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CATHEDRAL-64
- 2023 - HARVESTWORKS - NEW YORK, NY -


Printed Circuit Board, Electronics, Speakers, 18-2 Speaker Wire, Hardware

A spatial audio instrument and composition system, controlling 64 sample accurate 1-bit audio channels.

Swarming tones shift and modulate over time, dancing across the walls of the Cathedral. A wafting sound that hangs heavily in the air like incense.

PHOTO/VIDEO: ANDRES MERCADO


Cathedral-64 is an immersive audio installation and instrument exploring the use of a very large number of spatialized sound sources. 64 individually controlled speakers are driven with sample-accurate 1-bit (square wave) outputs from a custom designed electronic audio system. The piece explores the musical and psychoacoustic possibilities of this instrument, with an emphasis on continued compositional experimentation throughout the duration of the exhibition.

The central electronic elements of the piece are displayed on a pedestal in the center of the space, with cabling running up to the ceiling and out to each speaker, creating the impression of a vortex or pillar of wire. 64 speakers are mounted in a grid pattern on the space’s walls and ceiling, surrounding the listener in fully 3-dimensional sound.

The piece works both on an auditory and a visual level, by creating a deeply physical and meditative sound environment, while simultaneously displaying the beauty of the instrument and the hardware used to create the sound.


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ARTIFACT SERIES
+ 2023 +


Printed Circuit Board, Electronics, Subwoofer Speaker, Blackened Carbon Steel, Brass Loudspeaker Spikes (Satin Nickel Finish), Birch Rod, Hardware

A one-channel bass synthesizer and speaker amplifier with aux input.

Deliver thine enemy a right sonorous blow.

PHOTO: NO GALLERY NYC, ANNA LOUISE

ARTIFACT is an ongoing series of sonic weaponry, wherein medieval armaments are imbued with electronic power via built-in audio synthesis and amplification systems. Weapons function simultaneously as installation pieces, generating autonomously synthesized electronic soundscapes, audio playback systems, amplifying user audio input, and performance instruments, synthesizing audio in a live context based on user control.

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RAY OF CREATION

- 2023 - FUSEBOX FESTIVAL - AUSTIN, TX -


A spatial audio composition written for 15 full-range speaker channels arrayed across 300ft. Premiered live at Waterloo Park in Austin, Texas as part of Ghost Line X at Fusebox Festival 2023, in collaboration with Dadalab. 

Ray of Creation is available for listening as part of the permanent collection at Black Hole Los Angeles.

The universe is a great musical scale, a descending octave, a harmonic spectrum, a filter, a process by which noise becomes silence.

PHOTO: DADALAB, AARON WHARTON

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KNAVE, GREAT WURM, AND THE STARRY FIRMAMENT
- 2023 - DUNKUNSTHALLE - NEW YORK, NY -


Printed Circuit Board, Electronics, SLM Printed Steel, Poplar, Baltic Birch with High Voltage Woodburning, Hardware

A rotary spark gap and Shepard tone based drone synthesizer.

The knave, humble man, looks out at the whole of the cosmos: the great chain of being, the wurm’s coiling body, the night’s blackened tendrils, the impassive stars. A spark breaks the aether where the material meets the divine.

PHOTO: DUNKUNSTHALLE NYC


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BLIND LEGIONS
- 2023 - MILLENIUM FILM - NEW YORK, NY -


Printed Circuit Board, Electronics, Speakers, Reclaimed Wood, 18-2 Speaker Wire, CRT Monitors, Video, Hardware, Molted Cicada Shells

An electromechanical insect swarm, enacting an apocalypse narrative via control voltage synced auditory behavior.

The insects rush toward the point of frenzy, blind legions, caught in a momentum of their own making. Larvae twitch in waxen cells, bathed in a honey-colored light, while chitinous wings cut patterns in the pheromone laden air. Drawn ever forward, they fall into the roiling vortex, to die amid bolts of lighting and the smell of ozone.

PHOTO: ANDRES MERCADO, VIDEO: TOMI FAISON

Blind Legions uses the behavior of circuitry to convey an apocalyptic narrative: the story a catastrophic event brought about by civilization-wide momentum and exponentially increasing rates of change. Incorporating a series of sonic sculptural works designed over a two year period, Blind Legions realizes their full modular potential, synchronizing behavior via analog control signals in service of a unified narrative.

Swarms of electromechanical insects feed off their collective momentum, hurtling towards a doom of their own making. Simultaneously, a series of video works are modulated in time with the swarm behavior, pushed towards incomprehensibility during the exponential rise and lingering as solitary impressions within the apocalyptic fall.

Blind Legions is a meditation on our modern conception of apocalypse. Within a cultural and material system predicated upon infinite progress, it becomes necessary that we envision a cataclysmic event which might bring instantaneous resolution to this otherwise unsustainable momentum. Blind Legions serves simultaneously to envision the reality of this event, in all it’s inevitability and horror, and to imagine the ways in which this conception may be artificial, a convenient substitute for the true reality of time; as a process unending and beyond human comprehension, moving in a direction all its own.