Join us for a talk by Alex Mustonen and Benjamin Porto of the New York-based collaborative design practice Snarkitecture. This event will take place in advance of the unveiling of The Beach, a large-scale interactive installation that will open to the public on Saturday, January 19 in the Aon Grand Ballroom at Navy Pier. Snarkitecture’s work focuses on the reinterpretation of everyday materials within a conceptual approach to create unexpected engagements with our surroundings — centered on the importance of experience, this premise extends to The Beach, an all-white ocean of over one million recyclable, antimicrobial plastic balls.

Following the talk, the bookshop will host a book signing of Snarkitecture’s recent catalogue, published by Phaidon.

Snarkitecture is a New York-based collaborative design practice established to investigate the boundaries between disciplines. The name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of The Snark, a poem describing the “impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.” In its search for the unknown, Snarkitecture creates work that includes large-scale projects, installations and objects.

This talk is presented in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO and Navy Pier. For more information about the upcoming installation The Beach at the Aon Grand Ballroom at Navy Pier click here.

The workshop focuses on building confidence from within and without. It asks how do we see ourselves and how we can help others see us in beneficial ways. Workshop leader Fay Victor—a New York-based sound artist and composer—leads exercises, demonstrations, and discussions in the service of being seen.  RSVP is required and space is limited.

Fay  Victor,  called  “artistically complete”  by the New  York Times, hones a unique vision for the vocalist's role in jazz and improvised music. Victor’s recorded work has been featured in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, and The Huffington  Post.  Victor has performed with luminaries such as Randy Weston,  Roswell  Rudd,  Nicole  Mitchell,  Archie  Shepp,  Marc  Ribot, and Tyshawn  Sorey. Performance highlights include those at The  Museum of  Modern  Art  (New York),  Hammer  Museum  (Los Angeles),  Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum  (San Francisco),  Symphony  Space  (New York),  and  Bimhuis  (Netherlands). Victor was the  2017  Herb  Albert/Yaddo  Fellow in  Music  Composition.  Current releases  include  her  album  Wet  Robots (ESP  Disk, July  2018)  with  her  SoundNoiseFUNK  project,   Nicole  Mitchell’s  Maroon  Cloud (FPE Records, August  2018),  and  Marc  Ribot’s   upcoming   Songs of Resistance (September 2018) featuring Victor as well as guests vocalists Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello.

Image: Fay Victor. Photo: Richard Koek

For more information on the exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, click here.

Image: Fay Victor by Eva Kapanzade

Presenting a talk, musical performance, and a question and answer session, New York-based sound artist and composer, Fay Victor utilizes music as a vehicle to express thoughts and sounds in a multigenre universe that reflects identity, new music, jazz, blues, house, funk, and free improvisation—recalling references from jazz legend Albert Ayler to the innovative Frank Zappa. In partnership with Chicago-based musician Mike Reed, the two explore message together through jazz.

Fay  Victor,  called  “artistically complete”  by the New  York Times, hones a unique vision for the vocalist's role in jazz and improvised music. Victor’s recorded work has been featured in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, and The Huffington  Post.  Victor has performed with luminaries such as Randy Weston,  Roswell  Rudd,  Nicole  Mitchell,  Archie  Shepp,  Marc  Ribot, and Tyshawn  Sorey. Performance highlights include those at The  Museum of  Modern  Art  (New York),  Hammer  Museum  (Los Angeles),  Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum  (San Francisco),  Symphony  Space  (New York),  and  Bimhuis  (Netherlands). Victor was the  2017  Herb  Albert/Yaddo  Fellow in  Music  Composition.  Current releases  include  her  album  Wet  Robots (ESP  Disk, July  2018)  with  her  SoundNoiseFUNK  project,   Nicole  Mitchell’s  Maroon  Cloud (FPE Records, August  2018),  and  Marc  Ribot’s upcoming Songs of Resistance (September 2018) featuring Victor as well as guests vocalists Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello.

Mike Reed is a musician, composer, bandleader and arts presenter based in Chicago. In addition to leading or co-leading several working bands, all rooted deeply in jazz and improvised music, he’s the current programming chair of the Chicago Jazz Festival, and the owner and director of the acclaimed performing arts venue Constellation.

Image: Fay Victor. Photo: Richard Koek

For more information on the exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, click here.

Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern architecture and urbanism has not been adequately explored. This presentation, derived from the recently-published Graham-funded book by the same title, introduces key concepts that chart the history of montage in late nineteenth-century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. Focusing on a specific case study, the talk demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. After the talk join us for a reception celebrating the publication of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018).

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, a role he assumed in March 2015. Martino oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. His exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 is currently on view at MoMA. In 2016, he cocurated, with Ann Temkin, the exhibition From the Collection: 1960–1969.

Previously, he held a SNSF Professorship at the University of Zürich. Stierli is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013) and coeditor of Participation in Art and Architecture (I. B. Tauris, 2016). He is the cocurator of the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. His scholarship has been recognized with a number of prizes and awards, among them the ETH Medal of Distinction and the Theodor Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008). In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich.

Image: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel, 1924-25. Photomontage. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow.

Computer music pioneer Carl Stone performs unreleased recent works, including Don Dae Gam and Sun Nong Dan, named after favorite restaurants, in this special concert for Lampo. Stone studied with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney at CalArts during the early 1970s, and, while still a student, began using appropriated material to generate work. His exploratory techniques led to a body of complex sound collages, widely credited for laying the groundwork for the entire sampling movement, and defining the arc of his singular practice over the decades since. He has proven a prolific and imaginative voice in electronic composition, mashing together notions of high and low culture and recontextualizing diverse ethnographic materials, from Purcell to Spears, into immensely beautiful, time-bending music.

Stone will also present an artist talk at the Lampo Annex on Friday, November 30, click here for more information and to RSVP.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Carl Stone (b.1953, Los Angeles, Calif.) has composed electroacoustic music almost exclusively since 1972, and has used computers in live performance since 1986. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. He is currently a faculty member at Chukyo University in Japan. Two retrospective volumes of his work, Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties (2016) and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties (2018) are available from Unseen Worlds.

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