Plastic Sound was a performance by Cal Fish and Lily Lasher August 18th, 2018 at CANADA Gallery 333 Broome St. NYC as part of Sadie Laska’s Summer Nights II
The Performance used the Dynamic Listening Instrument, conversation, sewn plastic bag flags from Mexico City, Berlin, Mount Pelion, London, Manhattan, and Red Hook NY with accompanying sounds.
The performance existed simultaneously as dance, sound composition, and a conversation between performers and audience about the origins and implications of the bags and flags being played with.
This collaborative installation was done with Lily Lasher, Otto Benson, Patrice Scott, Emma Lee, Eva Alcatera, and Tony Cartagine for Figment NYC 2018, an interactive art festival taking place annually on Governor’s Island.
Outside of group dance performances, festival attendees could use new and old sculptural buckets to explore a sonic venn-diagram using electromagnetic technology. Recordings and interviews taken over the course of the 2 day installation were put into the sculpture for play, re-play, and interaction.
This score was developed as a way to generate content and bring about valuable sonic exchange for, and in collaboration with, a place and community using the Dynamic Listening Instrument. Its spiral form, inspired by Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s 1981 spiral score, “A Search for Living Myths”, offers an origin point, trajectory, and no end. Having temporal bounds that cannot be broken is important for a social process that must be vast, flexible, and ultimately un-abandonable.
The score is not site-specific, but is to be used site-specifically. Its process generates micro-scores for activities, performances, sculptures, and archives. Points give suggestions for how to move from origin towards trajectory. Once an activity is introduced, it can and should be repeated anytime. Points left blank suggest that there is a lot to be learned and discovered. This score will improve over time.
Place Accumulation’s origin is the intention to for examinations between public space, ecology, and empathy. Its trajectory points towards commons, defined by Claire Pentecost as, “The organic, open, and democratic elsewhere of neoliberalism. Recognition of a common fate shared with all life on earth.”
This after-score is a haphazard snapshot taken April 23rd of what it has actually looked like so far to follow Place Accumulation in Kingston and the Town of Ulster since February 16th, 2018. The initial events I attended suggested their own trajectories which were followed and came to overlap over time.
I first attended a meeting town board meeting at Ulster Town Hall where concerned residents voicing their opposition a company who has only worked on renewable energy projects in the Midwest, buying land and building a fossil-fuel burning power plant behind the Hudson Valley Mall. I then attended a court session at the police station in Rondout which led to a community-police relations forum at City Hall, and a demonstration to advocate for DACA recipients. Since then, I have been to varied meetings and forums, roamed and occupied public places, done many interviews and collaborative recordings, listened to experiences vastly different than my own, and built a sonic archive of 21 hours and 53 minutes.
This process has brought two initial goals of Place Accumulation into focus by being directly present: Occupying and creating social feedback in public and semi-public places using sound and sculpture, and enabling sonic exchanges through my unique positioning and intention, both requiring close collaboration and unknown amounts of time.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Documentation from installation of the archive as of May 5th, 2018, at UBS and Red Hook NY.
Magnetic Sound/Echo 5 at S.A.F.E. (Seven Artists for Equity), at Broadway Arts, Kingston NY.
Echo #4 at a Tree Planting Ceremony at Chambers Elementary, Kingston NY.
Echo #2 at Earth Day at Peace Park, Kingston NY.
Tax Day Demonstration at John Faso’s (R) office, Kingston, NY,
As part of my participation in the 2018 Co-Incidence Festival/Residency from January 19th-28th with Joachim Eckl, Michael Pissarro, Ryoko Akama, and more, The Dynamic Listening Instrument was installed for public interaction in Union Square in Somerville for a Saturday afternoon.
Accessible in the instrument’s venn-diagram on the public square were recordings from earlier that week: A recording of resident artists performing “Bell Piece” earlier that week in Union Square, a wandering perspective of the Women’s March 2018 at Cambridge Common, A recording of a Kurdish protest against the Turkish Government in Harvard Square and an interview with participants, flute and vocal tones by me and Amy Golden, and recordings of water in the city.
An open collaborative movement performance with the composition happened later that night as part of a potluck/performance event at Washington Street Art Center, where the festival/residency was based.
A photograph I took during a performance of a Sound Bridges performance in the square earlier that week with Caleb Chase and Joachim Eckl.
The Somerville Media Center did a video piece on the festival, with some footage from a Dynamic Listening Dance Workshop in Washington Street Art Center, and a short (very casual) interview with me, that can be seen below.
The festival/residency was supported by funding from the Somerville Arts Council.
From January 12th-18th, Cullen Hoback’s documentary What Lies Upstream premiered at Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. The documentary shares a thurough ethnographic and personalized aproach to the reverberations and embeded complexes of an event of water contamination in West Virginia. The company Freedom Industries leaks odorous chemicals into the water supply while American Water, the company privatizing water sources around the country rushes to declare it safe. It sounds like a political satire but is an investigative effort which pushes deep into many communities and bodies of legitimacy. You can read more about the premiere here on Maysles’ site.
