Dry Run

April 7 – September 7, 2016

Modeled after Stroll, a previous public artwork for the City of Santa Clarita, produced by the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2012, Dry Run is a “poetic sound installation” that responds to and explores the implications of the word, Drought.

Six Southern California artists and writers authored new original sound works that comment poetically on the state’s on-going water crisis. The authors’ voices are played back from digital audio files through custom-made sound modules created by the Center’s faculty and students. These modules take the form of remote sound boxes, containing digital audio hardware, software and amplified speakers. Each module is battery powered by external solar panels.

The six modules are installed on top of poles and placed along Santa Clarita’s South Fork Trail between McBean Parkway and Valencia Boulevard, facing the dry arroyo.

Dry Run is designed to re-imagine the environment’s landscape through sound. The texts generated from the authors are a varied and dynamic reflection on absence and the impact of scarcity on our daily lives.

Artists

Production Credits

Center for Integrated Media (CalArts)

Project Producers/Curators: K. Bradford, Tom Leeser

Module Design: Tom Jennings, Dave Mickey
Module Production: Tom Jennings

Audio Recording: Jacob Goldman, Rob Ray

Production Management: Tyler Calkin

Technical Support: Jason Richards

City of Santa Clarita Arts Commission

Phil Lantis, Interim Arts and Events Manager

Jeff Barber, Arts and Events Supervisor

Dry Run Artist/Writers Bios

Neelanjana Banerjee’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Liner, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, World Literature Today, The Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Nimrod, A Room of One’s Own, Desilit, and several anthologies, including the forthcoming Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, Sept. 2016). She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press, 2016). In 2007, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She has had residencies at Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center, and received scholarships to attend the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her journalism has appeared in Alternet, WordRiot, Colorlines, Fiction Writers Review, HTML Giant, Kitchen Sink, and more. She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, a contributing editor with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and teaches writing with Writing Workshops Los Angeles.

K. Bradford is a writer, interdisciplinary performer, educator, and cultural worker living in Los Angeles. Their work has appeared on stages around the U.S. and in publications such as the LA Review of Books, Slag Glass City, Gulf Coast, Trop & viralnet.net. Bradford has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts & others. Before moving to LA, Bradford taught poetry and literature at Columbia College Chicago for eight years and was the head of the LGBTQ Office of Culture & Community. They also founded and directed innovative arts programs for marginalized communities in Austin and Chicago, funded by City Arts Commission grants. A recent graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Bradford holds an MFA in Writing and in Art + Technology. By day, they give public art tours and teach woodworking to kids on a school bus turned wood shop; by night they brew new work that blurs poetics, sound, bodies, and the space between the analogue & digital.

Dan Bustillo is a host and member of the Best Friends Learning Gang, a facilitator of L.A. based Cryptoparties, an organizer in neverhitsend, and an adviser of the Financial Aid Department of parafactual institution, Los Angeles College. Their practice is a collaborative, collective, and individual investigation of power dynamics. They also write letters.

Dan Bustillo holds an A.A. from Miami Dade College, a B.A. from Hunter College, and an M.F.A. from the Art and Technology program at California Institute of the Arts. They have been a speaking agent at Hunter College, KCHUNG radio, Otis College of Art and Design, Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, the Center for Integrated Media at CalArts, and the CalArts Aesthetics and Politics WHAP! Lecture series at West Hollywood Public Library. They have shared work at Machine Project, For Your Art, 356 Mission, Flux Factory, sometimes, Knight Hotel, Monte Vista projects, and Joey’s house, and their writing has been published in Tessex? (Image and Text Ithaca 2015), Black Clock blog, Perusal Per Usual Press, Hesse Press, and viralent.net. Dan Bustillo currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jen Hofer is a poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, bookmaker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. She publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, belladonna, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, NewLights Press, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, Writ Large Press, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Her most recent translations are Intervenir/Intervene, by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), Estilo / Style by Dolores Dorantes (Kenning Editions, 2016), and the forthcoming book Amé.RICA by Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas (Litmus Press), whose work was featured on The Offending Adam. Her visual work has shown at The Blaffer Museum, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Hammer Museum, and Project Row Houses.

