2004 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
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Dizzy Atmosphere: Sonic Suspension and Modernist Music is an interactive installation that investigates the interplay between abstract visual art and the cultural resonance and autonomy of the modernist jazz movement. A form of revisionist history, this notion has already been explored via multidisciplinary pieces that incorporate wall drawing, animation, sound and works on paper. Expanding on my current practice this project will employ the use of a chandelier-like sonic suspension device that utilizes sound as a form of atmospheric or ambient 'light.' Dizzy Atmosphere will shower the listener with an audio experience that is at once transcendental, educational, challenges the learned behavior of how we listen, and is interactive by allowing the participant to control experiential time. The audio piece itself will be based on the methodology of musical improvisation, harmonics, and counter-melody coupled with the visual aesthetics of minimalism and formalism. It is my intent to highlight the existence and contribution of early African American abstraction, I attempt a marriage of art history, black history and technology within the domain of the abstract languages they constructed.