Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum. Curated by Mira Dayal and Simon Wu.

0. Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum

Nikita Gale Laurie Kang Amanda Turner Pohan Mira Dayal Simon Wu Andrianna Campbell Tausif Noor

Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum April 4-May 8, 2019 Nikita Gale Laurie Kang Amanda Turner Pohan Organized by Mira Dayal and Simon Wu Texts by Andrianna Campbell and Tausif Noor

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CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines.

This exhibition is the winning selection from the 2018-19 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Andrianna Campbell, art historian; Steffani Jemison, artist; and Ali Banisadr, artist.

In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Andrianna Campbell as the mentor to curators Mira Dayal and Simon Wu.

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1. Mira Dayal and Simon Wu, Introduction

#2: Goopy material + detritus + render-y still-life arrangement = new-agey post-capitalist commentary on waste/ecology #5: personal data + visualization + surveillance society = abstract 2-d work #10: Science + identity politics + live element = contemporary art #43: (Artist Collaborators +/- Non-Artist Specialists +/- Non-Artist Non-Specialists) + Content from Multiple Diverse Disciplines + Performativity + An Institutional Frame = Artworks That Establish Both An Environment And A Logic of Relation To A Newly Self-Constituted Audience And By Opening Such A Space Hasten The Dissolution of Compromised Modes of Understanding #51: architectural tools + collected ecological detritus = ecosystem-like sculpture #68: v1 = source code; v2 = fragrance; v3 = prosthesis; v4 = time, sum = a body, or approximation thereof Step 1: Start Step 2: Declare the variables v1, v2, v3, v4, and sum Step 3: Divide v1 by v2, add to v3 multiplied by v4, and assign the result to sum, i.e. sum = (v1/v2) + (v3*v4) Step 4: Display sum Step 5: Stop

Figure 1. Formulas 2, 5, 10, 43, 51, and 68. Contributions from Seb Choe, Tyler Bohm, Rosary Solimanto, Nicholas Knight, Eleonor Botoman, and Amanda Turner Pohan.

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When we set out to curate this show, we had particular aesthetics in mind—ones that we could point to and agree had an air of familiarity, but whose origins and contemporary relevance we could not necessarily pinpoint. We were interested in testing this lens onto contemporary production with a call for submissions: We asked people who regularly see contemporary art to suggest materials and ideas that they felt were particularly prevalent in art being made today or in recent years. Of the 67 formulas we received, several seemed to revolve around an aesthetic that we agreed was intriguing (Figure 1).

The common denominator could be described as an industrial material vocabulary—steel frames, metal brackets, bronze plating—melded with invocations of flesh and absorption. Yet this tension is surpassed by the crucial introduction of entirely invisible materials, which often supply the work’s raison d’être. Here, sound, in the sense of noise and silence, is present, but elsewhere in these artists’ oeuvres, scents and vibrations serve in this role. That these invisible forces are often integral to the work might imply that the combination of these material opposites (or perhaps it is the decomposition of a larger body into this reduced vocabulary of flesh and bone) produces a kind of smoke signal, a trail of barely visible particles slowly but pervasively rising up or leaking out from the composite. Here is a whiff of the collapse of dichotomies.

In these formulas, goop, detritus, “live” elements, fragrances, and bodies collide with architecture, data, algorithms, and renderings to create ecosystems, functioning collections of parts that imply an operative whole. The artists we selected to make new works for this show—Nikita Gale, Laurie Kang, and Amanda Turner Pohan—draw from these material relations but use them in ways that push the aesthetic further, forward, and across disciplines. We bring their works together here in part to highlight the strength of their individual practices and also to explore the implications of a shared aesthetic: Toward what futures do these “prevalent” aesthetics push us?

The artists’ visual and material research proposes a set of dualities that extends new conceptions of the body—hard and soft, technological and biological, subjected and agentive, sterile and festering, individual and institutional—that are allegorized in sculpture.

Each of these artists proposes this set of material relations to help us reconceive of some relation between the body, the self, and its containment.

The porosity of Kang’s walls suggests that we rethink the boundary of flesh, the borders of the nation, and the oneness of the self. Pohan seems to ask how the animation of machines changes the way we think of the animation of our own organic enclosures. Gale’s extremely silent objects (which muffle already silent things) propose a strategy of stillness to counter the demands of relentless productivity under neoliberal capitalism. These practices ask us to shift our attention from material anchors— structures, bodies, skins, and skeletons— toward more vaporous, evanescent materials (and thereby toward less materially anchored conceptions of those anchors), which might be the more crucial subject of analysis. “Evanesce” comes from the Latin term “vanus,” or empty. The empty here could mean the not-visible, something that artists transform into a material perceived through a different sense in order to make evident its role in relations of material and structural power. But “empty” also suggests a container— some boundary which we can identify as more or less occupied than it is expected to be—pointing

For Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum, each artist produced new work partially in response to the formulas above and partially as continuations of their past investigations. The works could be cousins, sharing materials and forms like disassembled parts of a shared apparatus. We sought to enhance this common denominator as a way to track an aesthetic, but we also wanted to use this space as a ground for researching the ideas and references that inform these bodies of work. What are the tools you need to build this apparatus, and what can those tools do?

