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Geneva Skeen – Channels (#1 Pittsburgh / Los Angeles)
October 18, 2022 - October 20, 2022
FREE
open gallery hours: tuesday-thursday noon-7pm
Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is a technical cover-song to artist and composer Maryanne Amacher‘s City Links series, adapted for a high-speed interconnected world of streaming, liveness, and hybridity. This project, similar to Amacher’s original, brings together live hi-fidelity audio from multiple sites into a new situation. Here, the sites happen to be multiple water channels amidst constructed industrial infrastructure—the Los Angeles, Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers.
The sounds from remote spots along these bodies of water coalesce at the separate, third site of Human Resources. Using two portable A/V stations consisting of high-speed mobile wifi hotspots, solar paneled power–banks, condenser mics linked to mobile camera phones, and audio software, the resonant concrete architecture at HR becomes a hub and amplifier for ongoing signal receipt—a live mix for place, perception, and waters to recombine in presence and present-time.
Artists and musicians from each location have been invited to “join” the audio stream throughout the installation as follows:
October 18: Patrick Shiroishi (LA)
October 19: Machine Listener (Pittsburgh)
Geneva Skeen is an artist and composer. Influenced by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a range of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen works with sound, voice, architecture, video, sculpture, and software. Her recordings, performances, publications, and installations focus on site-specific landscape studies as a means to highlight complex interdependencies between perception, attention, and trauma. Through linkages made between our finite physical landscapes and their infinitely permutable digital representations, these works explore qualities of embodiment amidst climate catastrophe and late capitalism. Skeen has released musical works on Room40, LINE Imprint, Touch, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and Crystalline Morphologies, which have been reviewed in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Foxy Digitalis, and others. She has presented work at LAXART, the Broad Museum, Open Space SFMOMA, LAND AND SEA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Center for New Music San Francisco, REDCAT, and LACMA. She was the founding curator of Sequencing, an online transmedia publication series for Fulcrum Arts which explores the intersection of art, science, and social change, and is a member of VOLUME—a curatorial collective focused on sound and time-based practices. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is presented at Human Resources as part of Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure.
This project was supported in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Further Fund, and a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grant.