Sabisha Freidberg Residency

For her Audio Art Residency at the Clocktower, audio artist and composer Sabisha Friedberg will create The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere, a radio adaptation of the obscure scientific allegory Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey. Published in 1895, Etidorhpa tells the tale of an unknown man’s journey to the center of the earth, divulging arcane secrets in a process of initiation, and revealing a journey to an ethereal plane of non-material existence.

Friedberg’s The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere is a sonic prose-poem for the radio, drawing on the fantastical Victorian novel’s text and spiritual and scientific explorations as an inspiration for original soundscapes. Friedberg is known for investigating the tactile and aleatory qualities of analog material and antiquated technologies. For this project, she will combine an electro-acoustic approach with an application of granular synthesis to create specific auditive forms, adapting the 19th century Hermetic tale into an aural soundscape, illustrating the chapters with dialogue and musical interludes, and creating the environment of the piece with textures and effects generated by vintage foley work.

Friedberg’s Spring 2011 performance of the final work in the Clocktower Gallery will also be broadcast live on AIR’s radio station, www.ARTonAIR.org.

Friedberg studied experimental film with Ernie Gehr, and recording and electro-acoustic/ tape music composition with Don Lloyd, Paul DeMarinis and Chris Brown of Mills College of Contemporary Music at the San Francisco Art Institute. She recently received a prize at the Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition in France for her musique concrète piece Ellipsis. Friedberg is based in Paris and New York.

Woody Sullender

Woody Sullender is an artist who examines the social construction of the music performance space and how it reinforces specific rituals and modernist ideologies of listening. By minor interventions and reconfigurations in existing spaces, not only can these habits be ruptured but larger notions of social relations can be explored. Sullender has performed at venues such as the Kitchen, Issue Project Room, the River to River Festival, Sculpture Center, and Les Instants Chavirés. He has held artist residencies at art technology hubs STEIM, Harvestworks, and Brown University’s MEME program. He has worked in collaboration with electronic composers Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher, among others. Sullender teaches new media at institutions in the New York area and co-edits the music/sound publication Ear | Wave | Event (with Bill Dietz). For his Auditorium residency, Sullender's project Furniture Music consists of multiple arrangements of cardboard origami forms outfitted with audio transducers. These formations imply different social spaces such as a living room, a café, a sculptural exhibition, playing on notions of interior/exterior. The project explores, highlights, and confuses differences in public vs. domestic modes of reception.

Katherine Liberovskaya

Katherine Liberovskaya is a video/media artist based in Montreal and New York. Her work dynamically combines sound, images, and objects in an exploration of their collective potential. With the collaboration of varying composers and sound artists she creates improvisatory "music" for the eyes. Liberovskaya has been involved in experimental video installations and performances since the 1980's. Frequent collaborators include Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If, Bwana, Zanana, Kristin Norderval, Hitoshi Kojo, David Watson, David First and o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi). Recent projects have involved: Leslie Ross, Shelley Hirsch, Chantal Dumas, Richard Garet, Dorit Chrysler, Emilie Mouchous, Erin Sexton, Corinne Rene, and Philippe Lauzier. Concurrently she curates and organizes the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia and the OptoSonic Tea series at Diapason, NYC. For her Auditorium residency, she collaborates with Phill Niblock to create a video installation.