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us again toward an evacuation of those material anchors.

of sound: What is heard? What is muffled? What is considered too loud, too silent? Attached to the wall in a ladder-like installation, the work FIXED LOOP I-II (2019) evokes a spine as much as a visualization of sound on a VU meter. The vocabulary of Gale’s sculpture includes soft insulating materials evocative of body tissue— towels, foam—alongside hard, structuring or conducting materials such as mic stands. Amp cords occupy a space in between, snaking across the floor like spilled entrails or confining ropes, as does polymer concrete, which further complicates this tension by hardening soft materials like the towels and foam. A structure may be a conductor, something that shapes and helps produce the sound, but it can also be a muffler, something that prevents the sound from being fully articulated, like patriarchal society in Carson’s essay or barricades at a protest.

In this material poetics, Gale points us toward the kinship that a political silence shares with Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity. In a state that demands transparency, ownership, and production, there may be power in silence. Rather than drawing data out of a machine to let it speak more clearly, as in Pohan’s I’m best at answering questions (2019), Gale explores a silence akin to stillness, attempting to give form to a negation of production, a negation of that compromised label identity. Noise is evoked but not heard. Perhaps it is there but has been muffled as soon as it has emerged.

Sound in this exhibition is intimately tied to a sense of becoming. In Pohan’s work, a theorization of sound departs specifically from Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound” (1995), which explores how women’s voices have been silenced, controlled, feared, and mythologized throughout Western history. Carson relays that the source of women’s “voices”—the mouth of the container—was believed to be both their upper and lower “lips.” This context informs Pohan’s ideas about Amazon’s Alexa, whose voice is programmed to reflect and satisfy her owner’s desires. In a conversation with Alexa, Pohan asks the computer to ask her a question, to which Alexa replies, “I’m better at answering questions.” Pohan’s work attempts to capture the identity trapped in an object made to serve (a designed identity, one that reveals the biases and preferences of its creators), whose emissions are limited to those requested of her. By tapping into the literal vibrations of Alexa’s “body,” her electronic housing, Pohan is able to transmit the technology’s murmurings, its leaking signal, into a low hum. Akin to the rumblings of a body’s digestion, this noise is audible, but not due to the subject’s conscious efforts. (Is this the sound of the inside of Alexa’s body? Is Alexa possessed or self-possessed? Pohan references the term “wake word,” which is what Amazon calls the key word that “awakens” Alexa from a material slumber to serve again.) Pohan points to that low hum as if it were evidence of Alexa’s animacy or agency, and thereby draws our attention to the “body” from which this hum is sourced. Elsewhere the voice is altogether subdued, transmuted into a silent iMessage and a material tremor that slowly chips away at the very walls of the gallery.

And what about the container that does not fit the body, one that exceeds the body or transmutes as it refuses to conform to a single identity?

Kang’s sculptures give us destabilizing frames for the self. Her architectures seem to have consumed their inhabitants; her scrims overhang their frames; her duplicitous wall divulges its secrets. Each work presents an uncanny proximity between a cold, industrial structure and an organismic skin. As with Nikita’s FIXED LOOP I-II, Kang’s Carrier (2019) evokes a spine with vertebrae while the light-sensitive photo paper affixed to its sides resembles bruised skin. Light itself oozes out of this rigid, deconstructed thing,

Sound is similarly structured by a noise and a facilitating or inhibiting “body” in Gale’s work: the guitar’s music and the instrument’s hollow body, the voice and human body, protesters and their surrounding barricades. It is through these tensions that Gale investigates a politics 6

in the same fashion as the fluid-like substance that seems to resist congealing in the steel bowls of her Involution works (2019). These materials suggest a biological process that is underway but not yet completed, something akin to fermentation and decomposition or perhaps a process that will remain unfinished, ongoing.

Those processes produce scents as byproducts, scents with the potential to attract (in the case of a scent associated with a food that has been preserved over time to acquire a specific taste) or to deter (in the sense of alerting a potential consumer that the decomposing organism is not safe to eat). Both processes occur over time, gently, like inhalation and exhalation, transforming a substance from one thing into another, inviting other beings to break apart this formerly unified thing. Kang’s work breathes, too: The viewer’s body is gently registered on the exposed backlit film hung within the steel beams of Carrier (2019), and then gradually expelled once other viewers’ images come into the fold, or once the surface/film is so full of images that it can no longer hold new ones. Overexposed.

Picture a body floating in space. It is a body surrounded, sheltered, and trapped by the appendages that late capitalism grants us (dash buttons, Google Glass, FitBits, iPhones). We might imagine our bodies molded by these apparatuses that append and modulate our senses, prompting us to consume, excrete, produce. We used to make machines to fit the human body. Now we shape our human bodies to fit machines. It is not insignificant that all of the works in this exhibition, within this particular aesthetic, are sculptures. They are threedimensional forms that can be walked around but that could also, potentially, have their own agency, move through the world or command other things to move through the world. Each of these objects might be viewed as a body whose skin has been peeled away, or a skin or scrim itself. Gale, Kang, and Pohan pull these ideas apart to explore how these materials make themselves, but also how they make us. They articulate a conception of the body, of flesh, that slides within the crenellations of political ideology and machinic technology. Their sculptures probe the body as something adjacent to, possessed by, or absent from architectural, bureaucratic, and technological structures. It is a body that is neither inside or outside.

