Listening reveals forms. My installations, small sculptures, and video works offer things to see, however sound and listening always retain pride of place. Amid the dissimilar or fragmentary things you touch and see in my work, sound creates connective tissue, conferring, shifting, or depleting meaning. 
Thrill: A Love Song
Inspired by Elizabethan vocal music and remixed a cappella tracks favored by club DJs, this installation re-composes the classic torch song “You’re My Thrill” into an unsettling jazz madrigal.
The voices of four singers – Josephine Howell, Kelley Johnson, Dawn Clement, and Greta Matassa – converge and dissolve into seductive duets, trios, and quartets. I produced and composed the recordings, which were engineered by the masterly Doug Haire.
Created in 4-channel surround sound for objects (tables, chairs, etc.) in tandem with calibrated gradients of red light for the Andrews Gallery at the College of William & Mary, Thrill ran January 17-31, 2013. I’m grateful that the College produced a short documentary which elegantly captured sights and sounds inside the installation. Thrill was subsequently heard and seen at BEAF 2013 – the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival, April 24-28 at the Commercial Street Theater Gallery.
{ secret songs of your surroundings }
At once a jukebox and an oracle, this web-based installation and cell phone app (2010-2011) enabled you to mix field recordings collected along Metro Transit’s A Line RapidRide corridor into poetic collisions of sound and speech. A work of limited presence made possible by 4Culture, { secret songs… attracted thousands of listeners while online from October 2010 to October 2011. Watch two souvenir videos.
The Listening Room
Conceived while at INSTAL 10 in Glasgow, The Listening Room (2010) welcomed all sounds, especially any “bleed” from surrounding events. Attendees were discreetly encouraged to explore the room for compelling confluences of external sound.
The image to the right documents two comment pages left by visitors; some walked (or stomped) into the installation and quickly walked out, while others savored the space as a refuge and site for unusual listening.
N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999
As an installation, N30 (1999-2001/2004) combines and synchronized both N30s into a work for multiple (at least four) speakers.
This version of N30 has appeared at the Taipei Biennial (2008), Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival (2009), and the Henry Art Gallery (2009-2010). I also have performed and diffused N30 live through multiple speakers at Polestar Music Gallery (Seattle, 2003), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008), INSTAL 10 (Glasgow, 2010), and Goldsmiths University (London, 2014).
Sand Point Sound Gazetteer
“Exploration is not so much a matter of covering the ground as of digging beneath the surface: chance fragments of landscape, momentary snatches of life, reflections caught on the wing-such are the things that alone make it possible for us to understand and interpret horizons which would otherwise have nothing to offer us.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955; translation by John Russell)
The night I met Maria C_____
Created for the Sound Structures exhibit at Cornish College, The night… (2002) is an audio dossier and collection of artifacts to be touched and examined. A cassette deck plays, suggesting contexts for the objects.
Locust Music, which, alas, appears to be defunct, released the cassette component on their Met Life series in 2003.
Preparator instructions: pdf