Art

What’s your background?

I began as a musician, but was never that good as a guitarist; then I started collaborating with visual artists, working on the sound for videos by Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler and others before making my own sound pieces.

Can you describe some of your past projects?

I was artist in residence on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center in 1999 and I made a piece amplifying the sounds of the building. I’ve also made work with the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon rainforest and created an outdoor piece for this year’s Winter Olympics using foley artists to recreate the sounds of ice skaters. Feature continues

Where did the idea for ‘Night Chatter’ come from?

A lot of my work is made on location and two years ago I moved from New York to a much more rural environment in Virginia. I realised how many different sounds there were there and started doing recordings with one of the local park rangers, whose work includes calling to owls at night to explore how they communicate. There are a lot of military bases in the area, so the chatter of the wildlife became conceptually linked with the ‘chatter’ the US government listens in to when it’s monitoring potential terrorists.
What will be in the gallery?

The sound piece, which will involve a textural layering of night sounds including deer, frogs and crickets, will play in surround sound on six speakers in the back gallery space. In some ways it mimics what happens in surveillance chatter; you tend to get a build-up of noise and then it all goes quiet. In the front gallery there will be photographs and a film of a journey I made by canoe through a previously uncharted area of forest in Virginia. It’s incredible to think that, in a country where every piece of land is owned, there are still untapped areas. The two spaces will be linked by some ivy growing along the wall. Playing from within the ivy will be ambient sounds created by translating the voice patterns of Tony Blair, George Bush and Osama bin Laden into a bell, a Tibetan bowl and a beep respectively. It’s about listening and understanding; they listen in on us, but they don’t listen to us. I wanted to flip things over so that we listen to them, but are unable to understand them.