2009 - 2013
- Audible Geology (2013)
- Scenes From Last Week (2011)
- The Week in Review (2010)
- Color Field (2009)
- Nitrogen Cycles (2009)
- Ah Um (2009)
- Verb Adverb (2013)
2003 - 2008
Audible Geology (2013)
Andrew Demirjian
Documentation of the installation at the Visual Art Center in Summit, NJ. The work uses three weeks of audio surveillance of the Grand Canyon as its source material for a series of audiovisual compositions.
Scenes From Last Week (2011)
Andrew Demirjian
In a city constantly moving forward and erasing its relationship with the past, Scenes from Last Week seeks to re-insert the past into the present. The work is a public art installation that uses video surveillance cameras and monitors in two storefronts directly across the street from each other. In addition to showing the current street view the monitors display the view from seven previous days synchronized to the present moment, giving the passerby the chance to see the immediate history of where they are standing. The work creates a digital hall of mirrors, a perceptual trip wire into the past, intended to reawaken our senses to randomness and ritual in our daily environment.
This work was created during an artist residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York. The piece was presented in midtown by The Roger Smith Hotel and Beekman Liquors in June of 2011. and at 218 and 225 14th St. in collaboration with Art in Odd Places (the participating venues were Rags-a-GoGo and 14th Street Framing Gallery). The work explores the tension between fear of surveillance and our love of being on camera.
The Week in Review (2010)
Andrew Demirjian
The Week in Review maps the stock price fluctuations of the three largest companies in the music industry to musical notes and visuals. The piece highlights the role of the global marketplace in music by reversing the traditional industry relationship that turns speculations on music into money; instead it turns speculations on money into music.
The Week in Review is an interactive audiovisual projection that participants can play through a turntable and LED clock interface. When the piece is not being played there is a program mode that creates patterns from the week of data. The documentation above is from the installation version at Eyebeam Project Space in June of 2011.
Color Field (2009)
Multi-channel video installation
Dozens of unwanted television sets from Craig's List were put into a piling lot in Asbury Park to create a video installation for the TriCity Arts Festival. The videos are three short pieces that reflect on the cathode ray tube as the country switches from analog to digital reception.
Technical information: Part 1 uses the brightness fluctuations of video feedback to control a noise signal that simulates an ocean wave. The video feedback fills a 3D model that is scaling in response to the brightness fluctuations as well. The second part is a NTSC color bar that has certain colors being knocked out then different sections of the screen are being randomly sampled while an audio oscillator is reading the center scan line. The third part manipulates a television set being turned on and off with the center scanline being read to create the soundtrack.
Nitrogen Cycles (2009)
Andrew Demirjian & Zachary Seldess
Nitrogen Cycles is an 8-channel sound art installation that sonically maps the daily activity of live fish into the gallery space. A rectangular fish tank stands in the center of the gallery and each fish is assigned a unique tone that spatially travels through the rectangular gallery corresponding to that fish’s activity. The music generated is a reflection of the dynamic shifts in the location, speed and the relationship between the fish in their daily lives. Through motion and color tracking a sonic transposition is created that immerses the listener into an aural experience of the movements inside the fish tank. This twists the visitor’s traditional sensory experience by putting their ears inside the tank and the eyes outside of it.
Four speakers are low to the ground and an additional four are over six feet high in the air, so we hear the fish sound travel and pan with height fluctuations as well as width. The pitch scales from low to high on the y-axis, and the x-axis controls a tremolo effect that is fastest at the center of the tank and slower at the edges. When a fish moves quickly the sound is processed with a filtering effect that emphasizes their sharp movement.
Ah Um (2009)
This piece re-categorizes a media literacy lecture by removing all of the words and keeps just the stutters and “ah’s” and “umm’s”. The vocal fragments eventually coalesce into a rhythm and the vocalizations become a percussion backdrop for improvisation. During the middle of the song the vocals are stretched and fragmented in a conversational improvisation with alto saxophonist Rob Brown. Recorded live at the Bronx River Arts Center the band also includes Sabir Mateen (tenor saxophone), Lewis Porter (keyboards), Andrew Drury (drums), Andrew Demirjian (audiovisual processing) and Chad Dell (lighting and camera feeds).
Verb - Adverb (2013)
Click here to start this web piece. It is a javascript program that combines Richard Serra's verb list with Peter Wegner's Adverb list from A Monument to Change While it is Changing. It is constantly recombining these text data bases in different ways, the work is different every time creating unexpected combinations of text . I recommend using a Firefox browser in full screen mode.