Wednesday, April 24th at 8pm, ISSUE invites our community in partnership with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and Fridman Gallery to explore the evolution of Gestures/Murmurations by composers and sound artists Cecilia Lopez and John Driscoll. The unique acoustics of ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater provides an ideal laboratory for experimentation, where the audience can move about the space and experience the work-in-progress from different sonic and visual perspectives. A reception will follow the free artist talk & showing.
Lopez and Driscoll have been working together over a period of approximately five years, most notably at Fridman Gallery in 2018 and Harvestworks’ Sponsored Projects program in 2021. These collaborations have focused on works with electronics and acoustical spaces. Following a discussion about collaborating on a self-running sound art installation, they decided to create a joint work utilizing a custom sound system designed with a series of five robotic rotating loudspeakers, two speed-controlled rotating 55-gallon drums with loudspeakers inside and two conventional speakers. Driscoll brings to the collaboration a long history of creating electronic music and sound art with the Composers Inside Electronics group, with a background in developing unique electronic instruments, robotic speakers and significant sound installations. Lopez brings a strong musical background often applied to improvisation, electronic music, sound installations, sound sculpture and a novel approach to creating graphical scores for the performance of mechanical instruments. Together, they share a commitment to developing sound materials that accentuate and complement the resonances of performance spaces, creating a mesmerizing array of evolving sound fields.
The evolution of Gestures/Murmurations has intrigued both artists with the potential for activating resonant spaces with a series of shared sonic and choreographic gestures. They have created a mobile sound system whose movement can be controlled by software allowing them to “compose” the space with a high degree of site specificity. The project is completely self-running, using a Mac Mini and Ableton Live software developed by Lopez and Driscoll. Both artists have designed sound materials for Gestures/Murmurations resulting from their combined aesthetics. These sounds are tailored to the movement of the speakers and vice versa. The resulting installation will create an immersive experience for the audience in which the movement of sounds in space and their nature are inseparable.
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Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation and the creation of sound devices and systems. Lopez holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College and an MA from Wesleyan University in composition (2016). Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (AR), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Roulette Intermedium, ISSUE Project Room, Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Ostrava, Czech Republic), MATA Festival 2012, Experimental Intermedia, Fridman Gallery (NY), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway) and the XIV Cuenca Biennial, among others. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various international residency programs. In 2019, Lopez curated the intermedia festival Folly Systems co-produced by Roulette Intermedium and Outpost Artists Resources that featured 11 international artists. Collaborators include Carmen Baliero, Aki Onda, Brandon Lopez, John Driscoll, Carrie Schneider and Lars Laumann among others.
John Driscoll is a composer, musician and sound artist from New York, currently living in Denver. He is a founding member of the innovative Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) group and performed with David Tudor and collaborated on his Rainforest IV project since its inception in 1973. His work has focused on robotic rotating loudspeakers, unique ultrasonic instruments, compositions and sound installations for resonant architectural spaces, and music for Dance. He was a DAAD fellow (Berlin), and has toured extensively in the US and Europe with Tudor, Composers Inside Electronics, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Maida Withers and the Dance Construction Co., Stephen Petronio Dance Co., Merce Cunningham Dance Co., Phil Edelstein, Cecilia Lopez, and as a solo performer. His recent sound installation work has been exhibited at the Fridman Gallery (NYC), MoMA (Warsaw), MoMA (NYC), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Lyon Biennale, MAC (Lyon), Arter Museum (Istanbul), University of Maryland (College Park), Subtropics Festival (Miami), New Bedford Art Museum and others. His collaboration with Phil Edelstein on the sound installation Rainforest V – (variations 1-4) (2015-2018) resulted in acquisitions for the collections of: MoMA (NYC), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Vehbi Koc Foundation for the Arter Museum (Istanbul), and MAC (Lyon). His recent installation work Cluster Fields is a collaboration with Phil Edelstein.