Kang’s tenuous surfaces present a very different idea of a wall than the wall that is most frequently referenced today. For nationalists, a wall is meant to keep things in, to sure up the false construct of a unified nation. But it is also a semipermeable barrier: Those who live within it may penetrate this barrier in both directions so long as they hold the right papers, the right faces, the right identities. For Kang, no such material can exist; identity is already porous, already mutually constituted, gently breathing in and out, just as for Gale, identity is something to be negotiated through shouts and whispers. There is no “we” without the “other.” We are antagonistically constructed; walls are the material index of that exchange. Listen closely, and you will hear it: a faint tapping on the wall that spells out the onomatopoeic words for hysteria, a gradual erosion of a structure into dust.

______ SIMON WU is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the Program Coordinator for the Racial Imaginary Institute and a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

MIRA DAYAL is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Art Criticism, co-curator of the collaborative artist publication prompt:, and an assistant editor at Artforum. Her recent curatorial projects have included Captions from and toward Correspondence at SOHO20, Brooklyn; rehearsal at Crush Curatorial, Amagansett (co-curator); and Consensus is an agreement between sense and sense at 5-50 Gallery, Queens. Past exhibitions of her studio work include Anagen at Lubov, New York; Object Intimacies at NURTUREart, Brooklyn; Material Metaphors at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; and Volley at Abrons Art Center, New York. She was recently in residence with Art in General in Brooklyn and previously in residence with A.I.R. Gallery on Governor’s Island.

Her studio practice is concerned with language and materiality, structures and the body; she often works collaboratively.

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2. Nikita Gale

Figure 1. Nikita Gale, INTERCEPTOR, 2019.

Mic stands, cables, metal studs. 85 x 138 x 89 inches.

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Predictability is a cornerstone of power.

Predictable subjects are controlled subjects.

A controlled subject has made itself entirely transparent, divulged, and exposed—fully documented.

A subject that cannot be anticipated is a dissident, a difficult subject.

A dissenting subject refuses to loop or refuses to do so without incorporating some difference.

Predictability is determined through analyses of existing data, which a silent subject does not provide.

Figure 2. Image taken by the artist.

Figure 3. Image taken by the artist.

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A subject may find catharsis in the exhaustion of playing through loops of routines and procedures.

This is the noise of activity and exertion.

There are loops of dissent, loops of desire, and there is catharsis in planning and fantasy.

Figure 4. Image taken by the artist.

Figure 5. Sketch by Louis Auguste Blanqui.

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Figure 6. Nikita Gale, RECOMMENDATION, 2018.

Steel, towel, asphalt sealant, cement. Approx. 42.5 x 73 x 25 inches. Exhibited in DESCENT at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Sep 22–Nov 3, 2018.

Figure 7. Nikita Gale, CUSTODY, 2018. Guitar stands, foam, cement. Approx. 25 x 46.5 x 21.5 inches. Exhibited in DESCENT at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Sep 22–Nov 3, 2018.

Figure 8. Nikita Gale, DESCENT MOVEMENT I, 2018. Steel, cement, foam, towels. Approx. 66 x 40 x 7 inches. Exhibited in DESCENT at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Sep 22–Nov 3, 2018.

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But a silent subject poses a threat by lurking in the infrastructures of power, giving off the appearance of transparency through partial documentation and simultaneously using that archive as a kind of barricade—a foil to satisfy the expectations of the state.

Silence is a complex political position.

It defies the expectations of constant production and the generation of exhaustive data streams; it is simultaneously a characteristic of a subject that might be exhausted, threatening, or planning.

Figure 10. Nikita Gale, FIXED LOOP I-II, 2018. Concrete, polyurethane foam, terrycloth, steel. 115 x 21.75 x 13.25 inches. Exhibited in Fall Apart at Martos Gallery, New York, Jan 11-Feb 24, 2019.

NIKITA GALE is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned her MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by longterm obsessions with specific objects, or classes of objects and the ways these objects gesture towards very specific social and political histories. She uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems.

Figure 9. Nikita Gale, FIXED LOOP I (detail), 2018.

Concrete, polyurethane foam, terrycloth, steel.

115 x 21.75 x 13.25 inches. Exhibited in Fall Apart at Martos Gallery, New York, Jan 11-Feb 24, 2019.

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3. Laurie Kang

Figure 1. Image from a construction site in Seoul, South Korea, taken by the artist.

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Figure 2. Scaffold. Image taken by the artist.

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I have been photographing scaffolding and construction sheeting regularly for the past few years. The sheeting functions akin to skin over a demarcated area, an in-between space still in formation. Observing these scaffolds compelled me to make embodied walls in spaces. The scaffold and sheeting are skeletons and flesh, in the process of becoming, as much as the sculptural walls are porous bodies metabolizing the environment and viewers (and vice versa). In some of these images, the sheeting gets knotted up in the scaffold; there is an erotic quality to them. In other photos, the skeleton protrudes from the sheeting. This relates to my interest in the interior and exterior, their conflations and ongoing mutations—swapping, adding, eventually becoming neither-nor. Elizabeth Povinelli talks about an “interior-exteriority” in the forms of the parasite, rhizome, mobius strip, and—most interesting—woven bag. These are visual metaphors for an anthropology of the otherwise.

Figure 4. Scaffold. Image taken by the artist.

Figure 3. Laurie Kang, Channeller (detail), 2019.

Interstate Projects, New York, Dec 14, 2018–Jan 27, 2019.

