Contributors

Abstract

Previous article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLawrence Abu Hamdan* is an artist and audio investigator. Abu Hamdan’s interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background as a touring musician and facilitator of DIY music. His audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organizations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International. Abu Hamdan received his PhD in 2017 from Goldsmiths College London. He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions worldwide and is the author of the artist book [inaudible] : A politics of listening in 4 acts (2016).Robert Bird* is Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and focuses on the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His first full-length book Russian Prospero (2006) is a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Viacheslav Ivanov. He is also the author of two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev (2004) and Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008). His translations of Russian religious thought include On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (1998) and Viacheslav Ivanov’s Selected Essays (2001). His biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky is forthcoming from Reaktion Books in their series Critical Lives.Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities and Interim Directory of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (California 2017, Lewis Lockwood Award 2018), and has published on such topics as repetition, voice, opera, and madness, and on the music of John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Arnold Schoenberg, and Wolfgang Rihm.Africa Brown & Maggie Brown are the two youngest of seven children by singer, songwriter, playwright, Oscar Brown, Jr. Carrying on his prolific legacy means using their talents to “edutain,” offering insights into history, culture, and life. Their concerts include a world music sensibility, blending genres from classic jazz and ballads, to spoken word and folk tales set to hip-hop and afro-cuban rhythms. These two Brown sisters have not always worked together as a performing arts team. Both have great singing voices and inherited their old man’s theatrical style. Each of them had their professional start in theater, working with their talented family in productions and plays their Dad produced. While it would be enough to simply introduce the world to a treasure trove of poetic, musical material from the Brown family vault, these siblings are focused on bringing new arrangements and harmonies to the material. Audience members witness sisters who love sharing not only a Dad, but also the reigns of carrying on in the traditions: Music traditions. Storytelling traditions. Keepers of our Cultural Consciousness traditions. Chicago Jazz Royalty traditions.Yao Chen’s* music, always ritual in nature, eschews contemporary vogues and instead aims at a timelessness and an otherness that exists beyond the standard categories—music for the moment, but also music for then and music for what lies ahead. He has received commissions and awards from many international organizations including Radio France, Harvard University Fromm Foundation, Bernstein Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. Performed by many internationally famed musicians and ensembles, his music has been wonderfully received at renowned music festivals. He received his PhD in Composition from the University of Chicago. He is Associate Professor of Composition at Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer, and former musicologist. Most recently, her work appeared in the Radiolab series “Gonads.” She performs & records most frequently as one-half of Bay Area duo Hae Voces (with Kristina Dutton) and with NYC-based composer-performer collective Oracle Hysterical. Her solo EP, Anything Chartreuse, debuts in May 2019. Connery founded (2007) and directed avant-garde opera company, Opera Cabal, whose world premiere of G.F. Haas’s ATTHIS garnered accolades from The New York Times. As an artist-scholar she has held positions as Assistant Professor of Music and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago; Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley College; and Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford.Stephanie Cristello is a critic and curator living and working in Chicago. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art, and her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Elephant Magazine, Frieze Magazine, BOMB Magazine, and OSMOS, among other outlets. She is currently the Artistic Director at EXPO CHICAGO, the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, and the Director/Curator at Chicago Manual Style.Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism, and art theory. He has lectured extensively at universities in the US and across Europe, he is the author of over 150 papers in scholarly journals and collected volumes. Apart from 12 books in Slovene, his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into eight languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages). His new book The Riskiest Moment is forthcoming with Duke University Press. He is one of the founders of the Ljubljana Lacanian School.Robyn Farrell is Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) where she curates the moving image program in the Donna and Howard Stone Gallery for Film, Video, and New Media and has helped organize exhibitions with artists including Lucy McKenzie, Frances Stark, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Dennis Oppenheim, and Helena Almeida, among others. An internationally recognized scholar on television and video art pioneer Gerry Schum, Farrell organized the first American presentation of his work in Chicago and New York in 2014.Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name Design Office took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director).Ted Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work lies at the nexus of experimental music studies, critical organology, and science & technology studies. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, and earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago in 2018. He performs improvised music with the viola and the Buchla Music Easel.Shannon Harris has been internationally initiated into many traditional indigenous healing arts modalities since 2003. He was recently invited to privately study under a Maharaj in India and 34th generation Shaolin warrior in Canada. He’s taught and treated clients in Brazil, Canada, Kenya, India, and London along with traveling monthly all over the US. Currently, Shannon is working with the Bigelsen Academy, a group of scientists who are providing test case study evidence for his Audio Pharmacology™ private treatments, musical compositions, sound showers, and the effects of his qigong on patients, students, and clients.Hannah B Higgins* is Professor of Art and Art History and Founding Director of the interdisciplinary IDEAS program in the School of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Along with articles on food and art, early computer art, the avant-garde and experimental education in the arts, her books include Fluxus Experience (2002), The Grid Book (2009), and the anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (2012). She has received DAAD, Getty Research Institute, and