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Water’s Edge, Biome Tells

“Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms. I began to see and hear not only the outer forms, but also the inner content, the nature and the history of things.” Ernst Haeckel, describing the microscopic radiolarian forms he was drawing and researching around the 1860s. Radiolarians are tiny protists that live inside the intricate silica shells found at the bottom of the ocean. Water’s Edge, Biome Tells (WEBT) is an interdisciplinary art-science research project that focuses on the microscopic life forms found within the littoral zone of the brackish shoreline of the Patapsco River’s Middle Branch at Masonville Cove in the Brooklyn community of Baltimore. For many years, micro fauna and flora that reside at the water’s edge of Masonville Cove have been subjected to high levels of pollution due in part to the dumping of dredged materials from the Baltimore harbor, compounded by […]

Sound Ecological Response

Stone Music: Geology Sounding Ringing Rocks County Park, PA. in collaboration with Ed Ruchalski Place-based sound intervention. Edited Google landsat image of the area of the Ringing Rock stone field. We were located at the red “X.” Last June, 14 I met up with Ed Ruchalski from Syracuse at 8:00 AM to perform and experiment in the football size and mysterious seven acre field of boulders located appropriately named Ringing Rocks County Park, PA. We knew one another through a radio project called art@radio that I started in 1999 that ended around 2011. Photograph by Ruchalski of Bradley swinging the DIY buzz-roarer. Above is a composition created shortly after the site visit with Ed Ruchalski based on the concept of an “audio journal” or soundscape collage. We created rhythmic structures that other sounds were integrated from various instruments we carried with us out into the park. There were moments when […]

Mediated landscapes

Above image, Abdominal Pain I is from a medical textbook purchased from a library book sale, Computed Tomography with Multiplanar Reconstructions, 1990’s, w 17″ X h 11″ – pages have been rearranged, stacked and glued together based on illustrations, images and text then sanded. Working from discarded, found commercially printed materials as a jumping off point, these works represent and signify my vision of global mediated landscape. Materials range from pop-culture, news magazines, to medical and science textbooks. Choices are based on the quality of printing, paper, color and texture. Abdominal Pain II, pages from the chapter, Abdominal Sonography, w 18 X h 11.5, Beginning with a block of glued and frozen layered pages and ground (sanded) down until a story or potential narrative appears to emerge. The goal is to speak above and below the surface of the high resolution, pristine, sanitary, graphical and typographical surfaces. [banner image is from the diptych, Tommy Flight, […]

Found wall paintings

For years I have documented odd textures, marks and other human references located in cityscapes; “imprints” in place that when “framed” appear to be abstract paintings. The past two summers I spent a month in Xiamen China, where I rediscovered my interest in these unique textures, primarily found in urban settings. The image in the banner along with the image above are from the ancient Kalyuan Temple, Renshou Pagoda, located in ancient city of Quanzhou the that has two towers in the east and west corners of the land with the temple in the center of the ancient compound. The walls where these were photographed surround the main temple. These appear to be very old with water damage, which makes for the best pictures.

Xiamen ink washes

Through out my time in Xiamen, I maintained a journal/sketchbook. The influence of living in South Korea and being exposed to calligraphy, silk drawings, and writing characters has been reignited from this most recent trip to China. I purchased a tube of Chinese ink and a brush along with some other tools for the following explorations.

X.U. Sandao Gallery

Last Thursday night, July 9 was the opening of an exhibition at the Sandao Gallery, Xiamen University, where I had four bodies of work on exhibit. The work in the images is from the new series called “John Thomson Reframed.” More information will be added in the near future.

Art Student’s videos

Xiamen University art students produced a 2-3 minute video art project within a little over a week. After the students were introduced to a brief history of the medium of video art, they were instructed to produce a work that was important to them at this moment in their lives.

Xiamen students

Above are the art students I am working with at Xiamen University who are creating short video works that include hybrid forms of time-based media; i.e., animations, stop-motion and motion graphics. On the far right in the classroom panoramic image is Melody 阳, currently a X.U. graduate student assisting with translation and assisting me with the course. She has been essential on many levels and is most open to how to best manage the students. I think this is a very interesting model to have professors visit a foreign university and to teach a research based course in a condensed manner– offering students a unique experience besides for the faculty. This experience has been most useful in my own practice as an artist/educator. Needless to say, I can no longer complain about crowded classrooms in America. The oddest discovery was that half of the machines have windows installed and they do not seem to […]

BPA Bottle performance

Yesterday while waiting for the weather to cool down in Xiamen I performed with two Chinese water bottles by holding one in each hand spread out as far as I could stretch and began squeezing creating the crackling and popping sound. The distance of the bottles from the microphone and the angle to the left and right of the stereo field was considered to create a spacial listening experience. There was no editing nor cutting of the audio except for some subtle compression and equalization of the final sound track.

Astronomical Unit

Audio experiment using a trumpet mute inside of the a tenor sax bell along with moderate processing using the Whammy pitch shifter. I am incorporating extended techniques; opening and closing valves that are not typical, hence the overtone and odd frequencies in combinations with the mute creates some wonderful acoustic moments. The images are photographs of early electron microscopic imaging by Dr. Keith Porter, 1960’s whose collection is located at UMBC’s Special Collection.

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