If We Stay Still
Exploring how our patterns of movement impact the world we live in, If we stay still uses sound, video, sculpture, and music to create an immersive, interactive environment in which stillness and action feel both unnervingly precarious and urgently necessary. This installation reflects on the potential of slowing our movement throughout the planet while speculating on what the planet might look and sound like in a future shaped by proposed climate cooling technologies.
About the Team
Jeremy Bolen is an artist, researcher, organizer, filmmaker and educator interested in speculative planetary futures. Throughout the past fifteen years he has created research and work at several scientific institutions including: CERN, Argonne National Laboratory, Sanford Underground Research Facility and Fermi-Lab. His work has been exhibited and his films have been screened internationally at numerous locations including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; PACT Zollverein, Essen; Field Station, Cape Town; POOL, Johannesburg; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Antimatter (Media Art), Vancouver; and Bideodromo International Film Festival, Bilbao. Bolen lives and works in Atlanta, serves as Associate Professor of Art at Georgia State University and is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago.
Katherine Young uses expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures in her electroacoustic music and sonic art; relationship building and ecological systems are central to her practice. The LA Phil, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and many others have commissioned her work. Katherine has documented her work as a bassoonist and improviser on numerous recordings. She teaches composition, electronic music, and improvisation at Emory University. Her work has been recognized by awards and fellowships including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,”
Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator who enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her research interests focus on integrating critical making methods into instrument design and building interactive musical systems. Her research in this interdisciplinary area has been published in Arcana Musicians on Music X and presented at the Audio Engineering Society (AES), International Computer Music Conference, SEAMUS, and MoxSonic.
Renny Hyde (they/them) is a computer engineer, music technologist, and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their research focuses on creating embedded systems for music performance and installations, acting as a bridge between the natural and digital worlds. Renny is the General Manager of WREK 91.1FM, covering all of Atlanta with 100,000 watts of quality, diverse programming. They create music as ‘pocket noise’ and various other aliases, and run a house-venue called The Fortress.
Mir Jeffres is an engineer, experimental electronic musician, and a graduate of the Georgia Tech Music Technology program. Mir's master's research was in new interfaces for biosignal music performance, developing an open source software/hardware system to make music with brain waves. An Atlanta native, Mir now lives in Dallas, Texas, working as an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments. After work, Mir continues to develop new electronic instruments and performance systems, performing as "audio boss".