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    Eli Keszler: Swarms

    Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 12–5pm

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    Eli Keszler will present Swarms, a composition and installation created for SculptureCenter's lower level, on August 22, intermittently from 12-5pm, in conjunction with SculptureCenter's LIC Block Party.

    In Swarms, Keszler repurposes the severed pipes in an arched hallway of SculptureCenter's basement to commemorate their functionality and forge a landscape for immaterial responses. Composed of recorded and live acoustic and mechanical sources, Keszler's composition reflects swarm models and emergent behaviors observed in nature and developed through digital systems, patterns that mimic and layer but never connect. Using sound to connect the cellar corridors, pipes distribute audio throughout the space, questioning the physical divisions between distinctive hallways. Individual lines of sound are layered until their patterns are lost in a percussive stasis.

    In another large corridor, the audio channels enter through pipes to activate stretched piano wires shaped in a torqued 'X'. Glissandos slowly shift up and down the wire in a progressive circuit, tracing the sonic contour of the X's visual pattern. This complex series of spatial and sonic interventions serves as a setting for a solo drum performance by Keszler. Together, the installation and performance construct a swarming network of sounds that is both static and fluid, recalling the organized chaos of collaborative intelligence in natural and digital spheres.

    Eli Keszler (b. 1983 in Boston, MA) is a New York-based artist, composer, and percussionist whose practice is situated within the intersections of architecture, performance, installation, notation, and composition. Keszler's installations and visual work have appeared at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; The Kitchen, New York; South London Gallery, London, UK; Barbican, London, UK; LUMA Foundation, Arles, France; Tectonics Festival Reykjavik, Iceland; and Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands; among many others. Keszler has toured extensively throughout Europe and the US, performing solo and in collaboration with artists such as Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Oren Ambarchi, Joe McPhee, Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, T Model Ford, Ran Blake, and Ilan Volkov with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. His writing and work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Wire Magazine, Frieze, and Modern Painters.