REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER : EXPERIMENTS IN SOUND
February 17-March 26, 2023
During your waking or sleeping life, bring yourself to attention with the thought “remembering and remembering to remember.” You might find yourself listening backward in time to a sound that you didn’t know that you heard!
- Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005)
Portland, OR - Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) presents Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound. Curated by Roya Amirsoleymani and Felisha Ledesma, Remembering to Remember is a multifaceted program of 15+ international, national, and local artists spanning six live performances; five newly commissioned multichannel compositions; four film/video works at the intersection of sound and moving image; and one month of artist residencies, community workshops, and public engagements. The anchor for all of this programming is an exhibition that will be on view at PICA from February 17 to March 19, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, February 17, 2023, 6:00 - 8:000 pm. Artists in the exhibition, performances, residencies, and workshops include Adee Roberson, Alison O’Daniel, bone lattice, Crystal Quartez, Hiro Kone, Kite & Robbie Wing, Lucy Liyou, Nivhek, Nyokabi Kariũki, Reese Bowes, Saint Abdullah, Sholeh Asgary, Synth Library Portland, Takashi Makino, and Tomoko Sauvage.
In connection with Remembering to Remember, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art, Kristan Kennedy, will release a forthcoming, limited edition of The Who Cares Clock—a time-based print project released at random, for free and only through the mail—featuring sound work by artist and Remembering to Remember curator Felisha Ledesma.
Remembering to Remember is a collection and collision of impressions and inquiries. It recognizes the rich histories and vibrant communities of sound art in Portland while offering a dynamic experience of new and recent work in experimental sound across forms by artists from around the world.
I was commissioned by PICA to produce a multi-channel audio experience that was presented during the month-long exhibit of Remembering to Remember. In it's original form, the piece would be experienced fully in-the-round, as an immersive audio production. Here, though, I have summed the eight channels down to two, in order that it be experienced in stereo.
Using a mix of field recording, custom synths, and live manipulation of layered effects, the resulting recording places the listener in multiple urban spaces around Portland and presents a slowly building cacophonic experience. The attempt is to create a cognitive dissonance that might evoke a visual hallucination - as if one were walking through space, only their gaze turned skyward, toward the tops of buildings as they pass.