For her first commissioned work as a 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence, sound artist and musician Sydney Spann presents "Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog" a performance-activated sound installation co-presented with CPR – Center for Performance Research. The piece will premiere at CPR’s space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
This performance will air live via Wave Farm.
"Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog" is a performance-activated sound installation using the entirety of CPR's gallery and theater space. Spann will use FM radio baby monitors to receive and diffuse a live performance taking place in one room to another room where the audience will be left to parse through the broadcast music. Additive synthesis is superimposed over feedback swells created with hearing aids, punctuated by rhythms made with electromagnetic microphones and augmented with sung and spoken vocalizations.
The live performance marks a reflection on Spann’s experience working in childcare. For years, Spann has found herself enmeshed in the complex, exploitative, and inevitably partial structures of care and kinship that reproduce the nuclear family. Care work collapses, or rather, reveals as spurious the “structural, experiential, conceptual gap between the public and the private.” For Spann, the bourgeois middle class home is a contested site, in which nanny cams and radio monitors represent just one form of banal surveillance and control. Also integral to the performance is the artist’s interest in the relationship between sound and psychoanalysis, particularly D.W. Winicott’s theory of “transitional phenomena,” which identifies early speech, singing, and babbling to sleep as both methods of self-soothing and assertions of independence. Spann’s own distilled transitional speech and song broadcast through baby monitors is meant to gesture towards an expanse of care outside the nuclear family, perhaps prefigured intergenerational, queer, and other imaginitive forms of childrearing.
Sydney Spann (b.1994 Baltimore, MD) is a sound artist and musician based in New York. She works with synthesis, chance operations, recursive compositional processes and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long form compositions and improvised performances. Her music engages the private experiences that shape public spaces, and the affective dynamics within childcare work. She has released albums with Ehse Records (Baltimore), She Rocks! (NYC), and Reading Group (NYC), with a full-length release forthcoming on Recital in 2022. She has performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, The Walters Art Museum, Bar Laika by e-flux, and in diy spaces and galleries throughout the US. Recent works for streaming include Sending up a Spiral of on Montez Press Radio and Attached/Detached (partial disappearance) for ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work Series.
