Listen to the Material
Movements 1-4 (2021) music boxes in walnut and maple with music based on textile artist Anni Albers’ designs. Currently on exhibit at Catharine Clark Gallery.
When we started looking at Anni Albers’ weavings and prints, they became more like graphic notation in music compositions. Her textiles and prints, revealed to us their hidden music. It became clear why she talked about listening to the material.
And we heard their music as we began transposing Anni’s shapes, points, and color onto scrolls for music boxes.
“Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness…”
Music scrolls relate to punch cards; punch cards relate to the Jacquard loom; the Jacquard loom relates to weaving; weaving relates to Anni Albers and Ruth Asawa at Black Mountain College; for us it all relates back to data visualization.
And data visualization, most of all, relates to our first fiber optic data tapestry 50 Different Minds inspired by the Albers that we debuted at Zer01 in 2010 and then showed with Catharine Clark at her Minna Street gallery.
Click here to read our presentation to the San Francisco chapter of the National Womens Art Museum about Listen to the Material.
[LigoranoReese] transform [Anni Albers’] weavings and prints into musical compositions by superimposing the artist’s patterns over a notated grids laid out on punch cards. Fed into wood boxes housing an unseen mechanism that operates like a player piano, they produce sounds that fall midway between a kalimba (an African “thumb piano”) and a xylophone. The timbre is exotic and instantly addictive – so much so that I had to tear myself away from them for fear of irritating the gallerists. A fusion of Albers’ credo and the monkey-wrenching of John Cage, whose “prepared” pianos mark one of the high points of mid-century art-making, they are the exhibition’s highlights.
– David M. Roth, Listening to Threads, Square Cylinder