MSAE Member News (Mid-Summer 2018)

On June 12-14, Eric Leonardson led a workshop for over 20 grad students in the International Media Cultural Work program at the Hochschule Darmstadt Mediencampus in Dieburg, Germany. The topic was posed as a question to the students, ”How do you actively engage others in listening for everyday sounds?” Their findings were performed with the public participation of attendees to the finissage of their graduate exhibition at City Hall and the Fechenbach Schloss Museum in Dieburg, on Sunday, June 24.

From June 15 through July 15 Eric Leonardson is an artist-in-residence at A.I.R. Krems, in Austria. This honor is supported by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). On July 20, he will perform with Anja Kreysing (Germany) and Donatella Bartolomei (Italy) for the re:flexions sound-art festival in Augsburg, Germany.

On May 19, Eric kicked off MSAE’s 2018 Night Out In The Parks Summer Soundwalk Series at at West Ridge Nature Preserve with the theme of ”Nature Sounds at Night.” A dozen participants received an introduction to soundwalking in the tradition of acoustic ecology and a demonstration of the different sounds of the calling frogs by Park Advisory Council volunteer, Gary Morrissey. The group discovered that the presence of any frogs and toads was inaudible, possibly due to the irregular warming and cooling that occurred in late winter and early spring. That triggered the breeding season to occur much sooner than normal, before the Calling Frog Survey protocols would allow. When the frogs were audibly present, no data was collected. However, Gary informed us he observed an abundance of tadpoles could be seen in the park’s lagoon.

Amanda Gutierrez’s Exhibition Walking on Lightness is a multidisciplinary installation and process-based work that departs from psychogeographic soundwalks through Sunset Park Brooklyn, a neighborhood largely populated by Mexican immigrants. The artwork was developed as part of the Art in Residency 2017 at The Camera Club of New York, and exhibited as a solo exhibition at Baxter Street Gallery in Manhattan.

Amanda Gutierrez’s second iteration of the Walking on Lightness project was selected for the 2018 Artist in Residency at Harvestworks. The project will be fully funded and developed as a series of soundwalks in Mexico, Chicago, Brooklyn, and New York City, inviting women of color to analyze through the urban environmental sound, the concept of security in the public space. The project will be developed and documented in a 360 video as a Virtual Reality environment, highlighting and developing the sound in a 3D process. The project will be presented in the New York Electronic Art Festival 2019.

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