Zack Davey

In reflection of my recent work, I became particularly interested in glitches and malfunctions that would occur throughout the process of audio programming and editing. Glitch aesthetic in and of itself is not something that I’ve ever been particularly attracted to. However, the process of failure itself interests me. Artist Eugénie Shinkle wrote that “[i]n a failure event, the unimaginably large, extroverted, operatic sublime – which many video games attempt to simulate visually – is replaced by an unimaginably complex ‘introverted’ sublime that is incapable of presentation to the senses… it is not the object that is the source of sublime sensation, but our inability to comprehend its inner workings.” (This statement is continued on zackdavey.com ↗).

Website

Two Views

Sound, performance, installation

Documentation of a performance piece created in collaboration with sculptor Yang Yi, inspired by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

Untitled

Performance

Score: Find a location. Record the sounds here. Save them onto an audio storage device (i.e. usb drive, sd card, cd, vinyl record). Leave the recording in the location in which it occurred, having never listened to it.

This work was created for the Hyundai/RISD Collaborative, alongside the Sound Design for Mobility team.

Untitled

Sound, performance, installation

Documentation of a performance originally using 25.4 channel audio

Interweaving (Disintegration Cycles)

Video

(Collaboration with Arielle Eisen) This project started with the interweaving of our interests in reconstruction and ruin; focusing on the aestheticization of disintegration by connecting it to the presence of bodily warmth. Our produced de- or re-construction cycle exists not in a linear progression from beginning to end, but more so in an interconnected web.

Untitled

Documentation of web-based performance

Bill Evans originally wrote “Peace Piece” to convey a feeling of loneliness. For me, it is his harmonies which accurately portrays loneliness, and the composition which romanticizes it. In “Untitled,” I programmed an algorithm that uses the brightness of my backyard to control a Seed function which continuously reorganizes all of the notes of Bill Evan’s “Peace Piece.”

Clouds

3 Channel video, 4 channel audio, 2 self-made controllers

In this installation, two self-made controllers were placed inside of the space. Viewers could interact with them, controlling and altering the rate in which the piece would glitch, and begin to fail. The original source imagery is of clouds.

Decentralization

3D Concept

Concept for an electroacoustic performance in the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery, in collaboration with artists Lisha Nie, Yixiao Wang, and Shuyuan Zheng.

The Anxiety and Dispassion of Alexa

Sound, performance, installation

Documentation of a performance at the RISD Painting Department Triennial Exhibition. It was executed in collaboration with artist Lisha Nie.

On This Night

Sound, performance, installation

Documentation of a performance originally using 25.4 channel audio. In this clip, from 03:20 to 4:50, each of the 25 speakers in the space is playing a unique Christmas song.

Painting ↓

Image

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Zack
Davey