The Whiskey Sea

3ft x 1ft x 5ft | Video sculpture | 2010
ITP Spring Show, New York
Made with Michelle Temple

“Grandma Had the Hand of a Whip” forces people to advance a video projection of hand movements by pulling apart the knitted contents within. This piece grew from a series of conversations between the two artists about their matriarchal inheritance and delves into what goes on behind closed doors, how lessons were transmitted, and how emotions were sublimated through daily, repetitive chores like washing dishes, scrubbing the floor, knitting.

Grandma had the hand of a whip from Nisma Z on Vimeo.

I. Abstract
Diptych (Gk. dis “two” + ptykhe “fold”)

Diptych is a live duet between two artists who attach themselves to monolithic paper microphones in order to create soundscapes conducted by body movements. Balancing choreography with spontaneous attunements, this performance explores the types of metamorphoses that can arise when two distinct parts are continuously juxtaposed and torn apart, synchronized and individualized, in an ever-shifting diptych.

The most prominent example of such metamorphosis occurs between the performers’ bodies and the paper instruments. Attached by hair alone, the body becomes an extension of the looming paper structure’s nervous system. In turn, the body movements give voice to those structures who sing in feedback loops with the speakers cradled below. Sometimes we performers appear to be at one with the paper structures as if our human bodies have reconfigured into strangely familiar beasts. Other times, it is difficult to tell if we are the structure’s prosthetic instrument, or if it is ours. Thus the boundaries of the visual diptych constantly change shape.

This shape-shifting also occurs aurally. Counterposed to nested, mobile speakers, the contact microphones built into the handmade paper sculptures allow for frequency compositions where the surface area and edges of the paper catch and resonate the sound waves below. At first it seems as if movement drives sound, but oftentimes, the attempt to attain certain frequencies is what actually drives the body gesture. At the same time, the two instruments generate sine waves in a phasing effect that forms new frequencies from the combined parts. All these variables enforce a degree of spontaneous improvisation where frequencies slip and shift unpredictably into a site specific architectural soundscape.

Most basically, the concept of a ‘diptych’ speaks to the collaborative form between two women. Our co-creative process is characterized by shared intentions, counterbalancing perspectives, and dialectically strengthening individualities. As a relationship, the diptych of two individuals highlights the integrity of each even as together something new and whole gets created. Moving into a performative piece, this dynamic is reflected through the performers who begin in a ritual unity that gradually differentiates into complementary parts. The resulting parallax offers views of the whole via the twofold parts, as well as the individual units in context of the related whole.

II. Last Dress Rehearsal, night before the NIME show at Glasslands in Brooklyn:

III. Glasslands Show
Thanks to Nisma for organizing and editing the NIME videos:

Michelle Temple & Aiwen Wang-Huddleston: Diptych from Nisma Z on Vimeo.

Thanks also Calli for the photos of the show!

Neil has created a digital interpretation of our breath recordings which I thought would be nice to represent as “Big Screen pixels”––i.e. taking the border dimensions of the Big Screen and manipulating them proportionally. I’ve been really inspired by Bach fugues these past few weeks (thanks especially to Matt Ganucheau’s awesome Theory Club presentation) and this digital visualization has definitely influenced my thinking for this project.

Below are some storyboard examples of Big Screen pixels by themselves and in conjunction with the circle breaths. There’s a part of me that feels that introducing the rectangular structure risks the danger of simplifying the concept (now it’s a duality of circle and square) even though visually it might look more complex, but this is an exciting challenge.

EXAMPLE 1:

EXAMPLE 2:

EXAMPLE 3:

EXAMPLE 4:

A few pictures of the MyCloud project in Copenhagen:

Grandma Had the Hand of a Whip

DIEalog / Mark My Words

MyCloud

Tweetgrass (twitter + wheat grass) is a playful, interactive installation designed to encourage sustainable living habits.

Community members can tweet their sustainable living actions to a physical screen which will display each tweet as a cloud.  Once a critical mass of clouds have gathered, it starts raining on-screen, which triggers a real water system to rain on a box of wheat grass located below the screen.  Tweetgrass thus features two related types of information:

1. The tweet-clouds display specific ways in which people contribute to their environments.  For those who do not use twitter, the Tweetgrass installation provides recycling bins which will automatically tweet your cloud to the screen when you recycle something.
2. Tweetgrass installation reflects the amount of contribution needed.  The community can either appreciate a vibrant installation of tweetgrass, which can be used for shots, or they can watch it slowly turn into a memorial to our environment.

We hope to eventually expand single Tweetgrass installations into a wide variety of GardenTweets.

Interesting developments with our ITP30 1-in-1project, TweetGrass: talks are on the way towards installing TweetGrass at the next Founders Club event which will be hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.  Who knows where this will go, or if it will happen, but the opportunity is definitely exciting and gives us even more momentum!