µ (mu)

In this talk, artist Marina Rosenfeld will present an overview of her practice. The program also includes an informal introduction to her new project µ (mu), to be developed while in residence at EMPAC.

A 48-hour piano performance inspired by abandoned Bell Labs research on environmental recording. Photographic panels that double as the physical contours for a live sound work. These are just two examples from Marina Rosenfeld’s body of work, which merges approaches from composition, sound installation, and the visual arts. Rosenfeld’s work often seems to inject physical structures with sonic forms. Her installations explore the sculptural substrata and (in the artist’s words) “material instabilities” that underlie composed works and sound performance. Inspired by musical minimalism yet critical of its histories, Rosenfeld’s works rearticulate sound as a relational field.

While in residence at EMPAC, Rosenfeld will embark on a new project titled µ (mu) that emerges from her longstanding work with dubplates. Unlike vinyl records, dubplates are one-off and hand-cut. For this project, Rosenfeld imagines the dub plate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm, independent of the audio it embeds. She looks at the ways in which analog agents–a stylus or a hand–modify the sonic and visual content of the plates. The artist asks what might happen if one were to focus not on the overt sound within the dubplate but on incidental phenomena along its surface. Rosenfeld’s residency is a visual and sonic inquiry into the topography of the dubplate’s (material) grooves.