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SHOW TITLE: Audio Space
ARTISTS: Jem Finer, David Rokeby
CURATOR: Justin Hopper

On Friday, October 1, at Wood Street Galleries, artist, composer, and musician Jem Finer presents the world premier of “Shortplayer” – a new live setting of his world-renowned 1,000-year-long musical artwork Longplayer. Along with a host of Pittsburgh’s finest musicians, the London-based Finer celebrates Pittsburgh’s opening of the first Longplayer listening post in the Eastern U.S. with the performance of a new composition based on the principles of Longplayer.

Jem Finer is considered a unique voice in exploring issues combining science, technology, and philosophy such as “deep time” through sound installation, autonomous technology, and astronomical sculpture. He has been artist-in-residence at Oxford University’s department of Astrophysics and in 2005 won the PRS Foundation New Music Award for “Score for a Hole in the Ground,” and is songwriter and co-founder of famed Irish-punk band The Pogues.

Performance 9:30 pm October 1st with the following artists:

Jem Finer - trumpet
Mark Fromm - reeds
Ben Opie - reeds
Roger Dannenberg - trumpet
Brandon Masterman – reeds
Roger Day - tuba

Dark Matter by David Rokeby

The darkened gallery space is dominated by an invisible sculpture of silent sound. Your body probes the space listening for the sculpture's spatial form to be expressed though the sounds of your contact with its immaterial presence.

Infrared sensitive video cameras survey the darkened gallery from 4 angles. These cameras carve up the space into thousands of 3 dimensional zones. A selection of these zones have been attributed sound behaviours. Together, these interactive zones define a complex physical but invisible form in the gallery space. A computer cross-references the data from the cameras to work out which zones are experiencing the greatest physical activity at any given moment and plays the sounds linked to those zones through an 8-channel sound system, distributing the sounds through the space in relation to the locations of the physical stimuli.