Fragments: Multimedia Inquiries, Metaphors, and Dialectics

Students at the Master of Music in Music Production, Technology, and Innovation presented “Fragments”, a series of multimedia installation works curated by professor. Pierce Warnecke. From personal explorations to social and aesthetic questionings and experiments, from large scales of planetary data to the intimate scale of personal relation to the world, this showcase put forth interactive, participative or contemplative works using a variety of interrelated mediums to express each artist’s vision.

Each one of these works presented very personal expressions of students coming from extremely diverse backgrounds, yielding a fragmented yet cohesive narrative that strings these pieces together. What did they all have in common?

The easy answer would be technology, and how it simultaneously mediates our relationships to the immediate world and to the farthest reaches of the globe.

But underneath the obvious and all-encompassing technological link, there lies a simpler, more direct one: You. Me. All of us.The human experience as a strange dichotomy: individual, secret and isolated - but also common, global and unifying.

These six human beings were united in their courage to open themselves up and portray their experiences, in the hopes that dialogues, dialectics, and questions would be generated by their works.

Invisible Subtelties
Qiufan Qiu
The work is a sound installation that conveys an aesthetic and conceptual statement that both critiques and embraces the minimalist approach. It is, in appearance, a big blank canvas that recalls a large painting. There is a small amount of space between the fabric and wall where it hangs, where 20 small speakers are installed.

A Cacophony Of Unrequited Love
Jeffrey Cobbold | Sara Spatz | Danielle Turner | Rafael Tanaka Monzo
A Cacophony of Unrequited Love (CoUL) is a mixed media (sound, video and photography) installation exploring the essential questions and emotions of unrequited love. The work began in 2010, with the song “Ms. Disinterested (part 2)”, which was written by New Jersey collaborators Jeffrey Cobbold and Sara Spatz as they explored the topic of unrequited love and abandonment. Since then Jeffrey has traveled to Valencia, Spain in 2015 for his graduate studies in music technology, where he has met American vocalist, Danielle Turner and Belgian photographer, Rafael Tanka Monzo to expand a sampling of the song into an installation work.

d.Cluttering
(a sonic soft sculpture: in btwn chaos+calm)
Debbie YJ Lin
d.Cluttering is a narrative exploring the relationship between physical/digital clutter in our daily lives and our individual mental/emotional spaces. Building on ancient traditions of Chinese Feng Shui, and Biblical concepts of “treasure,” it questions the attachment to material goods that are often superimposed with meaning.

#Terra Tweet
Reid Swartz
Migrations is an audiovisual installation that uses real-time news feeds to show instances of immigration throughout the world. The inspiration for the piece comes from the artist’s experiences as a student living abroad in Valencia, Spain and the significant amount of immigration has occurred over the past few years.

[walk]
Aly Haddad
[walk] is an experience that highlights the gravity that our individual walks through life have on us. It aims to explore the emotional impact that change has on us through different periods of time.

The Geometry of Sound
Touch the Shape of Sound
Michael Samuels
Geometry of Sound is an interactive audio-visual experience that invites visitors to play with dynamic, non-linear forms of sound and color by manipulating geometric objects. These polyhedrons can be picked up, spun, juggled, and bounced to control what participants hear and see. By physicalizing the relationship between sound and geometry, the intuitive symmetries inherent in tonal structures we know familiarly become readily apparent.