Notes: artists & books

 in relation to recent work - Artists and Books

• Investigating how constructed environments can affect and be affected by human interaction, frequent New York-based collaborates Alex Schweder (featured on tlmagazine.com earlier this year) and Ward Shelley conceive ReActor. Mounted in the expanse of Omi sculpture park – set within the bucolic landscape of the Hudson Vallery and at a 2.5-hour drive north of Manhattan,the 13.4 by 2.4-metres house-like structure balances off of a central 4.5-metres axis. Conditioned by both external and internal forces – the movements of two inhabitants – ReActor tilts, rocks, sways, and turns a full 360-degrees. Inside a mirrored interior provides both dwellers with the essentials: a bed, dining table and washing station. Both Schweder and Shelley spend periods of five days living within the construction. Occupying either side of ReActor, each person’s daily routine is influenced by the movements of the other. If one leans over the edge of an extruded balcony at on end, the other has to do so as well to ensure stability. Perhaps as a physical metaphor for the shared responsibility of cooperation, Schweder and Shelley’s latest example of “social relationship architecture” expressed as “performative architecture” builds on earlier collaborative projects like the Counterweight Room – in which two performers rely on the tug-and-pull of each other’s weight to interact with a vertical interior.​
•  Carsten Höller Slides at the Tate  'The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.
• ​Anne Imhof work, Faust, German pavilion. 
• “Flatland” and “Counterweight Roommate”: Two Installations and Performances by Alex Schweder La and Ward ShelleyIn “Counterweight Roommate” a tall and thin construction hosting living facilities, the two inhabitants are connected through a single rope making the use of the already constricted space dependent on the movement of the other occupant/performer.
• Janet Cardiff’s www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/voices/janet-cardiffForty Part Motet is an audio installation reworking the sixteenth-century choral work Spem in Alium by English composer Thomas Tallis​ ​

installation reworking the sixteenth-century choral work Spem in Alium by English composer Thomas Tallis
Janet Cardiff worked with the Salisbury Cathedral Choir to record 40 individual singers, playing each voice through its own corresponding speaker. The speakers are carefully positioned in eight different groups of five, responding to the structure of Tallis’s complex vocal piece, or motet. Each group forms a choir of five singers with different vocal ranges: a bass, baritone, tenor, alto and soprano. The eight choirs produce harmonies which blend into a polyphonic landscape of sound. Visitors are encouraged to walk among the speakers to hear the individual voices, as well as the immersive sound of the motet. Cardiff said: ‘I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.’

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• Laure Prouvost​

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Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet

books 

• inequality and the 1 % . by Danny Dorling (Author)
• Post Truth- the new war on truth and how to fight back.  Matthew d'Ancona (Author)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed , written by educator Paulo Freire.