Nancy Barton is an artist and educator, working in photography, installation, and community-engaged collaborations. Her work seeks to understand the effects of events in the larger world on psychic experience, and explores mourning and empathy as a space of resilience in response to historic forces that destabilize identity. She divides her time between Prattsville, New York City, and Wonder Valley, and is the Founding Director of the Prattsville Art Project, as well as a professor at New York University. Her work in creative placemaking and rural revitalization has been supported by the NEA, NYSCA, and ArtPlace America. She exhibits, curates and lectures on art, education, and placemaking in the US, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Working with individuals, organizations, and institutions around the world, she has created lasting positive change in both academic and community settings.

Bloodroot
Blind Tanks

Bloodroot, a lunar collective created between gal*in_dog AKA Guillermo Galindo and Amber Stucke, offers an incantation to change the shape of water to the desert land. Near to the Sheep Hole Mountains, the site for the performance holds the location as a secret water source deep within the earth. Blind tanks were used by the Cahuilla people throughout the Mojave Desert as they traveled back and forth through the harsh, arid landscape and were needed to survive. From a series of actions that includes sound, language and ritual, the piece honors and calls to the hidden water.

gal*in_dog AKA Guillermo Galindo(post-Mexican composer/performer/visual artist)
The extent of the work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist gal*in_dog AKA Guillermo Galindo, redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between all art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness. Galindo’s artistic practice emerges from the crossroads between sound, sight and performance and includes everything from orchestral compositions, instrumental works and opera, to sculpture, visual arts, computer interaction, electro-acoustic music, film making, instrument building, three dimensional installation and live improvisation.

Galindo’s graphic scores and three dimensional sculptural cybertotemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe, Asia and around the world including documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017) and CTM Festival (2017). HIs work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), Vice Magazine, (London), RTS Switzerland, National Public Radio (U.S.), CBC (Canada), California Sunday Magazine (U.S), Reforma Newspaper (Mexico) , CNN and the New York Times.

www.galindog.com

Amber Stucke is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. She identifies her work within ideas of social relationships situated between artistic research, science and imagination. Through materials of sound and language, embodied and appropriated drawings, scientific prints and DIY artist books, her research interests include questions of symbiotic and rhizomatic relationships, Native American ethnobotany, local knowledge systems, plant-human relationships, evolutionary biology, consciousness, and the appropriation of visual scientific classification structures.

Stucke holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has also had additional studies at Goldsmith’s College in London and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Satellite Berlin (Berlin, Germany), BAK (Utrecht, Netherlands), University of Oporto (Oporto, Portugal), Cain Schulte Contemporary Art (San Francisco, CA), Punch Gallery (Seattle, WA), Kala Art Institute & Gallery (Berkeley, CA), and Zacatecas Cultural Center (Zacatecas, Mexico); solo shows include: Electric Works (San Francisco, CA), The David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA), The LAB (San Francisco, CA), Clay Street Press (Cincinnati, OH), and 2731 Prospect Gallery (Cleveland, OH). She is a recipient of the 2016/2017 Curtis Gates Lloyd Research Fellowship at the Lloyd Library & Museum, a participating artist of Satellite Berlin in Germany, a member of the Society of Artistic Research (SAR), and a contributing writer to The Learned Pig.

www.amberstucke.com

Dan Gottwald is a sculptor, sound artist, instrument builder, musician and composer. Informed by desert landscapes, tools of industry, cartoons and tinnitus, his work focuses on the tactile, temporary and social through object, sound and performance. Gottwald's main exhibition vehicle is the Analogous Ensemble, A collection of sound sculptures and instruments designed and built for the purpose of exploring new music and interactions between objects, performers and audiences.

His unique instruments have been shown in San Francisco's Market Street Prototyping Festival (2015 & 2016), The Megapolis Festival (2015), as well as in conjunction with Bay Area dance companies inkBoat and Nina Haft & Co. He Holds a Master's degree in Electronic Music from Mills College and a Bachelor's degree in Studio Arts from the University of New Mexico.

http://dangottwald.com/

"The overpowering force of this desert draws me back again and again. I feel small here, perched on the edge of something massive and invisible. It took me many years to realize, it's most likely spirits, ancestors, gods, whatever you want to call it, a recognition larger than me, larger than us, which ties us together, all of us. Our collective unknowing. I come here not to find or understand this thing, but to be teased back into life by it, like being in a crowd, but alone."