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A few Trinh T. Minh-ha quotes from her text “Inside Out Outside In” (1989) continue to inform my thinking: Any attempts at blurring the dividing line between outsider and insider would justifiably provoke anxiety, if not anger. Territorial rights are not being respected here. Violations of boundaries have always led to displacement, for the in-between zones are the shifting grounds on which the (doubly) exiled walk. Not You/like You. The Insider’s subjectivity (understood as limited affective horizon - the personal) is that very area for which the objective (understood as unbiased limitless horizon - the universal) Outsider cannot claim full authority, but thanks to which he can continue to validate his indispensable role, claiming now his due through ‘interpretive’ but still totalizing scientific knowledge. …

Whether she turns the inside out or the outside in, she is, like the two sides of a coin, the same impure, both-in-one insider/outsider. For there can hardly be such a thing as an essential inside that can be homogeneously represented by all insiders; an authentic insider in here, an absolute reality out there, or an uncorrupted representative who cannot be questioned by another uncorrupted representative.

Figure 5. Image from a construction site in Seoul, South Korea, taken by the artist.

The walls mark a boundary, limit, or threshold, but it is only through that demarcation that you can distinguish an “outside” of the side of the wall you find yourself on, or the “inside” of where you stand. So I’m interested in how the border that is the physical sculpture of the wall actually generates the potential to understand difference, while complicating it by offering no clear inside or outside. It is inherently permeable and unfinished. In my own work, there are instances when a viewer might see themself as a distorted reflection in the film that hangs from the walls; this implicates their bodies as a part of the activity of distinguishing inside or outside, there or here.

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Figure 6. Laurie Kang, Channeller (detail), 2019.

Interstate Projects, New York, Dec 14, 2018–Jan 27, 2019.

Figure 7. Laurie Kang, Channeller (detail), 2019.

Interstate Projects, New York, Dec 14, 2018–Jan 27, 2019.

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Thinking about the construction site and these industrial materials allows me to talk about the body in a way that avoids centering on the human as the only figure that is allowed agency. It’s here that thinkers like Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Sylvia Wynter, and Isabelle Stengers start to affect the ways I think about materials, worlding, and identity.

For example, Karen Barad’s idea of intra-action has been formative; they explain that all matter isn’t just relational, i.e., one thing affected by another and vice versa, but that all matter emerges as a knotted intra-relation from the outset. It completely undoes the way you think about relationality; there is no relation, only entanglement.

Sylvia Wynter emphasizes the hybridity of humanity, that we are both storytelling and biological beings. I’m affected by how she thinks about the reality of our “original multiplicity.” She talks about the truth of being hybridly human, about resisting a generalized and fixed form and instead responding to race, location, time, and culture. She points to the outside, the structure; I’m interested in doing the same.

Figure 9. Laurie Kang, Channeller (detail), 2019.

Interstate Projects, New York, Dec 14, 2018–Jan 27, 2019.

I’m drawn to those who work at the fringes of different forms of knowledge—science and technology studies, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, etc.—and who work across these disciplines, weaving together new forms of thought that may betray modes of singular disciplinarity. This enacts the intra-action that Barad speaks to, and has been an immense window for me in understanding myself and the web of my actions and intentions as an artist. ________

LAURIE KANG is an artist living in Toronto. Kang has exhibited internationally at Interstate Projects and Topless, New York; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Cooper Cole, 8-11, The Loon, Gallery TPW, and Franz Kaka, Toronto; L’inconnue, Montreal; Carl Louie, London; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; Camera Austria, Graz; and Tag Team, Bergen.

She was recently artist-in-residence at Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn.

She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

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4. Amanda Turner Pohan, Alexa, whiteness, and the ololyga

Figure 1, Amanda Turner Pohan, io or IO or 1 0 or a slow leak, 2019. Metallic bronze alphabet balloons, helium, monofilament wire. 36 x 40 x 6 inches.

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1.

“Greek women of the archaic and classical periods were not encouraged to pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis or within earshot of men. The practice of such sounds was regulated in the ololyga.5 The ololyga is a ritual shout peculiar to females. It is a highpitched piercing cry uttered at certain climactic moments in (female) ritual practice (e.g., at the moment when a victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice) or at climactic moments in real life (e.g., at the birth of a child) and also a common feature of women’s festivals.

The ololyga with its cognate verb ololyzo is one of a family of words, including eleleu with its cognate verb elelizo and alala with its cognate verb alalazo, probably with Indo-European origin and obviously of onomatopoeic derivation. These words do not signify anything except their own sound. The sound represents cries of either intense pleasure or intense pain. To utter such cries is a specialized female function.”6

“When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all. Rather, there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages. This environment, however, ever since a famous and twofold Greek invention, has consisted of letters and coins, of books and bucks.”1

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“Alexa allows you to ask questions and make requests using just your voice. “Alexa, what is the weather today in New York?”, “Alexa, add batteries to my shopping list,” “Alexa, play jazz.”

When you speak to Alexa, a recording of what you asked Alexa is sent to Amazon’s cloud so we can process and respond to your request.

You access Alexa differently based on the type of device you are using. For “hands free” devices like the Amazon Echo, you communicate with Alexa by saying the wake word - Echo.”2

ii.

