Other Projects
Army of Love (stills, installation view) 2016
Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Nierman’s Army of Love is docu-fictional video exploring utopian solutions to the societal malady of loneliness in the era of romantic commodification. Score composed by Alvin Aronson. Army of Love screens through September at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art as part of Berlin Biennale 9.
2016, Format: Looping Video Soundtrack (40:07) K-W Institute Berlin Info Exhibition Book
Negative Entropy — Mika Tajima, 2014
Mika Tajima’s Total Body Conditioning takes its name from a physical conditioning program developed to adapt the body to an exercise regimen emphasizing endurance, flexibility, and performance through the seriation of time and the partitioning of bodily space. The exhibition comprises three scenes—display, work, and fitness—that invoke technologies developed to control and affect the body. Each scene traces the management of the body in different spaces and temporal contexts from factory assembly lines to therapeutic “after work” locations.
Featured in the exhibition alongside painted hot tub objects, Tajima’s machine-woven Negative Entropy acoustic panels portray spectrograms of field recordings from Toyota-powered Jacquard looms, an assembly line at a Toyota car factory in Japan, and a server colocation center. Using the same industrial source recordings, Alvin Aronson collaborated with Mika’s band New Humans to create a soundtrack for the exhibition.
Using microsound processes, the field recordings are recombined into washes of placid sound, through which the throbbing pulse of drum machines periodically surface. The compositional process mimicking principle of “jidoka”—the core of Toyota’s production method of lean manufacturing that defines the relationship between machines and workers (referred to as “automation with a human touch.”) Through extreme control of time and space demonstrated by this global production system, the natural body comes in tension with the machinic body.
Opening performance
2014, Format: Looping Audio (16:00) Eleven Rivington NYC Stream Catalog