Buy Tickets
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$17 advance / $20 door / free or discounted for members
Advance prices include ticketing fees. Request your member DICE Code here.
The Lab presents two works exploring sometimes-invisible articulations of landscape. Anna Friz’s “Salar: Adaptation” considers the audible sonic textures of desert field recordings alongside a electro-magnetic and radio signals, with video in collaboration with Rodrigo Rios Zunino. Gretchen Jude’s “Divide” consists of graphic scores outlining the silhouettes of mountains from an artist residency in Montana, performed by John Bischoff, Kevin Corcoran, Suki O’Kane, and Shanna Sordahl, alongside’s Jude’s field recordings from the site.
Salar: Adaptation
Deserts on Earth have served as a training ground for off-planet travel to Mars; meanwhile Earth's ecology becomes a little more like Mars every day. A Martian returns to damaged Earth, while earthlings who remained strive to adapt.
Salar: Adaptation is a live performance by Anna Friz combining unexpected sonic textures of desert field recordings with electro-magnetic signals, sampled and rewritten NASA mission communications, and live electronics and voice. The accompanying video created by Anna Friz and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino plays with the perceptual uncertainties characteristic of the desert--such as the prevalence of mirage, ambiguities of scale, and an expanded sense of time.
Salar: Adaptation is part of a suite of radio and audiovisual works entitled We Build Ruins. It reconsiders the history and fate of the industrialized Atacama desert in northern Chile, by simultaneously understanding it as a place once covered by water, as an arid environment described by rare geologic and organic systems, and as a high-altitude mining site transformed and abused by massive and devastating infrastructures. Robotic extra-planetary modules such as the Mars Rovers have been tested here as the conditions and geology serve as ready analogs for Martian environment and terrain. The mining techniques currently being developed in Atacama are also contributing to a neoliberal imaginary for eventual off-planet mineral extraction operations. However, deserts are not ‘wastelands’ good only for exploitation. Salar: Adaptation rethinks the narratives of both earthly and extra-planetary inhabitations away from dominion and extraction, and toward listening, sensing, and adaptation.
Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist, who creates broadcasts, installations, short films, and live performances. She continually returns to themes of transmission ecologies and the intimacies of signal space, environment and land, infrastructures, time perception and durational performance, and critical fictions. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been a Rydell Visual Arts Fellow, a Hellman Fellow, and a Prix Palma Ars Acoustica awardee, along with numerous grants and commissions. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Presentation in recent years include Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the New York Times Magazine, esc Median Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin Germany), Soundhouse at the Barbican (London UK), Espace Multimedia Gantner (Belfort France), and RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg, Denmark), and Bienal Sur, Argentina. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Rodrigo Ríos Zunino is a media artist dedicated to sound, radio and the intersection between the invisible fields that surround us and the material plane of existence. His approach to video and photography are deeply informed by practices of listening. Rodrigo has been collaborating with Anna on We Build Ruins since 2017. Recent presentations of his work include Sonandes Festival in La Paz, Bolivia; Bienal Sur, Argentina; Radio Art Zone, Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg; and esc Median Kunst Labor in Graz, Austria. He is currently co-director of radiotsonami.org and part of Tsonami Arte Sonoro in Valparaíso, Chile. Deserts on Earth have served as a training ground for off-planet travel to Mars; meanwhile Earth's ecology becomes a little more like Mars every day. A Martian returns to damaged Earth, while earthlings who remained strive to adapt.
Divide
"Divide" is a performance score exploring peaks of the Great Divide, the Americas' primary watershed comprised of topographical ridges separating eastward and westward flows. At an elevation of 6720 feet, Western Montana's Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge (nestled high in the Centennial Valley) is a rare and striking place. Moose, grizzlies, and angus roam free. Peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks circle to eye me, strange bipedal interloper. At this height, divisive human contentions seem to flatten out, worn away by brutal winters and raucous thaws.
"Divide" is comprised of three hand-drawn graphic scores that trace silhouettes of mountains that dominated my stay at the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center (Lakeview, Montana). Field recordings illustrate the failings of human technology at the fringes of civilization. Instructions to my friends down in the city, at sea level, are an invitation to sound out our differences. To brave the divide.
Gretchen Jude is an experimental media performer and composer born and raised in the wild state of Idaho and currently lodged between the Wasatch Front and the Great Salt Lake.
John Bischoff is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his pioneering role in the development of computer network music. Kevin Corcoran works with percussion, field recordings and electronics with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication, and place. Suki O'Kane, an Oakland-based musician, composer, improviser and instigator, works with artists from a wide array of music, movement, expanded cinema and public art genres. Shanna Sordahl uses analog and digital electronics, amplified cello, and multimedia installation to create sounds that emphasize possibilities of transformation.