White Noise

White Noise is an exhibition of sound and image installations by New York-based artists who straddle the fields of visual art, music, sound and poetry. The exhibition will utilize the entire architectural premises of the gallery space consisting of four separate installations and performances under the auspices of free103point9, as well as Bruce McClure, and Jim O’Rourke with additional programming from the poet members of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Press. White Noise is presented as part of PERFORMA 05, the first biennial of new visual art performance in New York City, which took place from November 3 – November 21, 2005. More information is available at www.performa-arts.org.

Schedule:

free103point9
Wednesday, Nov. 2 – Saturday, Nov. 5 | On the Air Ongoing Live Performance
Saturday, 7-9 p.m. | Reception and Performance

Jim O’Rourke
Tuesday, Nov. 8 – Saturday, Nov. 12 | New Installation Piece

Bruce McClure
Tuesday, Nov. 15 – Friday, Nov. 18 | Film Installation
Friday, Nov. 18 at 7:30 p.m. | Live Performance

Over and Over the Endless Corner
Saturday, Nov. 19 | Poetry and Sound Performance/Live Installation from 2-6 p.m.

On The Air suggests an architecture, in-motion, for the reception of polyphonic radio signals in transmission-based performance. Four FM transmitters distribute four distinct “channels” of sound to portable radios suspended from clusters of helium-filled balloons throughout the gallery space. On The Air begins with a live Radio 4×4 event: an improvisational performance where four artists each perform into an individual transmitter; the audience’s location in tandem with the balloons’ determine the final mix of the collaboration. Audio ephemera from Radio 4×4 is installed throughout the project duration. Each day features interventions from participating artists including 31 Down, Alexis Bhagat, Matt Bua, Damian Catera, The Dust Dive, Joshua Fried, Tianna Kennedy, LoVid, Matt Mikas, Michelle Nagai, Ben Owen, Radio Ruido, and Tom Roe. free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists who explore ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression.

Bruce McClure creates a special installation for WhiteBox using film projectors and guitar effect pedals to produce a “shell game” of images and sound. On the last day of his installation McClure presents a live performance. Employing handmade black-and-white film loops, McClure projects a series of overlapping blasts of frames, alternating from black to white, dark to light, while continuously altering the luminosity of the bulbs and the variety of the flickering rhythms. The sounds these film loops create have their own special role: fed into a battery of guitar effects pedals, mixing boards, and loudspeakers, they emit a pulsing, mechanical soundtrack. The cumulative effect is an environment in which light, sound, and movement are wholly unified. McClure works with sound and film technologies such as experimentation with spinning discs and the xenon flash technology developed by Harold Edgerton in the 1930s. Internationally recognized, McClure is best known for his groundbreaking multi-projector performances that interrogate the very substance of film and its mechanical supports.

Jim O’Rourke produces a new sound and video installation site specific to WhiteBox’s architecture incorporating the native sounds of the exhibition space. O’Rourke projects a forty-minute color video of an airplane in eternal, slow-motion take-off onto a huge projection screen in the pitch-black gallery. He pairs it with a soundtrack: his droning, meditative, organ-based work from 1990, Mizu No Nai Umi. Known primarily as a composer, Jim O’Rourke has been a key component in the increasing overlap of the American and European experimental music avant-garde. His work includes multiple projects as producer, and a major reconfiguration of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. O’Rourke has recorded under his own name, and as a member of Sonic Youth and Wilco and has collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Troop and Tony Conrad among others.

Over and Over the Endless Corner A performance in three parts investigating formal poetic structures—metaphor, sound, rhythm, image, voice—through the arrangement and re-arrangement of everyday objects, actions, and sounds featuring some of New York’s most respected young poets pushing the boundaries of performance, installation and poetry including Ellie Ga, Julien Poirer, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Airport War and Matvei Yankelevich among others, each of whom sat in a corner for hours in rotation and silently read a newspaper. They faced a wall on which the word “LAWN” was writ large, while behind them a lawn-like field of intensely expressive faces was spread on the floor. Several record players scratched and moaned, their needles suspended in a single groove by bookbinding string.

White Noise was made possible by the Greenwall Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation funds program and WhiteBox members. WhiteBox has received additional funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.