Join artist Kamau Amu Patton and Skidmore Professor Adam Tinkle on Thursday, November 29 from 5:00–9:00 PM in Patton’s exhibition Tel_, on view in the Tang’s mezzanine, for an exploration into the power of sound, music, sensory awareness, and deep listening. 

SSSSHHHH / SoundMind is comprised of three discreet phases:
Phase I
5:00: SSSSHHHH with Kamau Patton
5:30: SoundMind with Adam Tinkle
6:00: SSSSHHHH with Kamau Patton

Phase II
6:30: Conversation with Kamau Patton, Adam Tinkle, and Tomie Hahn on approaches to listening

Phase III
7:30: SSSSHHHH with Kamau Patton
8:00: SoundMind with Adam Tinkle
8:30: SSSSHHHH with Kamau Patton

This fifth iteration of SSSSHHHH (the first three took place in Chicago, the fourth at Skidmore in September) will focus on active music that encourages movement through mental and physical space, objects through which audiences can listen, and instructions for specific types of listening. If music is written as a score for musicians to perform, can one compose a score for listeners? 

This thirteenth iteration of SoundMind is a site-specific meditation workshop that focuses on sensory awareness and aesthetic activation of the breath, body, and voice.

Installments of SSSSHHHH and SoundMind will be sandwiched around a longer discussion with Patton, Tinkle, and Tomie Hahn, Professor of Performance Ethnology and Director of The Center for Deep Listening at RPI, about perspectives on and approaches to voice and listening. The conversation will explain what happened in Phase I and give you the tools to experience Phase III. But you are free to drop in and out at any time. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator. His work is an examination of history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007. His recent works utilize a variety of media and art forms, such as transformation of speech, radio transmission, video feedback, and painting. His work has been shown at the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival and as part of the Machine Project Field Guide to L.A. Architecture. His work Elevator Music 27: Kamau Amu Patton was on display at the Tang in 2014-15, and he performed in the Tang’s Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow: Sound, Black Study, and the Multidisciplinary Artist in 2017.

Adam Tinkle is the Director of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Media and Film Studies at Skidmore, where he creates, teaches and writes about music, sound, media and performance. In 2010, he co-founded the Universal Language Orchestra, a group of elementary-aged novice musicians that composed, improvised, and built their own instruments. He subsequently created several similarly path-breaking arts education programs across San Diego County, where his collaborations with his students and his audience-participatory works were shown at the Birch Aquarium, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art, Old Globe Theatre, and Institute of Perception. His award-winning solo performance A Mess of Things merges radio documentary with songs and video art. In May 2014 his interactive sound sculpture the Shantytown Scrapblaster was permanently installed at the Media Arts Center San Diego.

Tomie Hahn is a Professor of Performance Ethnology and Director of The Center for Deep Listening at Renselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She is a performer and ethnologist whose activities span a wide range of topics including: Japanese traditional performing arts, Monster Truck rallies, issues of identity and creative expression of multiracial individuals, and relationships of technology and culture; interactive dance/movement performance; and gestural control and extended human/computer interface in the performing arts. She is a teacher/performer of shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), and of nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance) holding the professional stage name, Samie Tachibana. Hahn is the author of Sensational Knowledge-Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (Wesleyan University Press), which won the 2008 Alan P. Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, recognizing the most distinguished, published an English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology.