bitforms gallery

Performance: Wednesday March 7, 6 – 8 PM
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM & Sunday 12 – 6 PM

bitforms gallery is pleased to present Noise Patterns, Tristan Perich’s second solo exhibition with the gallery which features a new series of machine drawings exploring codified entropy. This theme is also the subject of his recent circuit album, Noise Patterns, presented with the drawings.

Perich’s machine drawings (2005-present) explore randomness and order as two opposite ends of a spectrum. The machine drawings are presented as either ink on paper or as wall drawings executed by a machine that the artist designed and built. A single pen strung between two small motors is controlled by the instructions of Perich’s program, describing a boundary and the pen’s motion within it. While precisely executed code drives the movement of the motors, the final drawings are realized by the mark of pen on surface, and are thus subject to physical circumstances such as the ripple of the string connecting pen to motor, the gradual depletion of ink, and the texture of the paper. These poetic incidents reveal that algorithms are merely instructions until they are executed by a physical machine. In dialogue with Perich’s recent work in music, the new drawings focus on the visual consequence of randomness.

Noise Patterns, the artist’s third circuit album, will be displayed as a listening station alongside a limited edition print of its source code. Released in 2016, Noise Patterns expands upon Perich’s acclaimed 1-Bit Symphony (2009), the subject of his first solo exhibition at bitforms gallery. While 1-Bit Symphony is comprised entirely of tonal sounds, Noise Patterns introduces randomness (noise) as a counterpoint. On a technical level, the sonic raw material in Noise Patterns is digital 1-bit noise: a probabilistic density of random oscillations that Perich sequences into rhythmic patterns and layers into textures, pulses, rumbles and beats. The physical format reveals how Perich engages music at all levels, from sound all the way down to the binary instructions of the hardware.

Tristan Perich’s work as a composer and visual artist is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. 1-Bit Music, his 2005 release, was the first album ever released as a microchip, programmed to synthesize his electronic composition live.

His compositions for soloist, ensemble and orchestra have been performed internationally by ensembles and artists including So Percussion, Calder Quartet, Vicky Chow and Bang on a Can at venues from the Whitney Museum and The Kitchen to Sónar and The Barbican. Perich has had solo exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion, Angels Barcelona, bitforms gallery (NYC), Mikrogalleriet (Copenhagen), Museo Carandente (Spoleto), The Addison Gallery (Massachusetts), The Katonah Museum (New York), Monster Truck (Dublin), LEAP (Berlin) among others, as well as group shows around the world. His Microtonal Wall was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Soundings exhibition. He has been featured in BOMB Magazine, The WIRE Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork and others.

Perich was a featured artist at Sonár 2010 in Barcelona, and in 2009, the Prix Ars Electronica awarded him the Award of Distinction for his composition Active Field (for ten violins and ten-channel 1-bit music). Rhizome awarded him a 2010 commission for Microtonal Wall, an audio installation with 1,500 speakers. Perich attended the Bang on a Can Summer Institute in 2002. He was artist in residence at Issue Project Room in 2008, at Mikrogalleriet in Copenhagen in 2010, at the Addison Gallery in Andover, MA and Harvestworks in New York in Fall 2010, and at the Watermill Center in 2012. His work has received support from New York State Council on the Arts, the American Music Center, Meet the Composer and others.

Perich studied math, music and computer science at Columbia University, and received a masters in from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

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