27 AUGUST: Super Critical Mass, A Civil Polity

A Research Seminar with Julian Day

Tuesday 27 August, 2019
2-4PM The Octagon

The orchestra has long been described in relation to “politics, government and civil society” (Spitzer and Zaslaw, 2004). How might such conceptions provide new models for thinking about and creating participatory art involving sound? How might sonic materiality act as a binding and disruptive agent for conceptualising community and the mechanics of interaction? In this talk, artist and composer Julian Day discusses his project Super Critical Mass in which mobile temporary communities articulate and complicate the social and acoustic flows of civic spaces such as libraries, parklands, squares, town halls and museums using identical sounding objects and memorized interdependent instructions.z

www.supercriticalmass.com

JULIAN DAY

Julian Day uses sound to reveal and transform power dynamics and to instigate perceptual shifts in social and civic situations. He does this within individual artworks (sculpture, installation, video, performance, text) and ongoing projects including Super Critical Mass, in which temporary communities articulate public spaces with sonic ganzfelds, and An Infinity Room, in which synthesizers and pipe organs charge negative space with turbulent sonic geometries. Day’s work has featured at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, MASS MoCA, California-Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, ACCA, Liquid Architecture, Artspace and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He lives and works in New York and Sydney.

www.julianday.com

Image: Julian Day, Future Tense, Shepparton Art Museum