Rob Ray is a Los Angeles artist examining technology in public/outdoor spaces through installations, interactive public artworks, experimental videos and sound compositions.

In 2015, Rob launched the EXOSKELETON arts concern in Los Angeles, California. EXOSKELETON collaborates with artists to create enthusiastic and thoughtful events and installations in the EXOSKELETON house and in strange disused places across the earth. EXOSKELETON also joins with artists to create monthly mail art mailings and weekly emails.
Rob’s interactive disorienteering guide, GET LOST! was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Manchester, UK and has exhibited at Conflux 2012 in New York and the Tracing Mobility festival in Berlin, Germany. His video game disguised as ATM, Bucky’s Animal Spirit, was selected for the art.tech exhibition at The Lab (San Francisco), and the (re)load exhibition at Antena (Chicago).

Rob also collaborates with Jason Soliday and Jon Satrom as a member of the Chicago-based circuit-bent multimedia noise trio I Love Presets. I Love Presets has performed at the GLI.TC/H 2011 and 2012 festivals, The SAIC’s Conversations at the Edge series and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

From 1999 to 2008, Rob was founding curator of the DEADTECH electronic arts center in Chicago, IL, USA. DEADTECH’s unique curatorial vision, residency facilities, workshop facilities and exhibition space were custom created to cater to the specific needs of the electronic artist and performer. DEADTECH exhibited artists from across the globe including the Beige Programming Ensemble, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Trevor Paglen, Norman White, Kevin Drumm, T.V. Pow and Kazuyuki K. Null. In 2010, Rob received his MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Tom Leeser is a digital media artist, educator, curator and writer. He is the Program Director of the Art and Technology Program in the School of Art and the Director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts.)

Leeser founded The Provisional Collective in 2012 to explore the “invisible” boundaries between art, life and media in a technological age. Since then the Provisional Collective has collaborated with numerous artists and has employed a diverse range of projects resulting in online publications, seminars, public art works, videos, installations, sound-based works and socially engaged initiatives.

The Provisional Collective’s intent is to explore collaboration through temporary and networked projects that can occur in public media spaces, alternative cultural and educational institutions and in our everyday landscapes. As a multidisciplinary and experimental practice, the collective has engaged in topics such as climate change, arts education within a globalized context, cultural memory and speculative futures. With backgrounds in photography, film, video and sound, the impulse of the collective is to expand our understanding and experience of social and virtual space through a critical process of immersion and participation.

Ebony Williams is a first generation Guyanese American Queer Black writer and healing artist transplanted into the sprawl of Los Angeles from Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in Writing from The California Institute of the Arts and is at work on How to Build a Ragdoll, a creative non-fiction manuscript where she and generations of women in her family seek home, a sense of place in the midst of violence. Her writing, explores the experiences of women throughout the African diaspora and the female body as container for memory, for culture, for an ancestral home often impacted by trauma. Ebony aims to embrace, complicate, break apart, and rebuild the way she/we understand family, culture, gender, race, the body/being embodied, and home. Her work has been included in S-tick Literary Magazine, Shadowbox Literary Magazine, and In-Process Inventory. IPI Press, and Line- The Journal of The Richard and Mica Hadar Foundation. Ebony is a healing artist organizing and leading community based writing, doll making, and fiber arts workshops focused on healing personal narratives across Los Angeles.

Dry Run Designer/Production Bios

Tom Jennings continues working as an artist, activist, and computer historian. Jenning’s work has been exhibited in numerous and varying art spaces around the country and has also shown internationally at the 49th Venice Biennalle. He had a solo exhibition “Story Teller,” the inaugural show at Machine Project, Los Angeles in 2003 where he also gave his lecture “Early Computing in 1994.” He has guest lectured at UC San Diego, UC Irvine and CalArts.

