IMA alumni Chloe Smolarski and Megan Hattie Stahl have work in Sound Scene at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the region’s premier interactive sound and multisensory arts festival on May 2-3.
Synth Rejection Therapy — Megan Hattie Stahl
This sample-based modular synthesizer performance explores the universal experience of rejection. Recordings of crowdsourced rejection letters are looped, reversed, and manipulated until their words lose all meaning. The result is a collective processing and live transformation of difficult ideas into music and noise.
The Future Memories Project — Chloe Smolarski and Tasha Darbes
The Future Memories Project is an art history slide cabinet that houses audio excerpts of climate memories and soundscapes that are activated as its drawers are opened. A speculative audio piece set in Washington, DC—sometime in the future—plays on a tape recorder, placing the viewer at the center of the experience. The audience, now interlocutors in the making of meaning, explores the drawers, mapping their own paths through an array of memories and layered, collaged soundscapes.