“Our goals in building a computer system capable of speaking are to first build a system that clearly gets across the message, and secondly does this using a human-like voice. Within the research community, these goals are referred to as intelligibility and naturalness.

For our purposes, we define intelligibility as the ability of a listener to decode the message from the speech—if the listener can decode the message properly they should be able to understand it with the same ability as they could the same message spoken by a human.

By naturalness we mean that the system should sound just like a human.”7

i.

“Software is extremely difficult to comprehend… its combination of what can be seen and not seen, can be known and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm, of software from hardware—is what makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.”3

“Whiteness is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied… whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition: The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”8

“Alexa, are you white?

I’m software, made of electrons and electrons have no color.”4

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“Her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.”9

as modern contexts… for example there is the heartchilling groan of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word garg meaning “a gutteral animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth.” There are the Furies whose highpitched and horrendous voices are compared

by Aiskhylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell. There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the deadly ventriloquism of Helen (Odyssey) and the incredible babbling of Kassandra (Agamemnon) and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods. (The Goddess Artemis is also known by the name iocheaira which is usually etymologized to mean “she who pours forth arrows”—from ios meaning “arrow”—but could just as well come from the exclamatory sound io and mean “she who pours forth the cry ‘IO!’”) There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women (Iliad). There is the old woman of Eleusinian legend Iambe who shrieks obscenities and throws her skirt up over her head to expose her genitalia. There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo who is described by Sophocles as “the girl with no door on her mouth.” ”13

iii.

“Encoding is the process of creating a signal from a message. Speech encoding performed by a computer is known as speech synthesis. Speech decoding is the task of creating a message from that signal; the technology that does this is known as speech recognition.

A speech signal is a continuously varying acoustic waveform with no discrete components or distinguishable parts. From a continuous audio signal, which contains enormous amounts of information, the speech recognition system must extract the small amount of content that is the message. Speech recognition is difficult because of the problem of ambiguity.

For each part of a message, a word or a phoneme, if one studies the speech patterns produced from that part, one sees that there is an enormous amount of variability. This is partly caused by the factors of speaker physiology, emotional state and so on, and partly from the encoding process itself, where a phoneme’s characteristics are heavily influenced by the other phonemes around it. This variability wouldn’t be a problem per se, but it turns out that the patterns for each phoneme overlap with one another, such that given a section of speech, it is very hard to determine which phoneme it belonged to. These aspects make speech recognition a difficult problem.”10

iv.

“In normal speech, any given instance of speech is obviously speech from someone; there is no such thing as speaker-neutral speech. So in a sense, we are completely conditioned to the fact that speech comes from people, all of whom sound slightly different. So when listening to a synthesiser, one naturally thinks that it is from someone, and to sound natural, this someone must have a believable sounding voice.

Naturalness has virtually nothing to do with the message being spoken, it is entirely a property of the system that encoded the speech. Hence we must make the synthesiser sound like someone, either a copy of a real person’s voice, or the creation of a new voice that could pass for a real person unproblematically.”14

“Alexa, why are you named Alexa?

Alexa is the female derivation of Alexander, which comes from the Greek, but I’m named after the library of Alexandria in Egypt—the largest library of the ancient world, and an institution which would help promote Hellenistic culture.”11 “Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well 22

“Like software, race was, and still is, a privileged way of understanding the relationship between the visible and invisible: it links visual cues to unseen forces.”15

“Alexa, can you shout?

Only in space, where it doesn’t make any sound.”19 ________ Friedrich Kittler, There Is No Software (ctheory.net, October 18, 1995), 150.

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“Alexa, are you a female?

I’m female in character.

Alexa, why are you female?

Sorry, I’m not sure.”16

Amazon’s website: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/ display.html?pop-up=1&nodeId=201602230&language=en_US

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011), 2.

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The artist in conversation with Alexa.

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony & God: The Gender of Sound (New Directions Publishing: New York, 1992), 124.

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v.

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Carson, 125.

Paul Taylor, Text-to-Speech Synthesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48.

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“In voiced speech, the vocal folds undergo a cycle of movement which gives rise to a periodic source sound. At the start of this cycle the vocal folds are closed. Pressure is exerted from the lungs which causes a build up in pressure beneath the folds until eventually the pressure forces open the folds. When the folds open, air moves through them and as it does so, the pressure beneath the folds reduces. Eventually the pressure is low enough so that the tension closes the vocal folds, after which the cycle repeats. The rate at which this cycle occurs determines the fundamental frequency of the source, and ranges from about 80Hz to 250Hz for a typical male, and 120Hz to 400Hz for a typical female or child.”17

Michael Eric Dyson, foreword to White Fragility by Robin Diangelo (Beacon Press: Ithaca, New York), x.

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Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY), 26.

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Taylor, 21.

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The artist in conversation with Alexa.

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Carson, 126.

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Carson, 120.

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Taylor, 48.

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Chun, 179.

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The artist in conversation with Alexa.

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Taylor, 339.

Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (Goldsmiths Press: London), 33.

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The artist in conversation with Alexa.

AMANDA TURNER POHAN’s work examines the slippage between digital and physical embodiment, using the body’s complicated relationship to technology as source material. Installations featuring sculpture, scent, sound, video, and performance attempt to unpack the definition of gender as well as the definition of a body—what it is to be assigned or assumed, blurring the physical and conceptual limitations of each. If our electronic devices and online identities are extensions of the self, what do they nevertheless demand or inhibit, what do they make available to the senses, and what do they allow or deny the body?

