Seven Approaches to Wave-Based Art

Seven Approaches to Wave-Based Art

Followed by a Q&A session

This presentation will offer an overview of Marcus and Christie’s work on “wave cultures”, thinking about seven different wave forms or media and the way that contemporary visual artists have worked with them. The forms are: sound, light, water, wind, earth, heat, and gravity. They will explore what it means to render perceptible as art the waves that are found in each of these cases. What kinds of commonality and singularity can be observed across the different forms and media? Can we draw any conclusions concerning a “general theory of wave-based art”?

Speaker Bios

Marcus Boon is a writer and Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002), In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010) and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice (Duke UP, 2022) as well as co-author with Timothy Morton and Eric Cazdyn of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (U. Chicago, 2015). He co-edited a collection of writings Practice in the Visual Arts with Gabriel Levine (MIT/Whitechapel, 2018), and is the editor of John Giorno’s Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems, 1962-2007 (Soft Skull, 2008).

Instagram: @marcusboon3001
Website: Marcus Boon

Christie Pearson is the author of The Architecture of Bathing: Body, Landscape, Art (MIT Press, 2020), a global history of public bathing cultures. Her buildings, events and installations reimagine urban infrastructures as immersive practices and utopian bathing environments. She is a founding member of The Waves Collective for immersive vibratory environments; Wade Festival for installation and performance art in public pools; Urbanvessel Performance Collective; and the critical journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy.

Instagram: @christiemaepearson
Website: Christie Pearson