Dec 15, 2015

Music Performance and Artist Talk

Daniel Neumann: “Aural Shadows In The Absence Of Trees”
Monday, December 14, 2015

Daniel Neumann’s sound performance was formulated as a response to Anton Ginzburg’s installation and consequently Neumann, the performer, will be absent. Solely the playback machine – an apparatus of reproduction – is performing.

The piece is a four-channel audio montage made from unmonitored recordings captured in the gallery during the run of the exhibition “Hybrid Gaze”, which is introduced in the press release as: “The exhibition focuses on the contemporary extension of the human eye by means of technology and the resulting dematerialization of the body, the hybrid gaze of the human and the machine.”

In the same way Ginzburg is and is not gazing at nature, Neumann is and is not listening to the exhibition – collecting and directing materials through various technological processes for it to be performing itself.

List of recordings:

01 Two-channel recording of “End of Perspective”. Microphones were placed inside the two subwoofers that play back the audio of the piece.
Fixed gain, no headphones, 21:11 minutes

02 Boundary mic recording of “Displacements”. Picking up the sound of the projector from the surface of the projection.
Fixed gain, no headphones, 5 minutes

03-05 Performances were recorded in absence.
No memories, no access other than the aural representation.

For the montage the installation recordings were used as straight audio material, whereas the three performance recordings were converted into various midi-data-streams that then “played” a four-voice synthesizer. The montage was done by overlaying all of the materials onto a timeline and then subtracting – so at that point Neumann inserted himself back into the piece as a human filter.

Artist Talk with David Ross
Tuesday, December 15, 2015

“In conjunction with his current solo show “Hybrid Gaze”, Anton Ginzburg sits down with David Ross, chair of the MFA program in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts and former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to discuss his interdisciplinary practice. Mixing new technology with art historical subject matter, Mr. Ginzburg presents a two-channel video installation that captures aerial views of the Hudson River Valley with a pair of drones that also observe one another in the process of filming, along with other site-specific videos and hybrid works that deal with issues of language and mapping.”

— Paul Laster, The Observer