OBJECT LESSONS

Patrick Vaillancourt: Celebrating a Rediscovery of the Intentionally Erased takes six number-one pop hits from the past fifty years and transforms them into a series of comprehensive drones, to kill the hook, in order to erase the effects of pop music on the mind. By reducing each song to an almost painful experience, a poetic confrontation with the base elements is made possible.

Tom Jennings: Story Teller is a self-contained system for telling stories, which are stored as rows of tiny holes in long spools of paper tape. The stories are on a wide range of subjects, but they are all about text, mediation, representation and deconstruction.

Nate Harrison: Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free.’ it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent.

Sean Dockray: Cabinet is based on a research project in which the recorded and archived the applauses he has received as a performer and in doing so has documented the temporary moments when we leave our isolated bodies and become part of a collective body, with its own temperament and desires. The cabinet itself is a homemade device that has been designed around its contents, much like a library’s card catalog furniture is based on the dimensions of a single index card.

Peter Cho: Takeluma is an invented writing system for representing speech sounds and the visceral responses they can evoke. The project explores the ways that speech sounds can give rise to a kinesthetic response. The Takeluma project explores the complex relationships between speech, meaning, and writing and comprises several animated, sculptural, and print works.

Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree: Almost Certified (Grade-A noise for non-discerning consumers) is a distributed network of sixteen precarious egg-tapping robots. Each individually amplified unit features a select unconventional egg. Calculated sequences emerge, conducted by beautifully rendered software on a resurrected mainframe (a sweet Mac LC3).