Sue Huang & Brian House
Post-Natural Pastorale
Post-Natural Pastorale is a performance work exploring entangled temporalities in a time of climate crisis. The work takes as its starting point New York City's Freshkills, once the largest municipal dump in the world. Currently in the process of a decades-long transformation into a public park, the bucolic serenity of the landscape belies the multiple timescales unfolding above and below its surface—from the thousand-year decay of a Styrofoam cup to the seasonal cycle of the regenerating vegetation and the present gathering of clouds overhead.
This work takes time-based data from eight of these layers, including statistical projections of weather patterns and methane and leachate emissions data from the Department of Sanitation, and transforms them into musical scores. Performed on site by double bassist Robert Black (Bang on a Can All-Stars), sound and video recordings capture the music along with the surrounding nonhuman dynamics. The temporal layers of audio are interwoven into a single-channel composition, and algorithmic video processing reflects the undulating form of Earth's strata. The result is a journey through the deep time of this mammoth monument to the Anthropocene.
Supported by The Robert Black Foundation
Performer: Robert Black; Producer: Mariel Villeré; Co-Producer: David Feinberg; Director of Photography: Paul Shin; Animation: Alexander Dupuis
Artist Bio
Knifeandfork (Brian House + Sue Huang)
Since 2004, artists Brian House and Sue Huang have collaborated as Knifeandfork on projects that critically reframe contemporary media and technology. Culture guide Flavorpill writes, “the imaginative bicoastal duo‘s installations utilize unorthodox media, including text messages and video clips, in their expository repositioning of traditional art forms.” The artists have previously exhibited at national and international venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati; Rhizome at the New Museum, New York; the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine; Ars Electronica, Linz; and Kulturhuset, Stockholm, among others. They have received grant and commission funding from organization such as Rhizome; the James Irvine Foundation (MOCA, Los Angeles commission); and Creative Scotland (NEoN commission). They were selected as finalists for the Creative Capital Award in 2020 (On Our Radar). House (https://brianhouse.net) holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College. Huang (http://www.sue-huang.com) holds an MFA in Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Design at the University of Connecticut.