Kabir Carters work moves between performance and installation, and has been exhibited and featured at Overgaden

Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Inter Arts Center, Malm; Diapason Gallery, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and museums and art spaces throughout Europe and the United States. He has participated in festivals and biennials including CTM (club transmediale), Full Pull, Performa, SoundWalk, Subtropics, and Unsound New York. He has received commissions and awards from the American Music Center, Danish Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Media Alliance, among others. Writing and reviews concerning his work and activities have been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, Nutida Musik, and Parkett. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of theArts at Bard College, where he was a Joseph Hartog Fellow.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 www.skidmore.edu/tang

tang

ELEVATOR MUSIC 19
September 17, 2011 January 20, 2012

ELEVATOR MUSIC 19

Kabir Carter Split, 2011

Courtesy of the artist Sound files and electronics Ive taken the space for what it isan active elevator. It performs sequences of tasks throughout the day, and in doing so, generates a range of mechanical and incidental sounds. Included in this range are stationary soundssounds that create what we might call drones or hums. So Ive tried to put another sound inside of this moving, verticulated space filled with stationary sounds and quasistationary sounds. The added sound behaves like the extant sound in the elevator, but it is something else entirely different. Neither sound necessarily masks or interferes with the otherinstead, they periodically modulate and blend with one another. So the added sound is not intended to be understood as the dominant acoustic event, or even as a site specific installation that happens to be inside an elevator. It is just a sound put inside of another sound. Beyond this, Im not sure how much I want to delineate the actual working process that was used for generating the sound. I felt like the elevator deserved to be heard betterthat it ought to be given a voice that would speak with its own acoustic characteristics, and in a language and fashion not unlike the one that is already in use. Weve been acculturated to understand listening in specific ways experimental music helped make it possible for us to generate and hear pure electronic sounds, and also permitted us the privilege of appreciating the possibility of noise, sound, and music as equally engaged partners in the formation of an expanded field of sound producing events. Nonetheless, we still find ourselves at a loss when it comes to listening with other parts of our bodies. This is one of the reasons I like to think about dance music clubs. A well thought out sound reinforcement strategy in a dance club activates space so that one can listen with ones entire body. One is encouraged to generate kinetic responses to sound as a listening experience unfolds over time. I remember the surprise that overcame me when I once felt sound resonate in and around one of my knees as I listened to a disk jockey play out at Berlins Panorama Barit was as if someone or something seized my knee, set it to vibrate, and then released it. And of course there is the pressurized rush of low frequencies that can resonate within parts of ones body, or simply balloon outwards in all directions inside of a buildingwhether by passing through walls or via some other form of projection and transmission. It is this kind of auditory experience that I try to approach, and link to a continuum of possibilities for listening. Kabir Carter

Split refers to a plane partitioning a space, and implicit in this spatial condition is that sound will behave differently depending on the actual materials that the space and the plane (or split) are made of. In the case of the elevator, theres a space with five metal sides, and a sixth made of carpet covered plywood. The split itself is a vertically suspended, multi-sectioned metal frame that can hold eight panels, which at present are comprised of a set of moderately thick Plexiglas sheets. So these dimensional and material properties contribute as much if not more to the work than the sound that Ive introduced.

Elevator Music 19: Kabir Carter is organized by Patrick ORourke in collaboration with the artist. Support provided by Genelec Inc.