Phillips Collection Fellowships in support of her research on sensation, cognition, and the shaping of information across the historic avant-gardes and contemporary material culture.Jessica Hopper is a Chicago-based author, editor, and critic. She has written for SPIN, Grand Royal, GQ, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Frieze, and Bookforum and was the music consultant for This American Life for eight years. She published her memoir, Night Moves, in 2018, and is currently at work on No God But Herself, a critical history about women in American music in 1975 (forthcoming, 2021).John Kannenberg is an artist who investigates sounds as cultural objects, the frontiers of digital heritage, the multisensory geography of museums, and the importance of listening as a cultural, political, and empathetic act. He has completed curatorial projects for the ZKM Medienmuseum in Karlsruhe; London’s Resonance FM; the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor; the Herskovits Library of African Studies in Chicago; and the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan. He is the Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Portable Sound, and recently completed a PhD at the University of Arts London. johnkannenberg.com.Glenn Kotche* is Chicago-based percussionist and composer. Since 2001 he has been the drummer for the Grammy-winning band Wilco. He is a Gray Center fellow at the University of Chicago and has been commissioned to compose for soloists, chamber ensembles, and full orchestra and has created several sound installations. He has played on over 90 recordings and has done residencies and workshops at dozens of universities and institutions. Kotche has made four solo recordings and frequently performs live solo as well as with Ate9 Dance and On Fillmore.Barbara McCullough is a filmmaker. Born in New Orleans, she spent most of her life in the Los Angeles area. Her projects include: Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflection on Ritual Space, Fragments, and The World Saxophone Quartet. Her most recent project, Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot, is a documentary on musical genius, community activist jazz musician, Horace Tapscott. Her work is screened nationally and internationally at galleries and museums. A 24-year veteran of the visual effects industry, she received a BA and MFA from UCLA. Currently, she is developing an installation, “Horace’s Garage.” McCullough sees herself as a part of the continuum of African American storytellers who aim to preserve knowledge by capturing the essence of her culture through film/video.W. J. T. Mitchell* is a Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and has served as editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978. His work is primarily focused on the interplay of vision and language in art, literature, and media, and the subjects of his articles range from general problems in the theory of representation, to specific issues in cultural politics and political culture. He has published widely in scholarly journals and written numerous books, most recently Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Art History (Chicago, 2015).Steven Rings* is a music theorist whose research focuses on popular music, voice, and transformational theory. Rings has taught at the University of Chicago since 2005. His 2011 book Tonality and Transformation received the Society for Music Theory’s 2012 Emerging Scholar Award. His article "A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),’ 1964–2009" won the 2014 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group. Rings is currently writing a book on Bob Dylan and is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory with Alexander Rehding.Jennifer Scappettone* works at the juncture of scholarly research, translation, and the literary arts, on the page and off. Her books include From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009), Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia UP, 2014), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016). She has developed interactive and site-specific poetry in collaboration with other artists at locations ranging from Counterpath (2019) to the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018), 6018|North for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles (2014), Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome (2011), and Fresh Kills Landfill (2010–11).Cauleen Smith* is an artist whose primary discipline is film. She has incorporated various influences and references in her images—science fiction, the black diaspora, and the lyrical potential of landscape. Smith first garnered national recognition with her feature-length film Drylongso (1998), which she completed during her graduate training at UCLA’s film school. In 2010 Smith moved to Chicago, where her work has grown increasingly site-specific and engaged in social activism. She created the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band Project, which has organized flash-mob appearances of a marching band composed of youth groups from the city’s South Side. This and other recent works have explicitly invoked the legacy of pioneering composer and performer Sun Ra, whose music and elaborate self-defining mythology also propelled the broader artistic movement of Afrofuturism.Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie at the intersection of sound studies and recent European philosophy, especially deconstruction, and her writings appear in journals including boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review, diacritics, Parrhesia: a journal of critical philosophy, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and Journal of Music Theory. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017) and her second book, The Sound of Biopolitics, is forthcoming with Fordham UP in the Commonalities series. In 2019–20 she is a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude working on a project titled "Cartotographies: Soundmapping Urban Political Economies."Ytasha L. Womack is an author, filmmaker, independent scholar, and dancer. Her books include Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture and the Rayla Universe series (Rayla 2212, Rayla 2213, Eartha 2198) www.raylauniverse.comJudith Zeitlin* works on the interface between traditional Chinese literature, theater, visual arts, and film. She is the author of Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale and The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Her projects on opera include co-curating the exhibition Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture, co-editing a special issue of The Opera Quarterly on Chinese opera film, and co-editing The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (forthcoming, 2019). Her writing has garnered fellowships from Guggenheim, ACLS, and NEH, among others. She is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chinese Literature and Theater & Performance Studies at The University of Chicago.Philip von Zweck has taught sound, radio, sculpture, and related things at several colleges and universities. He lives in Chicago.* Indicates recipient of the Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Portable Gray Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2019 Published for the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704274 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.