MY VOICE HAS AN ECHO IN IT
Temporary Distortion (NYC)
MY VOICE HAS AN ECHO IN IT is a six-hour durational performance of live music, spoken text and video set within a freestanding, sound-proof installation that is 24 feet long by 6 feet wide. While viewing the performers through two-way mirrors, audience members listen to music ranging from drifty ambient sounds to erasure poetry to raucous punk-inspired anthems through headphones along the outside perimeter of the installation. Complex and densely layered, Temporary Distortion creates an intimate experience where everyone has a front row seat.
Viewers are encouraged to come and go throughout the six-hour duration of the event. Capacity is limited and reservations are strongly recommended.
“Temporary Distortion just keeps elevating their game. You could call that game sculptural video, or perhaps living set design, or maybe just multimedia ravishment.” – Time Out New York
6 hours durational
Co-presented with Ideal Glass Gallery
Jan 7 – 6pm to 12am
Jan 8 – 6pm to 12am
Jan 9 – 6pm to 12am
Jan 10 – 6pm to 12am
Jan 11 – 12pm to 6pm
Ideal Glass Gallery
22 East 2nd Street, Manhattan
FREE; Reservations Recommended
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Temporary Distortion explores the potential tensions and overlaps found between practices in visual art, theater, cinema and music. The group works across and between disciplines to create performances, installations, films, albums and works for the stage.
Interdisciplinary artist Kenneth Collins formed Temporary Distortion in 2002 when he began staging intimate performances in claustrophobic, life-size shadow boxes in New York City. Performers were isolated behind large sheets of glass and whispered lyrical texts into microphones from inside each box, accompanied by atmospheric music and changes in light.
In later works, larger boxlike structures were built from steel scaffolding, industrial lights, speakers, televisions and video projection surfaces. The group began merging installation, theater and cinema in 2007 for a trilogy of popular film genre deconstructions: Welcome to Nowhere, Americana Kamikaze and Newyorkland. This trilogy concluded in 2012.
Temporary Distortion’s recent work has focused on long-duration, installation-based performance featuring live music, where spectators are encouraged to freely come and go throughout all-night events…
Ideal Glass Gallery is an New York-based art collective founded by performance artist and filmmaker Willard Morgan to shock, entertain, and transform. Collaborating with art-wear sculptor Uta Bekaia, visual artist Ayakamay, sound designer John Sully, editor Jessie Stead, the international team explores social activism, gentrification, sexual identity, and the slavery of debt-through live performance, sound recording and art video.
EMPAC is where the arts, sciences, and technology interact with and influence each other by using the same facilities, technologies, and by breathing the same air. Situated on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC is dedicated to building bridges between our human senses, to modes of perception and experience, to creating meaning in a physical environment, and to the intangible world of digital technology.
Installation Designer, Direction & Text: Kenneth Collins
Composition, Musical Direction & Sound Design: John Sully
Video Design & Assistant Installation Design: Scott Fetterman
Performances by: Kenneth Collins,
Scott Fetterman, Jenna Kyle and John Sully
Metalsmith: H. Scott Fetterman
Assistants: Daniel Acampa, Lauren Dunitz, Michael William Freeman & Emily Perry
MY VOICE HAS AN ECHO IN IT was commissioned by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY with composer commissioning award and additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts’ with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additional support, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Residency support provided by The Watermill Center and Ideal Glass Gallery.