In her Lampo debut, Madalyn Merkey premieres the performance of Digital Concert Creatures, a quadraphonic work for synthetic computer sounds and voice. Here, she sets autonomous sonic characters, or “creatures,” in motion, building sound by layering frequencies. “The main idea is that each letter on the keyboard has a different personality defined by four columns of numbers on the computer screen,” she writes. “Each keystroke catches a snapshot of the ‘creature’ as it moves along a compositional path, which then becomes complicated or influenced by the other keys being pressed.” Through a mix of control and chaos—and informed by mathematics more than traditional musicianship—Merkey’s new work is as playful as it is dense.

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.

Madalyn Merkey (b.1988, Oklahoma City, Okla.) is a composer and performer of live computer music based in Oakland, California. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art in 2010. Her recent work is concerned with using principles of logic to create computer programs that generate distinct sound surprises in a live setting. Merkey is also the English translator of Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia, a pioneering electronic music text written by Enore Zaffiri in the 1960s. Her translation, Two Schools of Electronic Music, is forthcoming from Die Schachtel. Recordings of Merkey’s work Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014) are available on New Images Ltd.

Join us for a talk by Manuel Raeder focusing on the work of his Berlin-based interdisciplinary design office, Studio Manuel Raeder and independent publishing house, BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. Concerned with the construction of narratives in the form of books, exhibitions, and communication design, the studio works closely with artists and designers to explore how books can be used as experimental devices to document or conceive of ideas, as well as how exhibition design can trigger different sensorial experiences through a spatial experience. Through his interests in the meaning of books in space, the archive, and the future of libraries, Raeder questions how different forms of organizing and categorizing can define or alter history.

Studio Manuel Raeder has collaborated on over 150 artist’s books and has been responsible for the communication strategies and graphic identities of several cultural institutions and galleries including Kölnischer Kunstverein (2007 – 2011), Kunstverein München (2010 – 2015), Para Site Hong Kong (2012 – 2014), Artists Space New York (since 2009), Galerie Neu Berlin (since 2005), Mendes Wood DM São Paulo/Brussels/New York (since 2014), kurimanzutto Mexico City (since 2016), as well as the fashion label BLESS (since 2004).

In 2011, Manuel Raeder founded the publishing house BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE to distribute and publish artists who have a strong interest in exploring the format of the artist’s book. In doing so, the studio has developed longstanding collaborations with artists such as Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Mariana Castillo Deball, Haegue Yang, Nora Schultz, Danh Vo, Heinz Peter Knes, Leonor Antunes, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Eran Schaerf, and Sergej Jensen, amongst others.

In collaboration with Elgarafi, the studio created a temporary shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Apart from offering Elgarafi prints, books published by BOM DIA and Muebles Manuel furniture, the space also hosts regular events.Specializing in high quality artist books that are conceived as an integral part of artists projects or as artworks themselves.

BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE — ‘good day, good afternoon, good night’ in Portuguese — conveys the idea that books can become part of everyday life, regardless of the time of day.

Concurrent with this event, the Graham Foundation Bookshop will host a BOM DIA pop-up featuring a selection of recent titles.

Image: Exhibition Architecture by Studio Manuel Raeder for Eduardo Costa, Mental Relations, 2017 at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, photo: Ramiro Chaves

The Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1974), was a cultural touchstone of the 1960s and 70s. The iconic cover images of the Earth viewed from space made it one of the most recognizable volumes on bookstores shelves. The lecture will shed light on material aspects of the Catalog—its mode of production and behind-the-scenes debates- and to better understand the intentions of its protagonists.

Caroline Maniaque-Benton, PhD, is Professor of the History of Architecture and Design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture  Normandie, and part of the research laboratory Ipraus- Umr AUSser /University Paris Est. A past fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), she is the author of Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009),  French Encounters with the American Counterculture 1960–1980 (Ashgate, 2011), and the editor, with Meredith Gaglio,  of the anthology entitled Whole Earth Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016).  She is the co-curator of the exhibition Mai 68. L’architecture aussi!, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, May-September 2018. She also is editing the book Les années 68 et la formation des architectes, Rouen, Point de vues, 2018.

This talk is presented in relationship to the 2012 publication grant to Caroline Maniaque-Benton for The Whole Earth Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016).

Image: Back cover image of a cutaway globe against a pink background showing the two Americas, filled with earthworms breaking through the surface. Paul Krassner and Ken Kesey (eds.), “The Realist Presents: The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog,” Realist 89 (New York: Realist Association, March 1971). Courtesy Stewart Brand and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

Landscape architecture has a fraught relationship with gardening, despite having developed from it via landscape gardening, as it has sought professionalization by becoming more architectural. Raxworthy argues that as landscape architecture has become more representational it has lost touch with maintenance tools in gardening that allow for the optimization of the properties of change that landscape materials like plants have, such as growth. Here, Raxworthy presents an overview of his latest book, Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening which was supported by a Graham Foundation grant in 2016 and published by MIT Press in 2018. The book advances a new model for plant form: "the viridic”—from the Latin for green, virent, and growth, viridesco—a landscape equivalent of the tectonic, which has been undertheorized in landscape architecture, and encourages the discipline to engage directly with the garden. 

Julian Raxworthy, PhD, is an Australian landscape architect, and teaches in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Design programs at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was a recipient of a Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts grant for his book Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by The MIT Press in Fall 2018.

Image: Species from the family Araceae collected by Roberto Burle Marx highlighted around the lake at the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil. Courtesy the author.

Architecture is a spatial performance that can engage space-making and the idea of liberation as a spatial practice—much as Michel Foucault said that liberty is a practice. In this talk, Gooden explores how relationships between architecture and performance liberate otherness and challenge the hegemony of Western thought and cultural imagination.

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and sole principal of Huff + Gooden Architects. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology.  His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, speaking, performance, and education advocacy in the pursuit of spatial and social justice.  Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation of Columbia University where he is a co-director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). He teaches advanced architectural design and theory at Columbia University where his studios focus on performance and cultural theory relative to global topics. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press) published in 2016.

Image: Harlem Now: Architecture and Its Ghosts (model view), 2017. Courtesy Mario Gooden

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

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