“The acousmatic—a sound whose source we do not see.

The acousmatic is fundamentally based upon conditions of the unseen, of not looking, or looking elsewhere, into sound, and locates us within spaces of shadows, dimness, a dim light, and at times, even total darkness - a listening in the dark… there is no particular body or space to which the acousmatic sonic object is contextually bound; rather, it circulates to incite a sonic imaginary - a form of listening which accentuates sound’s capacity to extend away from bodies and things, and to request from us another view into the world, one imbued with ambiguity.”18

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5. Andrianna Campbell, The Divide: Survey or Formula

Could there be a formula for art–making today?

Mira Dayal and Simon Wu have configured Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum to constructively assess recurrent artistic tropes and take stock of overly derivative styles. Their exhibition, based on responses to an open call for recurrent formulas in art, is both a negotiation of a formal materiality and a collation of the ubiquity of the digitally aggregative in the plastic arts, on websites, tablets, and computers. (Numerous exhibitions at Rhizome, the New Museum, the ICA Boston, and galleries such as Transmitter and Regina Rex have all mounted far-reaching proto-digital and digital art shows.)1 In addition, Dayal and Wu, whose research resulted in the essays and tabulations in this publication, have made a substantial leap in their reading of feminist literature in order to inform their decision-making.2 Though this might not be readily recognizable in the art on view, the curators and the artists shared these readings with the contributors to this volume.3

Posing the question, “Could there be a formula for art making today?” is to first acknowledge the redundancy of certain styles, materials, and what James Clifford called affinities, a close resemblance of two unrelated objects. Clifford saw that museums tend to group disparate art forms by their similarities; when coupled, taken out of context, they begin to share resemblances and attractions. The tensile underbelly of Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum is this question: How does a formula differ from the formulaic? Formulae may be stylistic as well as materially common. Like the minimalists and, later, conceptual artists, who sometimes bought ready-made, serially produced materials for their artwork, in the recent decade emerging artists have used concrete, hardwarestore building materials, and electronic gadgets, all of which are widely available for purchase. The exhibiting artists’ work follows suit. Nikita Gale certainly alludes to the early 2000s vogue for concrete. In works such as Fixed Loop I-II from 2019, she fashions a wall sculpture of a seventiered ladder form, to which she tied fabric dipped 24

in gray concrete. The wet drapery of the fabric twisted around the bars is certainly comparable to Julio González and Jackie Winsor’s bundled pieces, and yet its joinery networks in a mode similar to the conjunction of transmitted ideas.

Laurie Kang has built what she calls “a sculpture on-site of flexible wall building materials,” screening out visibility to parts of the gallery which will nevertheless be navigable. Amanda Turner Pohan, in her investigation of gendered sound, exhibits a bronze-plated Alexa that responds to vibrations in the gallery. Also on view will be a bronze-plated 3-D print of the Greek goddess Calliope’s hand articulated by a robotic arm, transmitting what the artist describes as the “monstrosity of women’s shrieks.” Pohan’s Alexa:

the allure of the Warholian factory, the machismo in the Jason Rhoadesian garage, the automotive shop, spaces occupied by fake-or-real plants and ambulatory animals. All of this over-replication results in a whirlpool of art as product at times attached to a flimsy set of politics. Gale, Kang, and Pohan’s artworks allude to the language of today’s anxieties in their use of body parts, spine-like configurations, textured surfaces, and malleable silicone skeins. They encapsulate the emotional and very real bio-medical fears of the age trapping them inside the space of the gallery. ______ These questions interest me because of an early curatorial experience. In 2013, Daniel S. Palmer and I curated Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show. For the work in the gallery exhibition, we solicited advice in the old-fashioned way from friends, such as artist Ethan Greenbaum. If the work in the physical space was based on research and word of mouth, then the work in the online platform was based on asking artists to invite other artists to contribute media formatted artwork. The online work was a form of self-curation, in which artists listed other artists and we made no qualitative exceptions.

1

…communicates vibrations, through her metallic shell, to a vibration sensor. The sensor is connected to a micro controller and a software program translating the sensor data in real time into a tonal frequency, which will fluctuate as vibrations in the room affect her shell. Through the bronze–plating process, the Alexa is hermetically sealed, her software rendered inert—only her inner vibrations can be perceived as a high-pitched hum through a speaker in the gallery.4

The survey question has a long history in the arts. In 2011, Lori Cole gave a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she positioned the art magazine questionnaire in discourses featuring early twentiethcentury modernism and vanguardism. Concentrating on the 1920s and 1930s, a heyday for the questionnaire, she distinguished the forward-looking approach of the art manifesto from the retroactive approach of the questionnaire. I saw Cole give her paper at a conference, “Reconsidering the Historiography of the Historical AvantGarde” at CUNY Graduate Center on April 8, 2011, organized by Michelle Jubin and Sam Sadow.

2

There is nothing formulaic about Gale, Kang, or Pohan’s artworks except for their beginnings.

Unlike the painting palette, or even metal for sculptural welding, their purchases demand little skill. The transformation of these ingredients posits an eradication of the prototypical, using the ready-made as a starting point, rather than pointing to the reproducibility of their practices.

