Consider the Drone, Barbara London and Aura Satz in conversation
What’s in a sound? And what of a drone? Venerable curator Barbara London is joined in conversation by artist Aura Satz, an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK with a particular interest in the sustained, ambient, and minimal. Satz and London discuss the artist’s approach to sound as an intangible, yet integral component of art and daily life, including her telephone sound composition Dial Tone Drone (2014), a piece that questions, articulates, and explores the drone form in all its political, conceptual, meditative, and musical implications. Their conversation opens onto broader artistic concerns, including the sculptural possibilities of combining sculpture and sound, the role of technology in our audible landscape, sound and connectivity, and her ongoing series of works with women composers. This program is organized in conjunction with Seeing Sound , an exhibition opening in June 2021 at KADIST San Francisco featuring Marina Rosenfeld, Aura Satz, and Samson Young. This exhibition is curated by Barbara London and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI). Seeing Sound is a traveling exhibition curated by Barbara London, with the support of Research Assistant Kristen Clevenson and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). This exhibition and tour are supported, in part, by Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E. A. T.) program and with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum. About Barbara London is a New York-based curator, writer, and KADIST advisor, who founded the Video-media Exhibition & Collection Programs at The Museum of Modern Art. Her book Video Art/The First Fifty Years (Phaidon) was released in January 2020 and her podcast Barbara London Calling launched in August 2020. London was the first to integrate the Internet as part of curatorial practice, with Stir-fry (1994); Internyet (1998); and dot.jp. (1999.) She organized one-person shows with such media mavericks as Laurie Anderson, Peter Campus, Teiji Furuhashi, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Song Dong, Steina Vasulka, Bill Viola, and Zhang Peili. Her thematic exhibitions at MoMA included Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013); Looking at Music (2009); Video Spaces (1995); Music Video: the Industry and Its Fringes (1985); and Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto (1979). London’s writing has appeared in numerous catalogs and publications, including ArtForum, Flash Art, Yishu, Leonardo, Art Asia Pacific, Art in America, Millennium, Modern Painter, and the Guardian. Aura Satz is a London-based artist whose work encompasses sound, film, performance, and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and dialogical notion of voice. Satz has looked at various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, BFI Southbank, the New York Film Festival, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Hayward Gallery, Sydney Biennale 2016, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, High Line Art, the Rotterdam Film Festival, MoMA NY, and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London; the Hayward Gallery project space, London; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Dallas Contemporary, Texas; George Eastman Museum, Rochester among others. Satz currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.