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Central Saint Martins, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation students present ...At the slow party, copies sync towards zero, a new sound work by Andrew Sunderland commissioned for the DRAF Studio.

The artist was initially struck by the particular character of the DRAF building, which was a furniture factory in the nineteenth century, and has since housed a printing company, dry cleaning business and tattoo parlour. Similar post-industrial spaces were repurposed in the 1990s for illegal raves and warehouse parties. By imagining a link between the repetitive manual labour familiar to the factory floor and the repetitive action of bodies dancing to electronic music, Sunderland envisaged the sonic piece as a kind of ‘slow party.’

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In order to achieve this effect, Sunderland made a short recording of his voice within the ground floor DRAF Gallery as a starting point for the work. What is heard in the gallery space has been transformed via time-stretch and auto-tune: software plug-ins commonly used in the production of club music. The resulting abstract sound, mediated through technological processes, has been ‘stretched’ into a 72-hour experience. The sound links and alters the downstairs and upstairs spaces, transforming the DRAF Studio into a sonic rendition of the exhibition space.

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Andrew Sunderland (b. 1986), an MFA graduate from Goldsmiths College, is an artist based in London working with music, sculpture, and print. He has exhibited at the Zabludowicz Collection in 2015 and recently won the Red Mansion Art Prize.

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volume dissolves into atmosphere is curated and realised by Lucinda Cusdin, Beike Li, Lynn Liu, Jennifer MacLachlan, Tonya Wechsler, Han Xia, Yusi Xiong, and Peilin Zhang. 

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Curating Sound
In conversation with Antonia Blocker, Hamish Dunbar, Ed Kelly and David Toop 26 November, 4-6 pm

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As part of volume dissolves into atmosphere, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation students host a discussion about sound and space and their coexistence in different environments.

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What is the relationship between experimental music and sonic art?
How does sound exist in different spaces?
What is the changing relationship between sound and its audiences?
What is the status of sound in the gallery and how can it be experienced as art? What are the challenges in exhibiting and curating sound work?

 

These questions will be discussed with the practitioners of the field: Antonia Blocker, Curator: Public Programmes, Whitechapel Gallery; Hamish Dunbar, Founder and Director, Cafe Oto; Ed Kelly, composer, musician, associate lecturer in Visual Art: Fine Art Digital at Camberwell College of Art; and David Toop, composer, musician, curator and UAL Chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation.