mueller has been an active drummer and percussionist over the past 25 years. His recordings have been featured in a variety of contexts, from cassette tape to MTV, and he has performed concerts throughout the U.S., Japan, and Europe. He has worked with members of the groups Swans, Wilco, Bon Iver, and Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, as well as been a longtime member of the groups Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and more recently, Volcano Choir. He has collaborated with artists such as James Plotkin, Marcus Schmickler, Bhob Rainey, Dan Burke, Asmus Tietchens, Lionel Marchetti, Z’EV, Jason Kahn, Jack Wright, and many others. His recordings have been released by record labels as disparate as Table of the Elements, Polyvinyl Records, Type Recordings, Jagjaguwar, and many others.

New York-based singer-songwriter Peg Simone employs the slide to bone-chilling effect, fracturing raucous rock choruses and sepia-toned ballads into ghost images with its off-tuned eeriness & pure blues tones stuttering across hectic post-punk rhythms. Her recent release is Secrets From The Storm (Table of the Elements, 2010).

The Text of Light group was formed in 1999 with the idea to perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avante garde of the 1950s-60s (Brakhageʼs film ‘The Text of Light’ was the premiere performance and namesake of the group). The original premise was to improvise (not ‘illustrate’) to films from the American Avante-Garde (50s-60s etc), an under-known period of American filmic poetics.

Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht (gtrs/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/perc), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/perc).  Various combinations of these players attend ‘Text’ gigs, depending on individual schedules, so the group takes on various permutations—sometimes all members participate, sometimes not.

To date the group has performed with the following films: Brakhageʼs The Text of Light, Dog Star Man, Anticipation of the Night, Songs; Harry Smithʼs Mahagonny outtakes, Oz-The Approach to the Emerald City, and Late Superimpositions.  The group has headlined the Victoriaville Music Festival, Canada (2002); Three Rivers Film Festival, Pittsburgh; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and have done several tours of Europe as well as performing in New York City and other USA club and cinema venues.

Jon Mueller has been an active drummer and percussionist over the past 25 years. His recordings have been featured in a variety of contexts, from cassette tape to MTV, and he has performed concerts throughout the U.S., Japan, and Europe. He has worked with members of the groups Swans, Wilco, Bon Iver, and Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, as well as been a longtime member of the groups Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and more recently, Volcano Choir. He has collaborated with artists such as James Plotkin, Marcus Schmickler, Bhob Rainey, Dan Burke, Asmus Tietchens, Lionel Marchetti, Z’EV, Jason Kahn, Jack Wright, and many others. His recordings have been released by record labels as disparate as Table of the Elements, Polyvinyl Records, Type Recordings, Jagjaguwar, and many others.

Jon Mueller formed the imprint Crouton in 1999, because of an interest in how people experience packaged sound and writing. Crouton published over 40 releases in deluxe presentations; each of them collaborative projects that required much listening, creative thinking, planning, discussion, organization, and hands-on implementation. Crouton also organized events in the Milwaukee and Chicago areas with artists from around the world. These were heavily documented by the press and even filmed as part of a PBS documentary. Mueller stopped publishing via Crouton in 2009 to focus exclusively on rhythmplex.com.

Peg Simone, out of NYC, employs the slide to bone-chilling effect, fracturing raucous rock choruses and sepia-toned ballads into ghost images with its off-tuned eeriness & pure blues tones stuttering across hectic post-punk rhythms. Her upcoming release “Secrets From The Storm” is due in February/March 2010 & will be released on Table of the Elements. Peg is also a guitarist in Jonathan Kane’s Februaryand collaborated with Kane on the upcoming album for their own 22 minute version of When The Levee Breaks titled “1927/Levee” with intro narrative written by Holly Anderson.

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”

—Robert Smithson

Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?

Jana Winderen, a sound artist and acoustic researcher based in Oslo with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fine arts, begins her compositional process in any number of unpredictable locations: “in the boat or hanging on a rope in a crevasse.” Describing her work as blind field recording, Winderen often embarks on long treks to search for unique sonic environments to source sounds for her elaborate performances and installations. Using hydrophones to record biotic and abiotic sounds, she then mixes these recordings into her layered compositions—uncanny semblances of inaccessible places.

