[Aug 18-22] Andrea Parkins: Three Rooms in the Memory Palace – Pt.1

“Three Rooms In The Memory Palace”, composed by Andrea Parkins, is a 3-part electroacoustic work, combining audio installation with live performance, and reflecting the artist’s ongoing exploration of poetic interrelationships between physical/acoustical spaces, objects, gesture and memory. Harvestworks presents ” Three Rooms…, Part 1,” an 8-channel site- determined installation, diffused through adjacent acoustical spaces that sonically respond in real-time interaction.

[Aug 18-22] Andrea Parkins: Three Rooms in the Memory Palace – Pt.1

Andrea Parkins
Monday, August 18 to Friday August 22 2014, 12 -5 pm.

Location: Harvestworks 596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130 Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleecker

“Three Rooms in the Memory Palace” is Andrea Parkins’ three part electroacoustic work-in-progress. At Harvestworks, she will present Part 1, an 8- channel generative audio work, diffused through separate acoustical spaces: “Room 1” features multi-pitched, slowly shifting layers of electronic feedbacks and “Room 2” – an interrelated audio installation, featuring more subtle,delicate, or articulated sonic details – primarily generated from a personal archive of manipulated objects that Parkins has been collecting and recording for the past 25 years.

The two rooms exist in adjacent physical spaces that are not acoustically isolated from each other and thus are in real-time sonic interaction: enabling shifting and sometimes startling juxtapositions to take place throughout the duration of this work. Parkins’ focus has been to articulate and build multiple and interdependent compositional structures and systems emphasizing tenuous states, relationships between object, gesture and meaning, and potential for “things falling apart.”

“Three Rooms in the Memory Palace” is a continuation of this work and also an investigation of tensions between “the real” and the ephemeral, and of slippages between phenomenological experience, memory and the poetic uncanny. “Three Rooms in the Memory Palace, ” when complete, will be presented at a location divisible into three separate physical spaces with two designated for multi -channel/multi-diffusion installations, and a third for presentation of a live 20-minute electroacoustic work, scored for a small ensemble with quad-spatialized electronics.

Interview With Andrea Parkins On Sound Studies Blog, October 2013

http://soundstudiesblog.com/2013/10/14/playing-with-bits-pieces-and-lightning-bolts-an-interview-with-sound-artist-andrea-parkins/

Andrea Parkins

Andrea Parkins is a composer, sound artist and improvising electroacoustic performer who engages with interactive electronics as compositional/performative process, and explores strategies related to Fluxus’ ordered, ephemeral activities. She is an integral participant of the New York sound art and experimental music communities, and known worldwide for her pioneering gestural/textural approach on her electronically-processed accordion and self-designed virtual sound-processing instrument. Described as a “sound-ist,” of “protean,” talent by music critic Steve Smith, Parkins’ laptop electronics and Fender-amped accordion create sonic fields of lush harmonics and sculpted electronic feedback, punctuated by moments of gap and rift.

Parkins’ compositions include multi-diffusion site-based installations featuring amplified objects, electroacoustic solo and ensemble pieces, electronic music pieces, and live scores/sound design for dance and film. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Diapason, and Experimental Intermedia; and international festivals/venues including Mexico City’s 1st International Sound Art Festival, NEXT in Bratislava, Cyberfest in St. Petersberg, and Q-02 in Brussels. Parkins records and performs as a solo artist and has collaborated with sonic innovators such as Otomo Yoshihide, David Watson, John Butcher, and Nels Cline, among many others. On an ongoing basis, Parkins develops her primary performance project, a series of interactive audio/visual works inspired by Rube Goldberg’s circuitous machines.

Recent projects: In 2013-2014, Parkins has been awarded artist residencies at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center in NYC and Q-02 Workspace for Experimental Music and Sound Art in Brussels, where she has been composing a multi-diffusion electroacoustic performance/installaion, Three Rooms in the Memory Palace. This season, she will tour in Europe with her solo project and in a new duo project with Swiss experimental pianist/sound text poet Jacques Demierre. In 2013-14, Parkins’ multi-diffusion Faulty (Broken Orbit) is featured in “With Hidden Noise,” a sound art exhibition organized by Independent Curators International that has been presented in Melbourne (Australia), Seattle, Minneapolis and NYC. Other recent projects include Austell 1, an 8-channel performance/installation presented in 2012 by Fragmental Museum, NYC, for which the artist funneled real-time sound from Long Island City’s rail yards into an adjacent reverberant warehouse, along with sonic interventions from a walking bell-ringer and Parkins’ omni-diffused accordion feedback. Also, in 2012, Parkins performed a new audiovisual work at Experimental Intermedia, NYC, in collaboration with video artist Ana Carvalho. Her “portable” audio work featured in the Lingua Franca show at Cyberfest 2011 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Parkins was invited by Christian Marclay to perform her interpretations of seven of his graphic scores at the Whitney Museum’s 2010 retrospective festival of Marclay’s work. Since 2009, Parkins has been touring in Europe with choreographer Vera Mantero’s production We Are Going to Miss Everything We Don’t Need, for which Mantero commissioned Parkins’ live electroacoustic score, featuring amplified performers, objects and surfaces; and since 2010, Parkins has performed her live 12-channel sound design for Symptom, an intermedia performance work commissioned by The Body Cartography Project.

Parkins’ recordings have been published by Important Records, Atavistic, and Creative Sources, and her work has received support from American Composers Forum, NYSCA, the French-American Cultural Exchange, Meet the Composer, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, and Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde. Parkins is on faculty at Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program.

www.andreaparkins.com

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