This Saturday, August 9, the Museum of Modern Art will open its first major exhibition of sound art. Soundings: A Contemporary Score presents work by sixteen contemporary artists who use sound, whether as an exclusive medium or in combination with video, installation, painting, sculpture, and more. One of those artists is Jacob Kirkegaard, who’s showing his piece “Aion” (2006), a recording of some of the abandoned spaces of Chernobyl.
sound art
A Kinetic Echo in a Chapel
BERKELEY, California — Remember Ernesto Neto’s jaw-dropping installation “Leviathan Thot,” at the Panthéon in Paris in 2006? As much as I loved “Leviathan Thot” it could have easily been made in the 1970s or 80s. Recently however, I stumbled across another artist in who has made an equally powerful and much more contemporary, albeit more subtle, installation in another French church.
The Volume of the Everyday
Zimoun is a Swiss sound and kinetic artist whose installations incorporate hundreds of everyday objects and simple movements to create a foreign experience for the viewer. He asks questions like, “What are the aesthetic and tonal qualities of cardboard in motion?” Traveling recently to see Volume, his first solo show in New York, I was oddly excited to find out.
The Popping Soundscape of Electronic Media
LOS ANGELES — There are sounds all around. Clicks and taps from keyboards, pings and pongs from phones, honks and heys from the streets. It’s a treasure trove out there for sound artists.
Livestreaming the City Through Police Radio
LOS ANGELES — Drawing inspiration from Robin Rimbaud and the lovely Mission Control site by soma.fm, artist Eric Eberhardt decided to turn police chatter and online radio into a media landscape.