Image: Charmaine Lee and Luke Cheng

Charmaine Lee's I trust her to go on living (for James Wright) refracts and reflects the voice as self.

Artist Biography

Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice.

Charmaine has performed with leading improvisers id m theft able, Sam Pluta, Tyshawn Sorey, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Ikue Mori, Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, and Eric Wubbels. Charmaine has performed at the Lincoln Center, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, The Poetry Project, and MoMA and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies and Huddersfield Contemporary. She been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by HBO Max, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. She has lectured at institutions including Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and The New School. Charmaine was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). She currently serves on the Board of ISSUE Project Room and on the Editorial Board of Sound American.

https://charmainelee.com

Stephen Cornford's Spectral Index shows us how we use rocks to look for rocks.

Artist Statement

Digitisation has shifted the materials on which our media technologies rely. The minerals and metals required for digital imaging are the same as those required for energy transition away from fossil fuels. There is currently a new resource race underway, with nation states and political blocks scrambling to ensure secure supplies of these critical raw materials. This race is both driven by and reliant upon visual cultures, a recursive circularity in which images are used to produce minerals which are used to produce images.

This single-screen video work considers the role of the ‘spectral index’ in framing our relationship with landscapes that are perpetually surveilled by orbital satellites and aerial drones. A spectral index is a mathematical image function in which different wavelengths of the visible and infrared spectrum are combined to produce false colour images that analyse different terrestrial conditions. To gaze at the earth through these instrumental lenses presumes both ownership and functionality of the planetary surface below.

Artist Biography

Stephen Cornford is a media artist who works with consumer electronics, critiquing the ideologies they embody and the constitutive role they have come to play in our lives. His current research is concerned with the toxicity of digital media, the complex metallurgy of ubiquitous technologies and relationships between planetary and photographic space.

Much of his recent work has been made in collaboration with scienctific researchers. He has worked alongside commercial geophysicists prospecting for technology metals in Europe and volcanologists studying magma crystallisation with X-rays. His practice often employs laboratory processes or scientific imaging, using geological furnaces to transform electronic waste or optoelectronics facilities to damage cameras.

In 2018 he completed a PhD affiliated to the Archaeologies of Media & Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art. Stephen has had solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, Brighton, Bergen, Ljubljana & London and his work has been included in group exhibtions at the ZKM Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe; ICC, Tokyo; Haus der Electronische Kunst, Basel; Sigma Foundation, Venice; Finnish Museum of Photography and Coventry Biennial.

https://stephencornford.net/

Peter Blamey's Hand over Panel listens in to the overwhelming abundance of solar radiation.

Artist Statement

Hand over Panel is a performance work that explores the possibility of using photovoltaic technologies for a physical, embodied interaction with sunlight, realised through sound. Despite its simplicity, performing with sunlight makes it difficult to present this work to a live audience, so video seems to make sense.

Technically speaking, the work is fairly straightforward: the output from a small photovoltaic (solar) panel is connected directly to an audio amplifier. In full sun, the electrical current the panel produces is heard as quiet hiss. However, when portions of its surface are shadowed by my hand, the amount of sunlight falling on the panel is reduced, along with its electrical output, causing the sound to increase in volume, shifting and deepening in tone. Ironically, in this case, less energy equals more sound.

My hand also interrupts the steady flow of photons onto the panel, no doubt contributing its own changes in texture and reaction, which is further complicated by me moving my hand around in response to the sounds I’m hearing, searching out new interactions. Sunlight, hand, panel and shadow combine to produce swelling, energetic, oceanic noise, here doubled through the separate performances seen on the left and right of the screen.

Artist Biography

Peter Blamey is an artist based in Sydney, on Gadigal land. His practice is often sound-focussed and accomplished via an economy of means, and includes performances, videos, recordings and installations. Broadly speaking, his work explores (amongst other things) the interconnected themes of energies and residues, often through reimagining our everyday encounters with mundane materials and technologies and the physical world, and our experiences of energy generation, use and wastage.

https://peterblamey.net