Jennings is a repository of technical crafts, practical philosophy, and the physics of programming at the Art and Technology Program at CalArts, where a large part of his job is teaching and mentoring graduate students in the technical and media arts. He received an MFA from UC Irvine in 2009. He has specialized in computers, software, and electronics since 1977, computer networking since 1984 and the Internet since 1992.

In 1992, with John Gilmore, Jennings founded the Little Garden, one of the earliest Internet service providers (ISPs), and in the same year he was hired as the first web master for Wired magazine. He was also the founder of Shred of Dignity, a skateboarders rights group, and publisher of the seminal queer core zine, “Homocore” from 1988–91. Jennings created the worldwide FidoNet bulletin board network (35,000 servers in 1995). He was inducted into the Shareware Industry Conference Hall of Fame, for Fido/FidoNet in 1997.

Dave Mickey Dave Mickey has designed sound, video, interactive, and lighting for theater productions at Off-Broadway’s Theatre Row, 59E59 NYC, Virginia Stage Company, International City Theatre, The Colony Theatre, The Rubicon Theatre, Laguna Playhouse, South Coast Repertory, the Chance Theatre, the Blank Theatre, and Syzygy theater. Mr. Mickey is a Co-Host of THE CUE podcast about show control. Some projects include MicePaceMaze at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the publication of 30 iOS apps, led a workshop on Interactive Theatre for the Scenofest at the PQ11 in Prague, and theme park show control (video) programming at Universal Studios Hollywood (2009/10). Mr. Mickey won the 2014 NAACP Best Sound Design for BREATH & IMAGINATION and the Robert E. Cohen Sound Achievement Award, a national award in sound design sponsored by USITT, three Editor Choice Awards from the Maker Faire, Honorable Mentions for the Garland Awards, Outstanding Achievements by StageSceneLA.com, and nominations for the LA Weekly Theater Awards. Mr. Mickey holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is the Sound and Projection Design Professor for the Theatre and Dance department at CSU Fullerton, Integrated Media Adjunct Faculty for The Center for Integrated Media at CalArts, and Sound design Adjunct Professor for Saint Mary’s College of California.

Dry Run Audio Recording Artist Bios

Rob Ray runs the EXOSKELETON exhibition space and mail art database. He also examines technology in public/outdoor spaces and creates interactive public artworks, experimental videos and sound compositions. The Abandon Normal Devices Festival, the Conflux Festival and the Tracing Mobility Festival have commissioned his work. Experimental Sound Studio commissioned Susuratti, his recent collaboration with Deborah Stratman, for their long-running Florasonic series at the Lincoln Park Conservatory. Rob also collaborates with Jon Satrom and Jason Soliday in the circuit-bent multimedia noise trio I Love Presets.

Jacob Goldman is a musician and sound artist from New Haven, CT, currently living in Los Angeles. His work ranges from sound installation to music production and composition for television. He's a former student of Joan La Barbara, Rhys Chatham and Morton Subotnick, and was 2015–16 artist-in-residence at CalArts’ Center for Integrated Media.

Dry Run Production Manager

Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and has since shown his work across the US and internationally. He has also led gameplay-based artist workshops in Nepal and Mexico. His participatory projects examine social constructions, habits, and anxieties through play and improvisation. Drawing particularly from safety and hygiene products and developing digital interfaces, Calkin rearranges material culture into social catalysts. The resulting situations propose new models for interpersonal and inter-object relations.

Dry Run Producer Bios

The Center for Integrated Media at CalArts is a trans-disciplinary, peer-to-peer, project-based studio environment that explores and critiques: multimedia performance, electronics, interactive systems, immersion, non-linear narrative and the Internet as a creative practice. The Center, located on the California Institute of the Art (CalArts) campus in Valencia, CA is a concentration of events, social interactions and workshops designed for artists who integrate multiple forms of media into new modes of expression.