From the Logan Center: A Sonic Installation

Logan Center for the Arts – North Stairwell

The centerpiece of Richard Lerman’s residency at the University of Chicago is the development and installation of a site-specific acoustic work created from the unique sonic structure of the Logan Center for the Arts building. Lerman will attach his handmade piezo disk transducers onto the structural support beams of the North stairwell of the building, allowing these contact pick-up mechanisms to amplify the otherwise unheard sounds of the building itself. Natural shifts and settlement, the impact of the outside environment, and the movement of bodies up and down the stairwell of the building will be recorded and subsequently amplified in designated adjacent listening spots. Lerman’s work will allow us to hear the building’s inner-workings and transform what we perceive to be a solid architectural container of space into an organism that moves and generates sound in reaction to its use. Capturing the inherently relational quality of sound, Lerman’s installation at the Logan Center for the Arts will create a dynamic environment in which architecture and sound transform one another.

Sonic Environments: The Work of Richard Lerman
Oct 11 – 14, Logan Launch Festival
As a part of the three-day Logan Launch Festival celebrating the opening of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Film Studies Center presents “Sonic Environments: The Work of Richard Lerman,” a series of performances and events featuring the internationally renowned filmmaker, sound artist, composer and provocateur.

An innovator in the field of hand-made electronics, Lerman’s work with sonic objects, materials and spaces develops the investigations of acoustic ecology that artists like Alvin Lucier, Takahiko Iimura and Maryanne Amacher began in the 1960s. A contemporary of avant-garde composers David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, Richard Lerman has been working with his homemade piezo microphone and amplification systems for over 40 years, and is recognized as one of the earliest and most important innovators of “piezo music.” His cinematic practice falls between the worlds of experimental film, performance and sound art, and offers an unparalleled glimpse into the interdisciplinary nature of media experimentation in the 1960s and 70s.

Richard Lerman’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues and festivals including the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Festival für Neue Musik in Munich, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Institute for Contemporary Art / Boston, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been institutionally recognized with grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council and the Mellon Foundation.