Artist Research

artist who are working with similar ideas:

Susan Philipsz's 'Lowlands'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWeKzTDi-OA

Study for Strings is a contemporary interpretation of an eponymous 1943 orchestral work by Pavel Haas (Czech, 1899–1944), who composed the score while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. The Nazis filmed a performance of the completed work at the camp as part of the 1944 propaganda film Teresiendstadt. Almost immediately after filming was completed, Haas and many members of the prisoners' orchestra were killed. The conductor, Karel Ančerl (Czech, 1908–1973), survived the Holocaust, and after the war he reconstructed the composition.
For her 2012 reworking, Philipsz has isolated only the viola and cello parts. Recorded onto multiple channels, the piece is a note-by-note deconstruction of the original composition, replete with fraught silence. These charged absences call attention to the fact that other instruments—and the musicians who played them—are absent.

Richard Garet

"Before Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkV-P_TkJk4

Garet’s work takes many shapes, from sculptural installations to digital projections to live performances. Before Me fits into the first and last categories: it is a sculptural assemblage of outmoded technologies, and the spinning marble amounts to a live performance of sorts. The work’s centerpiece is an old LP record player with its platter upside down and revolving at 33 ½ revolutions per minute. The marble at the upturned edge can advance only slightly before its momentum is overridden and it rolls back to its starting point. This action continues endlessly, suggesting the plight of Sisyphus, a king in Greek mythology who was compelled to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it repeatedly fall back to the mountain’s base. Garet explores what is often considered background noise, and here the background (the platter on which a record is typically placed for playing) is central to the piece, the director of the marble’s fate.

Stephen Vitiello

"A Bell for Every Minute."

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/soundings/artists/13/works/

For this piece, Vitiello recorded a great number of bells from around New York. Here, fifty-nine of them play, one every minute, including the New York Stock Exchange bell, the United Nations Peace Bell, bike bells, bells on cats' collars, and alarm bells. At the top of the hour they chime together. This work thus consolidates New York City (through fifty-nine of its disparate parts) into a single node of intensity. Like New York City, the bells, in their variety, encompass a great many temperaments.