Tracing Thin Air Installation

The collaborative Tracing Thin Air project I’ve been making with Karen Brummund and Allison Grant culminates in a one-night only video and sound installation on Friday.

December 2 7-9pm
Tracing Thin Air Installation
between Monarch Coffee and The Alcove
Tuscaloosa AL

For this part of the project I’ve created a sound installation driven by air quality data that we collected over the last 9 months using Purple Air sensors. I sonify the data using a variety of sound generating and audio processing devices built with Cycling ’74’s Max.

Screenshot of Tracing Thin Air Max patch

It’s been fun digging into Max’s multichannel mc. system, especially in combination with the gen~ suite of objects. Graham Wakefield & Gregory Taylor’s excellent book Generating Sound & Organizing Time has been a particularly timely (hah!) and useful resource. Highly recommended.

Saturday in Inwood, My Eighth Birthday, August, 1977

YouTube player

I had a great time working with poet John Barger on this music to accompany his poem and family footage. John already has another book out, but don’t miss his Resurrection Fail that contains this poem.

I’m particularly fond of “At the Barnes Museum on a Cold Fall Afternoon” as a testament to the twinning and twining of art/poetry/life that happens so often in museums.