Chris Kubick is an artist, composer, and sound designer who works under a variety of pseudonyms, including Language Removal Services and Many Many More Than One. Much of his recent work explores the meanings and half-truths that are embodied in Hollywood sound effects libraries. He comes to this work in part through a long and happy association with the dark corners of B-movie Hollywood, having spent more than a little time designing sounds for movies that you'd probably never want to see (Black Cadillac, Flatland, the Bloody Deep, etc.), and a few that you really should see if you get the chance (What America Needs, We Will Live To See These Things). His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery and the Royal College of Art, London, among many others.

www.socalledsound.com

“If you put a musician in the right musical environment for their style, they become an endless sample with no beginning and no end”

Portland native, C.J. is on a journey exploring audio synthesis, experimental music, live performance and interactive art. His work is inspired by and draws from a broad variety of elements ranging from live and experimental sound design, nature and more traditional forms of electronic music. 

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/endlesssample

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/endlesssample

Youtube: https://youtu.be/KlrqH-GRHts?t=36m56s

"One of my first memories is a trip to the volcano Mount Colema in Mexico. On the way out, we drove through a black obsidian desert. We stopped by the side of the road and I found a sharpened obsidian. That rock started my rock collection. People think the desert is desolation but it is one of the greatest places for seeing the millions of years in history in rock striations and formations. The long game of rocks puts perspective on our lives here on earth."

Rose Meyers is an artist, musician, roboticist, mom, and software engineer. She is currently making miniature gardens and building a social network for robots. She has competed in many years of robot olympics with Team Virobots and won gold, silver and bronze medals. She is a founding member of the sound art groups 0th, whose performances incorporate robotics and sculptural elements.

Her works have appeared in the The Hammer Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Exploratorium, Jeu De Paume, NY MoMA, Artforum, the UK Guardian, Vice Magazine, and on CNET.

Daniel Meyer-O'Keeffe is a composer and performer based in Joshua Tree, California.

His music has been featured at June in Buffalo, the Atlantic Music Festival and performed across the east and west coasts of the United States and Canada. Recent projects include a commission for a new work by Pronto Musica, a Performance/Installation for solo percussion at the Eastern Bloc Gallery in Montreal, QC, a tour across California with percussionist Rob Cosgrove and participation in Stefan Krebbers ‘Crabbear’ workshop at the 2017 Donaueschingen Musiktage.

Daniel Received his BA in music composition from Bard College studying with Joan Tower, Matt Sargent and George Tsontakis. After completeing a year of graduate studies at McGill University, he is currently studying (remotely) with Hanna Eimermacher.

Sound Funnels

Experimental sound group, No Bother, was formed a few years back when musician Tony Mason and visual artist Luther Broome began messing around with guitars and analogue recordings. Artist Cathy Allen soon joined the group with added voice and mixed media sound experiments. Their invitational live performance in Wonder Valley Experimental Festival #6 consisted of intuitive, harried responses to exterior stimuli.

Continuing the exploration of exterior stimuli, the three No Bothers will build Sound Funnels for the Mojave Sound Art Festival. The interactive installation will invite participants to listen and hear organically amplified desert sounds.

Aldous Huxley wrote of the quality of the sound in the Mojave in his 1954 essay “The Desert”: “But the light forgives, the distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can coexist with things of a far higher order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or vicarious sport. Jet planes, for example -- the stillness is so massive that it can absorb even jet planes.”

"Through all its stern lessons in attentiveness and indifference, the desert points to a beauty and wholeness found only on the far side of emptiness. In the desert wildness we meet an untamed God who upsets every expectation, destroys all order as we have known it."

Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Brick (1994): 600 bulk-erased 8-Track cartridges, blue plastic tarp and database documentation.

Bulk-erasing has rendered these objects mute. This invisible act leaves no trace of music to contradict or confirm our construction of the past. The disruption of nostalgia honors memory even if memory cannot be retrieved. Sitz repositions the stillness in Brick, the soundtracks of which have been erased, a redundant act taking second place to a technology rendered largely obsolete. All that remains is the noisy promise of the package, fading slowly in the sand.

Biography:

Ken Sitz was active in the music scene in New York in the late 70’s, covering the NYC for V. Vale’s Search & Destroy magazine, promoting Ed Bahlman’s 99 Records, co-founding the bands The Yorks and Khmer Rouge, playing CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club and Irving Plaza among others venues including the first Noise Festival at White Columns. He was also deejay Mr. Mod Monday at Tramps’ long running Mod Mondays and created the Naive Rhythm Nights series to promote downtown bands like Liquid Liquid, Dog Eat Dog, Konk, and Off Beach.