Winderen wants to bring “all the physical and emotional experiences [of the trip] in addition to the sounds in the mix,” to her work as a composer and installer. Intricate layers of reworked sound create a quality of underwater eco-realism, giving voice to living and non-living underwater forces. Winderen’s work is neither a purely objective representation of hidden worlds, nor purely subjective composition. At ISSUE (4/21), Winderen will continue her investigation into the sound of shrimp, exploring how the smallest creatures of the ocean use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding. Hydrophones—originally a military development—are repurposed, inadvertently producing unexpected qualities not informed by their original design. Here, the production of music and the study of cod are in excess of the technological thought.

One proposition of the Sonic Unconscious is that it supposes music to be a byproduct of another desire. Just as a bird song has nothing to do with human pleasure, it is still appropriated and aestheticized by humans. Bird songs are cultivated, but how do the birds take part in this?

Yolande Harris creates technological interventions in the gaps between phenomenal experience and mapped data. Her practice, fundamentally ecological in nature, takes sound as its primary material and subject and purports to unhinge anthropomorphic concepts through purposeful misuse of technology. Technologies produce machinic images—images or sounds not informed by human consciousness—as a byproduct of their intended purposes. Harris’ work explores this excess. Her project Sun Run Sun sonifies satellite signals through headphones, creating portable composition machines. These compositions are are always in flux, depending on the users’ physical relationships to the satellite.

Fishing for Sound, which Harris will present for The Sonic Unconscious, is a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals and underwater recordings from hydrophones, grounded by clicking noises appropriated from psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The composition weaves together recordings of sonic fields outside of human perception. Through the aid of technological devices, the listener navigates—a metaphor often employed by Harris—through these renderings by way of the EMDR clicking, linking bodily movement, like the blinking of an eye, to the navigation of virtual space in the memory. In Harris’s work, sound is the material and central metaphor for the transformation of space.

Navigation is perhaps an apt metaphor for thinking about the above practices because it relies less on presentation of an object through image or playback, and instead suggests provisional linkages between the non-place of the work and the site of the presentation. In order to navigate, you have to be somewhere.

Gina Badger works in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, encompassing new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her current thematic concerns deal with urban ecologies and environmental histories, while her projects tend to blur the line between artistic production and reception of the work. Using what she terms critical prosthetics—prosthetic devices that carry out a non-normalizing or hegemonic function—Badger often works in small groups at site specific locations with these tools, creating embodied interventions and explorations in the field.

Transmissions: A Botany of Decolonization creates a critical prosthetic via a scored performance and tape manipulation. During a ferry ride from Boston to Georges Island (selected because of Boston shore’s historic relationship to colonial and military power), a performer listens to a recording of Badger reading excerpts from Winona LaDuke’s The Ethics of Collecting. This performer then recites a section, from memory, to a second performer. The second repeats the text to a third, who is reading a copy of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. The third then recites a passage that she has been reading, which the second performer repeats, recording it over the initial tape of Badger’s reading. Badger records this performative action on video and plays it back, manipulating the cut-up tape in performance. The transmission of text is the material manifestation of colonialism, manipulating the reception through failures in the mneumonic and machinic function, a kind of de-performance of colonialization.

For The Sonic Unconscious, Badger will lead two afternoon plant walks (4/16 & 4/17) through the Gowanus Canal area with specially developed critical prosthetics exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds, followed by a reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Experimentation here is concretely linked to being in the field, to an active exploration of heterotopic space. Expression is a conscious function of the symbolic realm; The Sonic Unconscious brings together artists working on site, working through a wide spectrum in order to elicit material change.

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

These installations will run on 4/16 (5–7 PM) & 4/17 (5–7:30 PM).

Pink Noise:

Pink Noise (The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea) uses sound recorded underwater at a National Marine Reserve in midsummer. A surprising range of sounds – loud thumps, grinds and tones from boat engines, anchors and depth sounders – are juxtaposed with video of colorful light reflecting on the sea from the same location. Headphones are suspended from the ceiling directly above the video projection on the floor, physically emphasizing the technological mediation required to make audible the inaudible underwater sounds.

