Suzanne Thorpe

Binary Stiches

August’s CLEAT features two trios, including an ensemble work from visiting composer Suzanne Thorpe, and a new work from Chicago based project Binary Stitches.

Thorpe will be joined by improvising electronic musicians Bonnie Jones and Stephan Moore. Together they will present an iteration of Serenades for Settling: Tending Ostreidae, a sonic framework and multimedia installation that contemplates human interactions within marine habitats. For this event, the trio will perform their sonic sense of listening with oysters, a species that contends with escalating human disruptions as they listen for safe habitats in which to settle. The trio will improvisationally interact with a speculative soundscape of an oyster habitat diffused across the CLEAT multichannel sound system. In this sonic sphere, listeners and performers will move with waves of ecological balance and churn, and consider modes of multispecies existence as we navigate the soundscape's emergent aquatic environment.  

Binary Stiches says “The horror! A writhing mass emerging from a server-lined tomb! A body sewn together from extractions! As you sink into its wretched sonic space, do you hear something intimately familiar? As you witness its limbs flail, do you look down to check that yours have not been amputated? Risk death by fear as you discover what lies beneath the flesh bound by Binary Stitches!”

Join us! Music at 8pm

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door

Suzanne Thorpe is a performer, composer and scholar who couples critical listening with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology. She crafts emergent and immersive sound engagements with electronic and acoustic instruments to illicit clusters of ambient saturation, temporal intensities and possible melodies. Thorpe’s process reveals dynamics within human cultures and nature's systems, and invites discourse to support empathy, understanding and advocacy. Thorpe has performed and exhibited internationally, both as a solo artist and a founding member of the critically acclaimed American group Mercury Rev. Her work has also been supported by grants and residencies from NYSCA, New Music USA, and the MAP Fund, and she was awarded a Gold record from the Recording Industry Association of America for her work with Mercury Rev. Thorpe is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan University, and remains co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization co-founded with Bonnie Jones dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.

Bonnie Han Jones is an Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and board member of High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, https://technesound.org/, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent her formative years in Baltimore, Maryland and currently resides in Chicago, IL on the nceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.

Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, programmer, engineer, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Much of his work is collaborative, most notably with sound artist Scott Smallwood in their duo Evidence and with choreographer Yanira Castro in the collective a canary torsi. He is the co-founder of the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater (CLEAT) at the Elastic Arts Foundation, which promotes and encourages the creation of multichannel audio works. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a Professor of Instruction in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.

Caleb Foss (they/them) is an artist and educator who develops mess-making systems using media technologies. They make software, games, videos, digitally-fabricated objects, and multimedia performances. Foss' methods draw from amusement parks and magic tricks, and their work seeks opportunities for amorphousness in the future of human media interactions. Their work has been showcased in film festivals including Chicago Underground, Imagine Science (Brooklyn), and FRACTO (Berlin) as well as Hand Eye Society's WordPlay Festival for writing in games (Toronto) and BitBash at the Chicago Humanities Festival. They are an Assistant Professor of Web Development, Design, and Social Media at Joliet Junior College.

Michael Hart is a prolific composer and multi-instrumentalist for media based in New York. His music has been featured on Nickelodeon, Netflix, HBO, and CBS. Michael currently performs with Batiniyah, an ambient trio, as well as his solo project These Low Lands, producing sounds for the ghosts between the static.

Timothy Tsang is a queer Chinese American dance artist, choreographer, and educator whose work explores movement, cultural memory, and embodied research through contemporary dance. Raised between Shanghai and Chicago, his artistic practice is shaped by an international upbringing and training across contemporary, concert, street, and social dance forms. His choreography has been commissioned and presented at the Auditorium Theatre, Links Hall, and the Edge Theater, and he has performed with South Chicago Dance Theatre, Mordine & Company Dance Theatre, and The Seldoms. He recently earned his MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan, where he was a recipient of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Fellowship and the Rackham International Research Award.