Electronics and Art: Young Artists and Simon Blackmore

Friday, January 10, 2014 · 4 pm to 6 pm

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Join UK-based exhibiting artist and musician Simon Blackmore for a workshop that draws on hobby-style electronics, open-source software, and lo-fi aesthetics. High school-aged artists are invited to explore technology that responds to the natural environment and learn innovative techniques for up-cycling and transforming electronics into art. The workshop is presented in partnership with Ridgefield Music and Arts Center.

 

For Blackmore, the nature and history of musical translation and its relationship to technology has provided a rich area for inquiry. His Aldrich exhibition Three Sound Works brings together related works that use the language of music to convert one form of information into another: Weather Guitar, a Flamenco guitar that "plays" to changing weather conditions via an interface with exterior weather instruments; Audio Monitors, two speaker-like objects that don't broadcast sound, but rather count down the seconds and minutes of silence to 4' 33", the length and title of John Cage's iconic silent musical composition; and Sticks, a computer-based piece that utilizes a modified version of ASCII, an early binary computer code, to transmit text messages across the gallery by the clicking of hand-held wooden sticks.

Blackmore's "performative" sculpture and installations reveal the inner workings of things that are usually invisible, while attempting to tackle the more philosophically thorny questions that surround our increasingly complicated relationship with technology. Blackmore is himself a musician, but his choice of instrument might be surprising: acoustic guitar. He also creates and performs experimental music with the Owl Project, a collective of artists who have appeared throughout Europe playing sculptural electronic instruments of their own design. Blackmore's main interests lie in this clash between the old and the new, and the works in his exhibition all speak of his efforts to humanize technology, grounded by an attitude of playful subversion.

For more information, please contact Tracy Moore at tmoore@aldrichart.org, or 203.438.4519, during regular Museum hours.