Matt Rogalsky’s work as a media artist often focuses on exploration of abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored streams of information. He performs and presents work regularly in Europe and North America. Recent projects include a series of performance and installation works exploring radio silences, a commission from the Berliner Festspiele for a new version of John Cage’s Fontana Mix, the sound installation Auricle, in Norwich Cathedral (UK), and Perfect Imperfect, a collaborative series of exhibitions with UK artist Chloe Steele in England and Canada. In 2004 he made a performance tour in the Netherlands and Germany with Anne Wellmer (electronics) and Anne La Berge (flute/electronics), installed sound works for exhibitions in Sheffield and Norwich UK, participated in the Digital Poetics and Politics summer institute at Queen’s University (Kingston Canada) and was a featured artist in the Guelph Jazz Festival (Guelph Ontario) and the SoundPlay Festival (Toronto Ontario). Most recently he performed with Phill Niblock as part of the Pleasure Dome series in Toronto, and curated the fourth annual Tone Deaf festival of experimental sound performance at Modern Fuel Gallery (Kingston Ontario). Rogalsky is currently a PhD candidate in the Music Department of City University London, researching the history of David Tudor’s Rainforest series, and is an adjunct instructor at Queen’s University School of Music.

Abstract

Notes on Auricle, a sound installation for Norwich Cathedral

Since 2000, I have been working in various ways with small sounds scavenged from media sources, using homemade software to collect audio which falls below a very low threshold. This process is applied in two short pieces which derive from speeches of George W. Bush and a longer piece which was originally created as a sound installation.

“2 minutes and 50 seconds silence (for the USA)” employs Bush’s speech of March 17, 2003, delivered in the White House, in which he gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of town. “A Little Bird Told Me” employs an awkward and hurried press conference convened on the south lawn of White House on June 6, 2004, in which Bush announced the resignation of the director of the CIA, George Tenet – while a bird chirped continuously in a nearby tree. “Auricle” was conceived as a site-specific sound installation for Norwich Cathedral (UK) and is a reduction of a week’s worth of the daily Church of England services broadcast on BBC Radio 4.