VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
JUN 28, 2024
–
JUL 28, 2024
Sean Russell Hallowell
Time Recounted
Time Recounted includes recent work by composer and video artist Sean Russell Hallowell. The exhibition features a new interactive online experience, hosted by New Art City, with 3D video objects and spatial sound. Selected videos from the interactive experience accompany the exhibition as single channel artworks. The exhibition also illuminates Hallowell’s unique electronic process behind Time Recounted with synthesizer details and a composited video of an 8-channel audiovisual version. Using these multiple modalities, Hallowell’s work reframes our shifting relationship to nature with landscapes disrupted by technologically rendered patterns.
“By mixing documentary scenes such as these with geometrical patterns generated by analog video synthesizers, the line separating “natural” from “abstract” is blurred. Furthermore, temporalities both macro- and microscopic – tectonic shifts and video oscillators alike – come into dialogue, revealing uncanny similarities in the forms they tend naturally to produce.” — Sean Russell Hallowell
Sean Russell Hallowell is a composer and video artist from Occidental, California. His time-based art synthesizes experimental techniques developed from hand-built circuitry with a cosmic perspective on music as conduit of physical and metaphysical energy. Multimedia works, concert pieces and fixed-media compositions of his have been premiered at art festivals across the US as well as internationally. His art is inspired by the affordances of outmoded media technologies, such as analog audiotape and cathode-ray tube televisions. Through them, he explores phenomenologies of time in relation to the fourfold arts of number that Medieval European philosophers called the quadrivium — i.e. music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. He holds degrees in music from Brown University (BA) and Columbia University (PhD), where he studied Medieval music theory and composition.
Time Recounted, 2024, interactive online experience hosted by New Art City featuring videos and spatial sound generated by custom audiovisual synthesizers
Recounted Time (1), 2022, single channel video from 8-channel digital artwork created with custom audiovisual synthesizer
Recounted Time (2), 2022, single channel video from 8-channel digital artwork created with custom audiovisual synthesizer
Recounted Time (3), 2022, single channel video from 8-channel digital artwork created with custom audiovisual synthesizer
Midnight Sun, 2021, detail of custom hand-built audiovisual synthesizer
Midnight Sun, 2021, detail of custom hand-built audiovisual synthesizer
Artist’s Statement About the Work
Working at the intersection of music, video, and sculpture, I make audiovisual art that activates disparate modes of perception to highlight the grounding of our humanity in the natural world. Through custom-built electronic circuitry, I explore how aesthetic forms originate in our experience of physical reality. This I do to cast critical light on our existential suspension between the natural world that transcends us and the technological one we construct.
My work is dialectical. I illuminate new aesthetic paths by placing unexpected elements in stark contrast. One of the main poles of my process is the analog signal. I design and hand-wire my own audiovisual circuitry to tap directly into electronic phenomena. I find inspiration in the unmediated encounter this affords me with the materiality of electronic art-forms – music, video, and beyond. Over and over I return to the basic yet profound fact that oscillators that make tones we hear as musical can – when transposed into the realm of sight – produce geometric patterns we see as proportional.
Such insights anchor Recounted Time, which places footage of Icelandic landscapes in counterpoint to audiovisual patterns rendered by synthesizers of my own design. This work arose from reflecting upon modern society’s broken relationship to nature. We think we fully understand – and can on that account control – anything we “capture” through technology. Our ability to appreciate beauty in such scenic vistas as a mountain range obscures the glacial processes that produced it. By mixing documentary scenes such as these with geometrical patterns generated by analog video synthesizers, the line separating “natural” from “abstract” is blurred. Furthermore, temporalities both macro- and microscopic – tectonic shifts and video oscillators alike – come into dialogue, revealing uncanny similarities in the forms they tend naturally to produce. My impulse to make such art is deeply ethical. No matter how static it may appear, reality is all about process and change. Cultivating appreciation for this dynamism moves us away from our prevailing objectifying attitude towards nature and towards a more empathetic one.
installation view of custom hand-built audiovisual synthesizer for Lived Time (2023) at Gray Area in San Francisco, CA