For the duration of the premiere the Dynamic Listening Instrument was installed in the Documentary Center and open for public interaction. The Dynamic Listening Instrument functioned here for the first time as an interactive sonic extension of someone else’s work.
Listeners in Dynamic Listening Dance Workshop #13
People were invited to investigate a venn-diagram with sounding buckets before and after seeing the documentary. Through exploration, one could listen unique blend of audio from the documentary, recordings of the Hudson River and other water sources earlier that month, relevant interviews I’ve conducted in the past year, social media activism concerned with water conditions and more detailed on the score below.
2 sounding buckets made specifically for the installation.
The week long installation was a an opportunity for the Dynamic Listening Instrument to be used as a tool for immersion in critical ethnographic material, discovery of affective information, and kinesthetic participation in a documentary about water.
On the last day of the premiere I invited participation in Dynamic Listening Dance Workshop #13, and participated in a panel on the intersections of art and political action with Lola Jusidman Shoshana, and Arien Wilkerson.
A thesis installation, December 1st-8th 2017 in the lobby and main gallery of the Fisher Studio Arts Building at Bard College.
The Dynamic Listening Instrument is an electromagnetic architectural sculpture that allows sound to be handled as a tactile entity. People can navigate a venn-diagram of magnetic fields with a sounding bucket to listen and compose a unique acoustic assemblage. So far it has been used with buckets for dance performances, movement workshops, sound experiments, and listening installation.
Among sculpture, drawing, video, and large visual/text scores, were performances of the movement/sound compositions Exploration and Field, and an interactive listening installation, Anthroapologetic Sketch #2.
Since Spring 2017, I have worked to develop an instrument that uses art as a productive social container. The Dynamic Listening Instrument is a tool/sculpture able to do two really important things. Most noticeably, it allows anyone interacting with it to play with sound as a tactile entity. I call the instrument dynamic because it allows extreme variability and openness. Sound can be controlled with unique precision by someone just lifting and moving a bucket. As electrical current in magnetic fields, sounds become fixed to locations and remain dormant unless those places are tapped by interaction. Anyone can experience this as long as they can hold a bucket and move. It’s a mystifying experience that is technically simple and can be built without digital technologies.
The fact that the instrument allows someone to uniquely experience the materiality of sound helps the instrument do a second really important thing, which is make people want to listen. The type of listening the instrument engages is uniquely tied to touch and movement. Whoever is interacting with the bucket/instrument is in charge of audibility. They can fine tune and blend different sounds however they want. I believe that since the participant is in control of sound they become more invested in listening. Sounds are placed intentionally into the instrument, but it is the participants who accesses and expose themselves to these sounds, make their own compositions, and set their own durations. New value and curiosity is brought to sound because of the unique and surprising nature of the instrument. One can listen deeply for content or can just have fun with the aesthetic/tactile experience.
For more info email callanfish@gmail.com
Edited video stills for the process of “Field” printed on acetate.
A few listening buckets…
The Dynamic Listening Instrument powered by a rechargeable battery so as to be portable.
There were two nights of performances with Emma Lee, Margot Roo Ells, Lily Lasher, Livia Paraday, and Mehgan Abdel-Moheim with costumes by Mallie Sanford (Soulw0rm) and Cal Fish.
EXPLORATION Video Document
FIELD Video Document
FIELD Video Document
In the lobby were 5 CRT monitors with a scrolling artist statement and documentation from Dynamic Listening Dance Workshops held leading up to the installation.
The Dynamic Listening Instrument will be used next in Harlem from January 12th-18th to extend the “What Lies Upstream” documentary about water contamination in West Virginia,
and for the Co-Incidence Festival In Somerville MA from January 19th-28th.
As I have been trying to work towards asserting art as a socially productive container and sound as a medium of communication I have been working on a collaborative practice that involves interactive sound sculpture. This piece, Ellis Islander, Is a 6 minute looping cassette that could play indefinitely until the batteries die and its sculptural container.
The primary sonic material comes from a tape found at a yard sale years ago which held reading comprehension tests of elementary schoolers from 2003, an excerpt from an interview I did with artist and activist Mario De Vega used to speak back to the found recording, manipulated flute drones, and construction sounds from NYC in 2017.
The test gives us a look into how public education infrastructures in New York introduce immigration to children, and what they decide is relevant for the children to know. This oral history is mediated by standardized testing, interrogation, and cassette. The drawings on the shell question what is and isn’t allowed to cross certain borders.
The work was produced and auctioned for the Frontier Crossings Benefit Art show in Red Hook NY.
“In “Frontier Crossings,” artists explore their relationship with location and belonging and consider the multivalent effects of travel and displacement. Artists also take a critical approach toward the concept of borders, scrutinizing the way they serve to construct different categories of space and relationships among people. The exhibition features a group of artists consisting of Bard students and faculty, as well as Hudson Valley locals, to raise a dialogue surrounding site and psyche during a political time in which the preservation of certain human rights is intensely tied to land.
