released April 6, 2021

Format: Script for audio paper
Publisher: Seismograf
Country: Denmark
Artwork: Coppice
Duration: 20 minutes (60 minutes, extended version)
Including: Mark Booth and Jenny Vallier (narrators)
Date: May 16 and 24, 2018 (Yerkes Observatory recordings), 2021-2020 (written and produced), April 2021 (published)

Abstract

Founded in 1892 and known as the birthplace of modern astrophysics, the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin ceased operations in 2018. That year, its mechanical technologies were captured by Coppice (Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer) to draw parallels between its acoustic signatures and functions, and those of Coppice’s glossary of study since 2009.

Musing on the lack of delimiting frames (Chion, 2016) and vanishing point (Carpenter and McLuhan, 1972) in the auditory, Coppice manufactures a frame out of Yerkes’ architectures and acoustics. Within that frame, Coppice’s creative processes are anecdoted, while pointing to coordinates where conjunctions of its music may be found. Highlighting the intermediary influence of recording and reproduction technologies on perception and perspective – both in limiting and enhancing ways – open-ended questions of actuality and fiction are posed.

In this self-reflexive documentary experiment of music and phonography, obsolescence and preservation are creative resources that span from instruments and devices to shapeshifting spaces. Addressed directly, the listener observes sonic identities in flux, and finds footing through retrospection, projection, and imagination.

Coppice’s sonic artifacts in alignment with Yerkes’ telescopes intersect multiple domains of time, space, and scale. How is experimental music conceived over time and what is seen through it?

Composed by Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer.

Originally published as an peer-reviewed audio paper as part of Sound of Science, edited by Henrik Frisk and Sanne Krogh Groth for Seismograf doi.org/10.48233/seismograf2602, seismograf.org/fokus/sounds-science

Read the script at Issuu: issuu.com/futurevessel/docs/coppice_stewardship

Thank you to Doyal “Al” Harper, Ed Struble, Jesse Wirth, Kathryn Schaffer, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, The Chicago 00 Project, The Princess Grace Foundation, Seismograf, Jenny Kendler, Brian Kirkbride, and the departments of Art and Technology Studies and Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more information visit coppice.futurevessel.com and instagram.com/futurevessel

Side effects:

"The art duo Coppice (Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer) capture the sound of mechanical technologies at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin just before and after more than 100 years of operation (it ceased in 2018). With reference to media archaeology theories, the audio paper Stewardship to obsolescence and preservation: listening to specimen music through Yerkes Observatory’s refractor and reflector telescopes is a “self-reflexive documentary experiment of music and phonography, obsolescence and preservation”, exploring, representing and reframing the status of the laboratory while vanishing." –Seismograf (2021)