Holly Herndon In Collaboration With Mathew Dryhurst
06 Aug - 13 Sep 2015
Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst, everywhere and nowhere, 23.2-cannel sound installation, video installation, offset print on paper, photo: Kerstin Behrendt, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2015
HOLLY HERNDON IN COLLABORATION WITH MATHEW DRYHURST
Everywhere and Nowhere
6 August - 13 September 2015
They infuse their voices with tingles so that you can feel their struggle. Their words become bodies become movements. They are leaking with love, too much to be contained.
Their voices coalesce in a compassionate campaign, encrypted in a whisper. Funding arrives nightly from anonymous donors. They are everywhere, and nowhere. We collide, because we cannot see where we are going.
The sound design of American musician Holly Herndon is known to incorporate the sonic fragments from her every day life – Skype conversations, keyboard typing, subtle and exaggerated body movements. In her work, Herndon touches upon subjects such as surveillance, digital activism, and social theory. Herndon collaborates with an extensive team of forward thinkers such like Dutch design agency Metahaven, ASMR artist Claire Tolan, theorist Suhail Malik, and artist Mathew Dryhurst. everywhere and nowhere is a new work by Herndon in collaboration with Dryhurst commissioned for the ZKM | Center for Art and Media’s Sound Dome, celebrating its premiere at Kunstverein in Hamburg. This 23.2-channel sound installation and accompanying video works document a new emphasis in their practice. Their sound works often mine the internet as a resource, using custom software to sample their daily digital lives and compose assemblages of intimate sounds that reflect a new coherence between our real and virtual experiences, and explore the untapped emotional potential inherent to these new shared palettes.
For everywhere and nowhere, a cast of performers and props were assembled and documented in physical space, in an attempt to translate the boundless possibilities of digital assemblage into a living scenario and shared experience. The dancer and choreographer Jone San Martin (The Forsythe Company), Jiu Jitsu fighter Sam Forsythe and artist Brian Rogers were directed through a series of improvised interactions, embracing and struggling through a staged environment of brittle porcelain, rope and tarpaulin. Their actions are narrated by the whispered statements of three young artists Herndon and Dryhurst met while performing at an anti-fascist music festival in the Czech forest, representing a fantasy of a nascent resistance, leaking with compassion and utilizing the aesthetics of online intimacy as a recruitment tool. Deriving inspiration from the political action based cinema of Peter Watkins, these experiments are a utopian attempt to create bridges between private digital creation and experiments in shared space. Each sound is conceived without limitation and derived from an interaction.
Holly Herndon was born and raised in Tennessee, USA, and was part of the Berlin minimal techno scene, before moving to San Francisco to do a PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. In the 1960s, the Center was where John Chowning developed the algorithm for FM synthesis, thus preparing the way for synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7: cheaper, more easily available digital technologies which ultimately revolutionized the music industry. Herndon’s musical approach stands in this tradition, including its democratizing impulses. Herndon takes the concept of a politics of paradise, as formulated by British economist Guy Standing, and sets it in motion between real and virtual spaces. She recently released her second album, Platform, on RVNG Intl. / 4AD, performs globally, and has recently installed work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Guggenheim New York.
Mathew Dryhurst is an artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin. He developed the online distribution tool Saga, which allows artists to own the spaces where their work is hosted online. Recently he premiered MUSTER, an audio play derived entirely from data mining the listenership of Deutschland Radio Kultur. Dryhurst is a regular collaborator with Holly Herndon and the Berlin based record label PAN.
A co-production of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the International Summerfestival Kampnagel Hamburg, together with the Institute for Music and Acoustics ZKM | Karlsruhe. Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the Bert-Kaempfert-Foundation and Antje Landshoff-Ellermann.
Everywhere and Nowhere
6 August - 13 September 2015
They infuse their voices with tingles so that you can feel their struggle. Their words become bodies become movements. They are leaking with love, too much to be contained.
Their voices coalesce in a compassionate campaign, encrypted in a whisper. Funding arrives nightly from anonymous donors. They are everywhere, and nowhere. We collide, because we cannot see where we are going.
The sound design of American musician Holly Herndon is known to incorporate the sonic fragments from her every day life – Skype conversations, keyboard typing, subtle and exaggerated body movements. In her work, Herndon touches upon subjects such as surveillance, digital activism, and social theory. Herndon collaborates with an extensive team of forward thinkers such like Dutch design agency Metahaven, ASMR artist Claire Tolan, theorist Suhail Malik, and artist Mathew Dryhurst. everywhere and nowhere is a new work by Herndon in collaboration with Dryhurst commissioned for the ZKM | Center for Art and Media’s Sound Dome, celebrating its premiere at Kunstverein in Hamburg. This 23.2-channel sound installation and accompanying video works document a new emphasis in their practice. Their sound works often mine the internet as a resource, using custom software to sample their daily digital lives and compose assemblages of intimate sounds that reflect a new coherence between our real and virtual experiences, and explore the untapped emotional potential inherent to these new shared palettes.
For everywhere and nowhere, a cast of performers and props were assembled and documented in physical space, in an attempt to translate the boundless possibilities of digital assemblage into a living scenario and shared experience. The dancer and choreographer Jone San Martin (The Forsythe Company), Jiu Jitsu fighter Sam Forsythe and artist Brian Rogers were directed through a series of improvised interactions, embracing and struggling through a staged environment of brittle porcelain, rope and tarpaulin. Their actions are narrated by the whispered statements of three young artists Herndon and Dryhurst met while performing at an anti-fascist music festival in the Czech forest, representing a fantasy of a nascent resistance, leaking with compassion and utilizing the aesthetics of online intimacy as a recruitment tool. Deriving inspiration from the political action based cinema of Peter Watkins, these experiments are a utopian attempt to create bridges between private digital creation and experiments in shared space. Each sound is conceived without limitation and derived from an interaction.
Holly Herndon was born and raised in Tennessee, USA, and was part of the Berlin minimal techno scene, before moving to San Francisco to do a PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. In the 1960s, the Center was where John Chowning developed the algorithm for FM synthesis, thus preparing the way for synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7: cheaper, more easily available digital technologies which ultimately revolutionized the music industry. Herndon’s musical approach stands in this tradition, including its democratizing impulses. Herndon takes the concept of a politics of paradise, as formulated by British economist Guy Standing, and sets it in motion between real and virtual spaces. She recently released her second album, Platform, on RVNG Intl. / 4AD, performs globally, and has recently installed work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Guggenheim New York.
Mathew Dryhurst is an artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin. He developed the online distribution tool Saga, which allows artists to own the spaces where their work is hosted online. Recently he premiered MUSTER, an audio play derived entirely from data mining the listenership of Deutschland Radio Kultur. Dryhurst is a regular collaborator with Holly Herndon and the Berlin based record label PAN.
A co-production of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the International Summerfestival Kampnagel Hamburg, together with the Institute for Music and Acoustics ZKM | Karlsruhe. Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the Bert-Kaempfert-Foundation and Antje Landshoff-Ellermann.