Tropical Storm:

Sound and video recordings of a tropical storm evoke the multisensory experience of being immersed in a torrential downpour in a rainforest. Tropical Storm presents the intensity of noise and energy through minimal editing, allowing the exact synchronisation of sound and image to work up an affective space of palpable intensity that can be both overwhelming and meditative.
Yolande Harris (UK) uses her performances, installations and instruments to investigate how we use sound to relate to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

Mongrels, a short film

Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.

Badger’s work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Gina Badger: I am an artist and writer currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, my practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. My most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Much of my recent work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, I aim to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.

I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going.

Gina Badger is grateful to Dori Midnight, Eymund Diegel, Issue Project Room, Proteus Gowanus, Halo Halo, Nika Khanjani and Adam Rosadiuk for their support and insight.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. She has received numerous awards, most recently the Teddy for the best LGBT film at the 2009 International Berlin Film Festival. Her first book on queer cinema, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life launched at The Elizabeth Sackler Center at The Brooklyn Museum of Art on March 6, 2010 and is published by The Feminist Press of City University of New York. For one month in fall of 2010 Hammer was honored with her first US retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to be followed by The Tate Modern in London in fall 2011.

A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, the co-curator of Ridykeulous, a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work has been recently featured in Greater New York 2010, P.S. 1, New York and has been subject to solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the New Museum, New York. She is a visiting instructor at the School of Visual Arts and University of California Los Angeles, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, NY.

A.K. Burns lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A.K. uses sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions to pervert and exploit interpretations and implications of form. A.K. is a founding member W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), and co-editor of RANDY, a biannual transfeminist arts magazine. During 2010 the feature length video Community Action Center, created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner was released consecutively at Taxter & Spengemann, NY and Horton Gallery, Berlin. A.K. was also the artist-in-residence at Recess Activites Inc., NY, with her partner Katherine Hubbard. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Kelly Dennis is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of Art / Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Berg, 2009), on the role of touch in the reception of the nude from Plato to the Internet. She has published on fetishism and masturbation in art and wrote the definitive essay on beaver shots. She appears, along with Dr. Jocelyn Elders, Betty Dodson, and Scarlot Harlot, in the forthcoming feature-length documentary on masturbation, Sticky. Her work on photography, performance art, and pornography appears in A Cultural History of Sexuality (Berg, 2011), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge, 2008), Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna (SUNY, 2003), and in such journals as Art Journal, History of Photography, and n.paradoxa. She has lectured on pornography throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She also has been a consultant for documentary films and theater productions on sexuality and cultural representation in photography. She is currently at work on a history of the political aesthetics of Western regional landscape photography.

Since 1987, MIX NYC has presented the latest in queer experimental film and previously unseen works from legendary figures in avant-garde cinema. In addition to our vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations, and infamous parties, MIX NYC also provides year-round community screenings, a summer media workshop for queer youth, film preservation projects, and the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, documenting how collective action transformed AIDS activism, queer identity and health care in America.

The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.

Dyketactics, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Menses, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 6 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Women I Love, 1976, 22 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1977, 20 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Community Action Center, 2010, 69 mins., A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. The piece incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films of the 70′s which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.

Because the video contains sexually explicit content, the term ‘porn’ is relevant and the artists have an interest in exploring the trappings of the term itself. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. Queer sex and feminist agency is a shared acknowledgment of reciprocal penetration. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music and original compositions by artists culled from the worldwide sisterhood. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Using the gallery to exer/exorcise the mystical and discreet lost spaces of homosocial configuration, the artists have created a reason and a space to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.

Menses, 1974 by Barbara Hammer

Women I Love, 1976 by Barbara Hammer

Dyketactics, 1974 by Barbara Hammer

Since 1987, MIX NYC has presented the latest in queer experimental film and previously unseen works from legendary figures in avant-garde cinema. In addition to our vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations, and infamous parties, MIX NYC also provides year-round community screenings, a summer media workshop for queer youth, film preservation projects, and the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, documenting how collective action transformed AIDS activism, queer identity and health care in America.

The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.