Floating Sound Gallery

Micah Silver

Micah_500

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First person, temporary:

My participation in culture consists of producing scenarios within which a set of ideas and experiences can unfold. These scenes often point to core questions that I’ve been asking through many materials, strategies, and roles for the past decade. In each case, a highly speculative proposition is made, and it points toward ways of thinking that strategically emphasize the importance of an increasing sense of what’s possible; an awareness of alternatives. In the sense Piaget used the term schema, I think that art, especially time-based forms, are a kind of essential schematic play.

In the past I’ve worked extensively with audio as a means to use air as material. My interest was to change a room or a public space with an invisible shift in the energy, or to install objects or a scent that functions as a “set” for a dramaturgy that would unfold for the ears. These have been topical, political, sensual, and musical. But recently my work has begun to involve less audio and more diagrams, text, and means of exploring time-based forms in the absence of sound. This is the direction of my work at the moment. (February 2014)

Third person, formal:

Silver’s work has been produced by Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Mass MoCA, OK Centrum (Austria) the Jersey City Museum, Issue Project Room (NYC), Artspace New Haven, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The James Joyce Centre (Dublin), Museum of Sex (NYC), The Place (St. Petersburg), and the MATA Festival (NYC), ArteEast, among others in the USA and abroad.

Since 2003 Silver has also been active as a co-conspirator in the work of other artists. He was Director of the Earle Brown Music Foundation (Brown’s archive) from 2002-2006, Associate Curator at Diapason Gallery (NYC) from 2003-2006, and from 2006 to the end of 2011 was the founding Curator for music and sound at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

In 2009 he co-initiated the Maryanne Amacher Archive and in addition to facilitating the establishment of a long-term home for the materials has been facilitating exhibitions and performance research surrounding the artifacts of her practice.

SUPREME CONNECTIONS, a collective of recent Amacher collaborators continue the research continuum of initiated during life, constructing a mobile, living archive concept of how contingent performance and sound practices can be distributed. This collective has worked with DAAD in Berlin, TATE Modern in London, and the Sao Paulo Biennial.

Silver holds a degree in Music Composition from Wesleyan University and a Masters of Science in Architecture (Art, Culture, and Technology) from MIT.

http://nophones.org | present
http://empac.rpi.edu |  2006-2012
http://maryanneamacher.org |  2009-present
http://earle-brown.org |  2002-2006
http://diapasongallery.org | 2003-2006


You and Me, Going (2008).

You and Me, Going is the result of an imaginary unfolding — of a near-archaeological process through my recent work: of unearthing artifacts, brushing them off, finding new resonances with old things, and deducing/constructing narrative from emerging layers of association. My recent installations have required the capture and creation of vast libraries of audio material, much of which never found the right home.  You and Me, Going is a landscape of these bits and a departure for me from working with algorithms to realize pieces that endlessly permute within stochastic bounds.  For this project I wanted to refocus on the microscopic details of mixing and to discover how the more constructed basis for my recent works has been metabolised into intuitions and tastes. And so I returned to an entirely handmade approach. In one section of the piece, part of Agonism, a poem by Bethany Wright, is sung.