Burchfield Connects: LIVE - Null Point

 

PERFORMANCE | GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE
FRIDAY, JULY 23, 2021, 7:00pm–8:30pm

 

Ghosts in the Machine
Null Point featuring Colin Tucker

 

Ghosts in the Machine is a new performance designed specifically for the possibilities of live internet streaming, and focused on the politics of this format. Building on insights of site-specific art, decolonial study, experimental music, and critical study of technology, the performance attempts to contest the cultural and political neutrality of corporate internet streaming, and reveal how this space is shaped powerfully by colonial and racial power. Rather than taking at face value hype surrounding the “newness” of networked technological forms, the project aims to put these forms into conversation with longer histories: cultural histories of the White, Bourgeois project of (musical) spectatorship, and socio-ecological histories of Conquest in the “New World.” Technology scholar Bruno Latour writes that “technology is society made durable;” in response, this performance excavates how ghosts of Conquistador Whiteness are baked into norms of online media practice. Through a focus on complex entanglements between technology and embodiment, and past and “present,” the performance approaches the internet in ways that are unprecedented within historical notions of internet art.

The audiovisual performance interweaves a variety of stylistic registers: found footage, instrumental music, montage, “silence,” field recording, and lecture. In conversation with 1960s experimental music, parts of the performance interpret scores by Ben Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono (Grapefruit), and a new event score by Colin Tucker. A Q&A with the artist will conclude the event.

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When: Jul 23, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Burchfield Connects: LIVE - Null Point

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About Null Point:

Null Point is a musical research group founded in 2014 and based on Seneca/Haudenosaunee territories (so-called Buffalo, NY). Aiming to open lines of interchange between experimental music and contemporary art, the group utilizes musical techniques to investigate spatial politics, and engages politicized conceptual strategies to interrogate formal and institutional defaults of Western Art Music and its afterlives. Proceeding otherwise to Western Art Music’s division of labor between disinterested spectatorship, transparent notation, and compliant performance, Null Point investigates new approaches to concert presentation as well as event formats such as installation and workshop, as well as participatory and location-based music. Since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Null Point produced online events with similar critical attention to platform-centered internet’s normative procedures.

An artist-run organization, Null Point researches new approaches to composition/notation, performance, listening, facilitation, and curation, with members moving flexibly between these roles. In addition to performing compositions of its members, the group presents work by emerging artists as well as neglected radical experimental music scores of the 1960s and 70s. By design, Null Point presents events in a range of institutional settings: arts institutions (Artpark, Constellation Chicago, Fridman Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Squeaky Wheel, Visual Studies Workshop), community organizations (WASH Project, Old First Ward Community Association, Cincinnati Public Library), universities (Dartmouth College, DePauw University, Princeton University), and architectural repurposing projects (Silo City, echo Art Fair at Buffalo Gear and Axle Plant), with funding from Art Bridges Foundation, New Music USA, the arts councils of NY and Toronto, and numerous universities.