The artists in “Frontier Crossings” share a desire to highlight emotion and intellectual inquiry in visual or auditory representations of space. For many, the process entails unearthing psychological attachments to particular locations in time and area, building upon common conceptions of visibility, liminality, and home. Ultimately, artists uncover the ways in which ideas regarding site have shed light on how they can engage with the current sociopolitical moment and our surrounding world.
Special thanks to Bard Experimental Humanities for funding this exhibition as part of a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
—
All of the proceeds will be donated to United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation. They organize and advocate for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status.”
Dispersion For Proximity’s Video Voting Machine was implemented in public for the first time on March 29th and April 1st 2017 at the first Global|Local Conference at Bard College.
The following video shows the first exciting round of votes that came in.
Voters did not have to be citizens to vote and simply registered with Dispersion For Proximity by writing their name and email on a piece of paper. They were then asked, “What do you vote for?”
Some voters were explained Dispersion for Proximity’s voting philosophy. They endorse a political process that starts at the vote rather than culminating in a vote. The booth was accompanied by yarn and newspaper and receipt sculptures. The long strands of Newspaper were collaged of different publications from November 9th, 2016. The day after Donald Trump’s election.
The voting booth was ran by Cal for two days during the conference which also featured work, lectures, and activities by Manan Ahmed, Ting Ting Cheng, Treva Lindsey, Hoyt Long, Heather Love, Dennis Tenen, T.L. Cown, Angel David Nieves, Pedro Pedercini, and Nocile Starosielski. http://eh.bard.edu/conference2017/invited-speakers/
These photos document an installation for the Sound and Necessity final Exhibition in Pankow, Berlin. Sound and Necessity was a month long intensive led by Julianne Swartz and Ana Maria Lopez Gomez that interacted with various sites in Berlin, sound art, and social art.
The installation consisted of strands of sewn receipts with drawings, the Tempo Snake, Dynamic Listening Dance Workshops, and a 15 minute 4-channel audio piece filling the courtyard, and a video projection of the first Dynamic Listening Dance Workshop.
This listening prompt was hung with receipt strands in the courtyard, it introduces and explains the audio project.
Variations of these drawings were hung in long sewn together strands in the installation, alongside long sewn together strands of receipts w/ drawings known to me and others as my ongoing piece, Conspicuous Consumer.
(Transcription…)
This installation/composition… “Anthro-Apologetic Sketch for the Dynamic Listening Instrument*”
it is a first attempt at setting the D.L.Instrument for anthroapology with oriented recordings and affective information…
Without the electro-magnetic D.L.I. present.
Among the recordings assembled in Berlin from July-August 2017 are… Interviews/speech from
-April Gertler [A photographer, social artist, and teacher who runs the project “Picture Berlin”…]
-Dorothea von Hantelmann [a theorist, writer, and curator who has worked with Documenta, Free University, Berlin, MOMA…]
-Lola Jusidman Shoshana [An environmental activist studying Political Economy at NYU…]
-Anton Kaplan [An artist studying “Art and Accessibility” at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.]
-Nyika Mukada [An artist and musical producer working and living at Teufelsberg]
-Patrice Scott [An artist working in Media Studies at Vassar College NY]
-Julianne Swartz [A artist based in New York working with sound, sculpture magnetism, kinetics, and more]-Mario de Vega [A Berlin based sound artist and lecturer from Mexico City “exploring the threshold of human perception and the physicality of listening.” Speaking here on the radical potential of art communities.]
-Tamar Weiss [A Berlin based musician, artist, and Homeopathic doctor.]
…[also] Various [cassette] tape loops recorded in Berlin…
Sounds from:
Monbijou Park, Templehofer
Field, Devil’s Mountain [Teufelsberg,]
Krumme Lanke +more
…Bell towers & Birds from Kassel, Munster, and Berlin [Carillon]
+German birds recorded by “Sonnaberg”
+more -Cal Fish
***To attempt to “set the D.L.Instrument for anthroapology… without the D.L.I. present” was an effort to isolate the sonic and social aspects of the project from the technical electro-magnetic apparatus. Working on the Sound and Social Attitude without the actual instrument allowed greater focus and development of the sonic and social
practices that would have to develop to make the instrument worth sharing.
A video document of the first Dynamic Listening Dance Workshop held in the space days prior.
Cassette Traveler is a visual album assembled with a Fostex 280 4-track, a menu of DV cameras, VHS cameras, and analog video equipment from Fall 2015 until Summer 2017 when it began being mixed and digitized by Cal and Christian Billard for dispersion.
It’s video form is 54 minutes and has been sold on limited editions of home dubbed VHS and USB bracelets. Its audio form was released in limited editions on cassette and CD by the Brooklyn label, Firetalk.
This site will no longer be updated as of 2019, visit www.calfish.land <3 