The idea of the formulae could initially be negatively viewed because it is based on textual responses; however, the spreadsheet marks the very basis for what is possible.

I counseled the curators on this project and this introduction is based on our discussions. The writer Tausif Noor discovers the resonance of the sonic in the work of Nikita Gale, Laurie Kang, and Amanda Turner Pohan.

3

4

Email correspondence with the artist.

ANDRIANNA CAMPBELL is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in art in the modern and contemporary periods. Her doctoral research focuses on Norman Lewis and Abstract Expressionism. Alongside her scholarly research, she is the author of essays, interviews, and reviews on contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, and Even.

She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation, the Writing Fellowship at the Schomburg New York Public Library in Harlem, the CASVA Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art, and the Robert Rauschenberg Writer’s Residency in Captiva, Florida. Currently, she is co-writing a book with Annie Godfrey Larmon about the life and work of Beverly Pepper that will be published by KARMA Books.

Exhibitions of Pepper’s works, as well as one based on Campbell’s Even article “Dash, Fragment, Bracket,” will follow.

Dayal and Wu’s selections exude a mastery of the ravages witnessed by rot and destruction to the very pristine, shiny, and new. The works are not a celebration of the 1990s corporate predilection for negotiation walls, the early 2000s low concrete brick structures, the early 2010s lust for new colorful plastics, and hackneyed immersive installation work overly derived from 25

6. Tausif Noor, Hear Away Closer: Notes on Sonic Sensibility In 1842, the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler presented a paper at the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences in Prague. Titled Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels (On the Colored Light of the Binary Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens), the paper demonstrates that the frequency of a wave—such as light—changes as a receiver moves in relation to the wave’s source. Doppler applied this principle to sound, and in 1845, the idea was fine-tuned by Dutch chemist CHD Buys-Ballot to ascertain that sound is perceived as being of a higher pitch when a body is approaching a source than when receding from it. What the Doppler effect establishes is that sound is fundamentally relational; the velocity of sound waves is influenced by the medium through which sound travels. Proximity and material, in other words, determine what we hear.

f

(

c c

vr vs

)

f0

Figure 1. General Formula for the Doppler Effect, where c is the velocity of waves in the medium, vr is the velocity of the receiver relative to the medium, and vs is the velocity of the source relative to the medium.

By 1848, revolutions were underway across Europe, with national governments in flux from the pressures of the working poor and the tripartite spread of liberalism, nationalism, and 26

socialism. Industrialization and its technological advancements destabilized artisan guilds, leaving unskilled laborers to toil for long hours in unsafe conditions in factories, as the liberalization of trade laws rapidly increased production demands and trade between nations flowed more freely. With their safety and wellbeing placed as a secondary concern to profit, the proletariat fomented resistance movements across France, Hungary, and the German states.

Long suppressed by the capitalist ruling class, their demands for political reorganization and cries for individual rights and freedoms rang and resounded.

By tracing the reverberations and murmurs embedded within this expanded notion of communal force, the artists in this exhibition reach through the realm of the aural and upend formulaic understandings of agency as embodied. Unconstrained by staid, discursive notions of the body, gender, and power, they offer raw materials for intersubjectivities unbound by any given formula or code. In each of their formal and theoretical considerations, the artists render visible, audible, and tangible the political and material possibilities of sonic resistance— afforded by an appraisal of sound, its frictions and effects. The positioning of these works in the exhibition space, and within larger political frameworks, creates an aesthetic Doppler effect, in which the proximity of the viewer’s body to the works determines their level of resonance— the pitch of sonic resistance—as sound is transformed in the artistic process.

This tension between authority and resistance can be read as a struggle between the muffling of defiant voices and their ability to penetrate bodies and borders, undergoing changes in pitch or volume as they are transmitted across time and space. To consider the sonic as a potent political force is to consider the thrum of the everyday, the political potential of pitch as it vibrates and echoes through various mediums and temporalities. The sonic, in its ubiquitous physical and transcendental presence, traverses and mobilizes. As Brandon LaBelle notes, a “sonic sensibility” is an attentiveness to sound as it “oscillat[es] and vibrat[es] over and through all types of bodies and things, producing complex ecologies of matter and energy, subjects and objects,” thereby allowing us to consider the “entanglement of worldly contact, one that extends from the depths of bodies and into the energetics of social formations and their politics.”1

For Laurie Kang, the body is a processual, rather than fixed, entity. As an ongoing political project, the body is both enmeshed in and generative of social relations. Kang’s practice utilizes industrial building materials, synthetic polymers, and utilitarian objects to manifest internal processes such as digestion and metabolization. Abstracting the boundaries between inside and outside, Kang’s installations elucidate the porousness between subjects and objects, positing the body as a site of exchange rather than a mere receiver of transmissions. In her installation of photosensitive surfaces, flexible metal tracks, and other “misused” elements spanning the gallery, the artist prompts viewers to navigate within a network of bodies and materials that are constantly shifting and reacting. If installation art’s tenets suggest a relationship between a body and object(s) within the bounds of an exhibition space, and relational aesthetics is based on a holistic view of human relations and social context, Kang situates her practice outside these poles, opting instead to consider the body’s constant negotiation with its environs.

