R. Luke DuBois and Björn Schülke
R. Luke DuBois- New York Premiere
Bjoern Schuelke- United States Debut
Exhibition Dates: May 25 – July 15, 2006
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with German multi-media sculptor Bjorn Schuelke and New York based musician, composer and programmer R. Luke Dubois. This exhibit marks the New York premiere of Dubois’ art installations and Schuelke’s United States debut.
Bjoern Schuelke (b. 1967) designs objects that playfully transform live spatial energy into active responses in sculptural form. Born form a world of stuffed animals, spaceships, unusual scientific instruments and robots, some of these pieces also employ alternative energy sources– and speak powerfully to the environmental concerns of today.
Included in this exhibition are twelve of Schuelke’s Solar Kinetic Objects, delicate blue and white active sculptures powered and adorned by solar cells, some which employ tiny red blinking lights and propellers. Also on view, Nervous is an fluffy orange quivering ball of fur that emits electro beeps and extraterrestrial sounds frantically as viewers move closer to engage the object. Aerophon #4, a sterile-white and motorized pipe organ resembling the form of a guitar, responds to motion with bellows of sound and compression of the instrument’s body.
Schuelke has exhibited internationally including the Museu Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, BEAP Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia, the Rauma Biennale in Balticum, Finland, jeune creation, exposition internationale d’art contemporain, in France, and the European Media Art Festival in Germany.
In this exhibition R. Luke DuBois (b. 1975) presents work that explores the constructions of pop-cultural ephemera and its inherent temporal value structure. These pieces have grown out of his long-standing investigation of “time-lapse phonography”, a sonic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, spectral averaging reveals the average sonority of a piece of music. A programmer as well as composer, DuBois has authored software that produces a sort of average timbre, offering a sense of the average key and register of a song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time a recording was made.
Dubois’ Billboard, a 37-minute sound installation for iPod, uses all the songs that topped Bilboard’s Hot 100 chart chronologically since its August 1958 inception as source material. The spectral average of each of the 857 songs plays for one second, representing each week the song stayed at #1. His video installation Academy operates similarly, arraying algorithmically determined visual and sonic averages of the past Academy Award “Best Picture” Oscar winners since 1927, smearing audio, film sets and actors together in time. Chronologically each film plays over the space of one minute, covering 75 years of popular cinematic history. In a third installation, Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication’s first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, collapsing time, and emerging with a collective portrait. Temporal shifts in photographic representation blend together and speak to the crafted relationship between gaze, desire, and sex object.
In May, 2006 Cantaloupe Records released DuBois’ new album “Timelapse”, which also features Billboard. He has appeared on over 20 albums both individually, as a producer, and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. Known as a software engineer, he is also the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for real-time manipulation of matrix data, and has collaborated on projects with many artists and musicians, including Toni Dove, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Todd Reynolds, Tirtza Even, Chris Mann, Michael Gordon, and LEMUR. DuBois holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and currently teaches at New York University.