Moving back to San Francisco in 1983 he worked as a printer and gave lectures on typography at San Francisco State University Art Department. Working with photographer Judy Steccone he collaborated and designed SF Art Institute Walter/McBean Gallery catalogues for Carolee Schneemann, Carrie Mae Weems, Francis Dyson and Douglas Kahn. His encyclopedic knowledge of music was featured in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II.

Sitz later moved to Los Angeles and worked for Disney and Fox. After leaving those deserts he moved to the Mojave, as far east as practicable -- Wonder Valley. It was here that he became entranced / inspired by the inexplicable and unselfconscious quality of sound, and its lack.

Sitz is co-author of the weekly Wonder Valley Sand Paper, and ran a desert film series for two summers. He is currently cataloguing his extensive record collection, becoming reacquainted with the bass guitar, and shopping for a set of drums.

Shanna is a sound artist and composer based in Oakland, CA. Using amplified cello with analog and digital electronics and installation art as her primary mediums, Shanna’s work is a continual exploration of one's relationship to both sound and physical spaces. She emphasizes timbral changes, the resonant body of objects, and the re-contextualization of sound through the use of unconventional playing techniques, feedback, and audience immersion. Shanna strives to create sonic and physical spaces that induce a focused state of awareness, where one is encouraged to reflect on or reconsider their relationship to sound, people, spaces, and ultimately, ideas.

Her current focuses include a fascination with blurring the lines between performance spaces and installation to emphasize the transformative potential of these events. Seeing intricate connections between the experience of music and day to day life, Shanna cannot separate music from its social implications and lived realities. She views sound as a method for processing and re-contextualizing past experiences while simultaneously imagining and creating new possibilities for the future.

With an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, Shanna has studied composition with Laetitia Sonami, Chris Brown, James Fei, and Matt Rogalsky. She has performed and worked with a variety of composers and artists including Alvin Lucier, Trimpin, Wrekmeister Harmonies, and Sarah Davachi. In addition to solo endeavors, her most active collaboration is as the duo SO AR with percussionist Robert Lopez.

www.shannasordahl.net

Anja Ulfeldt is a durational installation artist working primarily in sculpture and time based media. Time and presence are the consistent themes of her work, particularly the presence of the audience. She is captivated by the idea of “the moment” as a period of undefined duration, but also as an event of great importance. Through visual art, sound, and performance, her work addresses psychological relationships to infrastructure and resources as they relate to stability, mobility and personal agency.

Anja grew up visiting the Mojave and is drawn to a sense of sublime endlessness that the open desert offers. She’s interested in designing for extremes and what it means to invent for this environment specifically. In 2017 she purchased land in Wonder Valley for the purpose of building temporary and long-term installations.

She has recently had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, and Recology Artist in Residence Program. She is a recipient of the Visions from the New California Award, the TSFF & SOMArts Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, The AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Finalist Award.

www.anjaulfeldt.com

hymn/hum (Mojave variation)

Ven Voisey is a Oakland-based multi-disciplinary artist, working primarily in sculpture, installation and sound. Born in Richmond, CA, Voisey grew up in the East Bay Area of Northern California. In 2000, he received a BA from San Francisco State University in a self-designed major combining Humanities, Electronic music , Film, and Conceptual Art. He continued his education outside of school by working, touring and collaborating with kinetic sculpture and installation collective Amorphic Robot Works, building machines, learning electronics, and composing music. In 2003, Voisey moved to North Adams, MA where he worked with a variety of arts organizations (MASS MoCA, MCLA Gallery 51, Clark Art Institute, Images Cinema...) and making his own work in his studio and exhibiting nationally. In 2010 he was Artist-in-Residence at the Berkshire Museum and was awarded the Individual Artist grant from Local Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire. His work was included in the 2012 deCordova Biennial at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. In 2013 he was a fellow of the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico. He returned to his home state in 2014 where he is currently working on new work.

www.v---v.net

A California native, Lindsey spent 12 years in NYC producing theater & film, acting, writing music, animating and making art. She now lives in a 1975 Winnebago in the high Mojave building free art studios out of sandbags and earth. Current projects include digging, refining, and sculpting with native clay soils, establishing a tool library for Wonder Valley, directing community Shakespeare, and exploring the natural, human, and machine soundscapes of the desert.

Personal art: lindseyandersen.com

Wonder Domes: www.instagram.com/domewonder/

Project video: https://youtu.be/cmDKii0gwq0