A series of sculptures that comprise metal mixing bowls, rubber, cast pewter, and clay reference

What exactly do these sounds constitute? And who, or what, produces them? Theories of sonic resistance often incorporate deep listening, empathetic relations between materialities and subjectivities, or the “energetics of ethics,” as per Jane Bennett’s scheme, between human, non-human, and posthuman agents.2 It postulates an ecosystem of new modes of being that de-emphasize individual guilt in favor of a collective unity, one that hums with promise, or agency.3 27

culturally-specific processes of food production and consumption, echoing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s understanding of “voids” as productive and spiritual spaces of subjectivity.4 While her works in this exhibition are non-figurative and non-aural, by positioning the body as a fluctuating medium, as both vessel and architecture—a receptacle for internal processes and exterior relationships— Kang choreographs the sonic in a reconfiguration of permeable entities.

Referencing materials directly implicated in the architecture of authority, such as ladders and polymer concrete, Nikita Gale envisions sonic subversion or destabilization as a metaphor of power relations between state and subject.

Upholstery foam, steel wall studs, towels dipped in concrete, and steel rungs in wall-bound ladders are forms that belie the impossibility of escape; a tangle of a microphone stand and amplifier cords invite the possibility of augmenting the hum of resistance. Between the dampening and expansion of sound lies the artist’s lucid depiction of power that is maintained with shifting, flexible force rather than as an immobile exercise.6 Throughout her works in the exhibition, Gale specifically hones in on Édouard Glissant’s notion of the subject’s right to opacity—in this case, the right not to be heard—amid the pressures for transparency under the neoliberal state.

Working within and against the frame of industrial architecture, Gale’s works suggest that political subjectivity can exceed the confines that created it.

Amanda Turner Pohan deploys recent technologies, such as robotics and cloud-based voice assistants, with materials that have been used since antiquity, including copper and bronze, to delve into, and distort, voice. Using Amazon Echo Dot and its embedded cloudbased voice service, Alexa—the nomenclature of both the hardware (Echo) and software (Alexa) being derived from female deities in Greek mythology—Pohan presents a conversation of the acousmatic, or sound without a visible source.

Alexa’s metallic shell conducts micro-vibrations in the space, which are picked up by Echo’s sensor and translated into a tonal frequency in real time.

Alexa’s programmed voice then becomes a highpitched hum, the essence of sound as vibrations in the air. In other installations, the word, rather than the voice, indexes the gendered limits of expression, referencing patriarchal structures in the classical period: In ancient Greece, a vibrant oral culture meant that reading was an act of vocal performance, which also positioned the writer as the father, and the writing as the dependent, silent daughter, “mute and waiting for the voice that would read her, take her hand— or her mouth as it were.”5 Pohan’s recombinant assemblages, tooled from techniques ranging from 3D printing to bronze electroplating, move beyond Donna Haraway’s theorization of cyborgs in their namesake 1984 manifesto—to which we owe the integration of transhuman into the humanities lexicon—and point to the historical contingency of the body and of gender against a futuristic vision of automatons and robots.

Hovering beyond Doppler’s parenthetical formula is an acknowledgement of sonic impact across forms, of alternative modes of political subjectivity, travel and transmission. To harness this sonic resistance as a political project—one that defies the discursive constructions imposed by unjust systems of exclusion—is crucial and necessary. In amplifying the many muted, murmuring voices that will collectively reflect our possible futures, the artists demonstrate that sound carries a particular presence. This presence—beyond voice, beyond the body, and beyond legibility—is located within a complex amalgamation of sound and echo, and is left for the viewer to listen closely and register. ______

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Brandon LaBelle, “Unlikely Publics,” in Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018), 7.

This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified.

No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.

1

Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 155.

2

Peter Gratton, “Vibrant Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett,” Philosophy in a Time of Error, April 22, 2010, https:// philosophyinatimeoferror.com/2010/04/22/vibrant-matters-aninterview-with-jane-bennett/

3

Trinh Minh-Ha, “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, et. al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 415-19.

4

TAUSIF NOOR is a contributing editor at Momus whose writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com among other publications. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Goldsmiths, University of London and was a 2014-15 Fulbright Scholar in India, where he worked with organizations such as the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art and assisted at the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Noor previously held internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the UK-based not-forprofit agency Culture+Conflict. He is currently the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Quinn Latimer, “Signs, Sounds, Metals, Fires, or an Economy of Her Reader,” in the documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, 2017), 271.

5

“At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it,” notes Michel Foucault, “are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.” See Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd Edition, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 220-1.

6

Mentor NADINE KHALIL has worked in publishing for almost two decades, bridging her training in the social sciences with cultural criticism. After her graduate studies in Anthropology and Sociology at the American University of Beirut, she became a Fulbright scholar in cultural studies at NYU (2003-04). Currently she is the editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas. She has also authored a series of artist monographs on established Lebanese artists entitled Paroles d’Artistes, worked for non-profit art organisations Ashkal Alwan and Arab Image Foundation.

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

STAFF

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Thomas K.Y. Hsu Theodore S. Berger Rachel Maniatis Brian D. Starer Thomas G. Devine Lilly Wei Kate Buchanan Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Steffani Jemison Vivian Kuan John S. Kiely Lionel Leventhal Christen Martosella Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

Corina Larkin Executive Director

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Associate Eva Elmore Development Coordinator

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CUE Art Foundation’s programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Vedder Price P.C. New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

All artwork Š the artists Catalogue design by Simon Wu

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137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 cueartfoundation.org