A project by Paddy Johnson
Thursday, August 11, 9pm
Live performance at Mercer Union
Free admission
MERCER UNION
A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West,
Toronto, Ontario M6H 1N9
T: 416-536-2955
E: info@mercerunion.org
www.mercerunion.org
Find out what art sounds like in the hands of artists Paul Slocum and Lewis Kaye. Thursday 11 August, the musicians will remix Art Fag City’s limited edition LP, The Sound of Art, a record composed of sounds heard in New York galleries, museums and project spaces over the last five years.
Just what’s on this album? Work by artists well-known and not-so-well-known. Difficult electronics. Sounds of stampeding animals, Hebrew prayer, a transformer fire, a children’s carousel. One hundred carpenters pounding 10,000 nails. Field recordings of recordings by guitar genius John Fahey, and archival sound pieces by the pioneering conceptualist Lawrence Weiner. An iPod drum circle and thoughts on nostalgia. Also, yes, a toy monkey with cymbals.
These sounds are just the start of a larger project that begins at Mercer Union. The first stop in a tour around North America, musicians, artists and creative folk of all types will be invited to remix this album to produce new sounds. Paul Slocum, a Brooklyn based programmer, artist and musician, will use the album in combination with “Magic Carpet”, an iphone app he built to be both a musical instrument and music visualizer. The application spins images of quilts at high speeds to create fractal like images. In keeping with this sensibility, Torontonian Lewis Kaye, a sound artist and media science researcher will use the software Plogue Bidule to process live audio from the event along with the other pre-existing samples including those from The Sound of Art.
Paul Slocum is a Brooklyn based, artist, musician and programmer. From 2006-2009 he ran And/Or, a gallery in Dallas with a focus on New Media. He was also a member Treewave, a two-person band that makes shoegazy pop music using obselete 70’s and 80’s computer and video game gear accompanied by female vocals. Recently, Slocum released Sir Sampleton a wildly popular sampling keyboard, and Magic Carpet, a music visualizer and musical instrument for mobile phones and tablets.
Lewis Kaye is Toronto based sound artist and media sciences researcher whose work is animated by a fascination with the interplay between sound, technology and culture. His projects frequently explore, adapt and transform recordings of various sound environments. Often working in collaboration with visual or performance artists, his work has found expression in many forms including media installation, theater, audio CD, 5.1 video and live 2-channel and multichannel performance. Major solo works include the McLuhan-themed Through The Vanishing Point (McLuhan in Europe Festival 2011, CONTACT Photography Festival, 2010), and You Are Here, which was commissioned as the official podcast audio guide for the City of Toronto’s first Nuit Blanche in 2006. Lewis holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York and Ryerson Universities, and has taught courses on sound studies, alternative media and digital culture.
Paddy Johnson is the founding editor of Art Fag City. In addition to her work on the blog, her work has been published in such magazines as New York Magazine, The Economist, and The Daily. Johnson lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Two years later, Johnson was nominated for best art critic at The Rob Pruitt Art Awards and won The 2010 Village Voice award for Best Art Blog. Johnson also writes a regular column on art for The L Magazine.