Andrea Polli

Mesa Del Sol Chair of Digital Media at the University of New Mexico

June-November 2010


PUBLIC ARTWORK: Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga will present the new work Particle Falls as part of the San Jose Department of Public Art's San Fernando Corridor Project. The work will also be featured in the 2010 01SJ Festival.
September 15-October 15, 2010

PUBLIC ARTWORK: Polli will present a new public video installation at The Article 10 Biennale in Stavanger, Norway based on her recent arctic residency with the Finnish Bio-art Society

October 27-30, 2010
INVITED WORKSHOP: Polli will participate in Irregular Art Practice in Public Space, an International 4-day workshop at Platform3 in Munich, Germany and various locations in the city including a series of public presentations.
February 9-12, 2011
PANEL PRESENTATION: Polli will present Witnessing Space in a panel on sound art at the College Art Association's 100th Anniversary Annual Conference in NYC
August, 2011
ARTIST'S RESIDENCY: Polli and collaborator Chuck Varga will be in Residence at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park, supported by the National Park Service.
August, 2011
PUBLIC ARTWORK: Polli and collaborator Chuck Varga will present a large-scale permanent public work at the new Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City

 

CDS AND MP3S AVAILABLE!


CD RELEASE Winter 2008/2009
Sonic Amtarctica on Gruenrekorder

"Sonic Antarctica is like no other release I have ever heard: it comes across like a documentary film without the visuals. Confused? So was I at first, but as it washed over me I fell in love with it." Henry Lauer

CD RELEASE Fall 2008
Round Mountain on Audible Geography. 11 sound artists were asked to consider the scope of geography today. The final edition is offered as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Australian Geographers.
ROOM40 is a label based in Brisbane, Australia. Curated by Lawrence English, the label continues to publish in and around the margins of electronics, improvisation, experimental-pop and sound-art drawing on a diverse roster of both established and emergent sound-makers.

MP3 RELEASE July 2004:
<http://www.stasisfield.com/releases/sf-3006.html> Stasisfield presents Retina Burn, a 27 minute composition by Andrea Polli. The Stasisfield record label focuses on instrumental experimental music that is minimal in nature.

"In Retina Burn, soundwaves generated by the sun are manipulated by movements of the performer's eye, thereby allowing the listener to audibly 'view' the sun without the usual risk of damaged vision. The composition's low hums and fluttering sine waves combine with percussive blinks and squints to gradually move through a series of sonic dilations; a feast for the ears prepared by the eye."
-John Kannenberg, Stasisfield Founder/Curator

"SUN-KISSED MP3: One of the beautiful things about electronic music that's derived from conceptual art is that it provides its own readymade metaphors....Case in point, Retina Burn...Polli's work — 27-plus minutes of low-level interference and broken whirs — takes as its source "soundwaves generated by the sun." Polli then manipulates this sonic information, transforming it with what she's termed "intuitive ocusonics," or computer-aided musical interfaces that track eye movement....Conceptually, Polli's point is self-apparent: by manipulating sound from the sun with her eyes, she's doing what we otherwise must not, which is to look directly at the sun. What's interesting, though, is that the resulting sound art, as heard on the overtly slow Retina Burn, doesn't suggest the scorching, brilliant center of our solar system (although the crackles do bring it to mind) so much as it sounds like data being processed meticulously in the name of science: pristine data sets published for peer evaluation."
-Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet: reflections on ambient/electronic music. www.disquiet.com    

Ongoing Project: SONIC ANTARCTICA


Sonic Antarctica is a series of natural and technological sound recordings and sonifications made by artists, scientists and sound enthusiasts who have lived in Antarctica.

"Andrea Polli goes far beyond: her tracks are not only field recordings of natural areas, but also sonifications of scientific data, extrapolated from weather station reports. These tracks are assemblies that include interviews with those involved (basically climatologists). The work gives space to purely aesthetic notions and to environmental concerns. Polli alludes to the radio-broadcast format but develops a new audio-based art with a genuinely scientific basis and an aesthetically dense style."
-Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural.it

Ongoing Project: N.


"The overall effect is mysterious; while giving an approximation of windswept desolation, it is also as melancholy as a whale song...It is remarkable that this work, almost entirely constructed from empirical scientific data, manages to produce such a palpable and emotive sense of loss." -David Barrett, Art Monthly

N. is collaborative project between UK sound and web artist Joe Gilmore (creator of rand()%) and Andrea Polli commissioned by the Lovebytes 2005 Festival and shown at the Site Gallery in Sheffield, UK

REVIEWS: Read an excellent review of an exhibition of several of Polli's works at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in the The LATimes by Shana Ting Lipton and another by Jit Fong Chin in Squeeze OC February, 2007

AWARDS: N. nominated out of over 2600 entries for the Viper International Awards, The 2005 VIPER International Festival for Film and New Media in Basel, Switzerland

Ongoing Project: THE QUEENSBRIDGE WIND POWER PROJECT


"The Queensboro Bridge is a beautiful artifact of the industrial age and this project represents the transition that can and must be made from the industrial age, dependent on fossil fuels, to an industrial era that lives off of solar income...wind is solar energy too, and all sustainability is about getting the income to expense ratio on solar income to something that can be sustained by living systems." Paul Hawken, author of Natural Capitalism

The Queens Council on the Arts awarded Polli an Individual Artist Support grant, funded by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Greater New York Arts Development Fund, for a public installation/screening of this work and related projects.

EXHIBITIONS: The Queensbridge Wind Power Project has been presented in a solo exhibition on public art at Contemporary and Classic Navy Pier Art Expo, Chicago and in The SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery: Intersections, Boston among other venues.

More information on the project available at http://www.andreapolli.com/queensbridge/

Ongoing Project: HEAT AND THE HEARTBEAT OF THE CITY


WEB PROJECT: Heat and the Heartbeat of the City commissioned by Turbulence, a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) launched December 1, 2004. This project has been funded by the Greenwall Foundation.

PAPERS: Short papers on Heat and the Heartbeat of the City have been published in the online Landviews Journal of Landscape, Art & Design and December 2005 Hz Journal #7.

EXHIBITIONS: As a part of Biennale of Electronic Art in Perth/Australia BEAP, [R][R][F]2004 --->XP September 3, 2004, through 2006
 
Sounds in Space [Ääniä tilassa] May 19, 2005 23:00-24:00
Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE Radio 1, 87.9 MHz.
http://www.aureobel.com/Sounds_in_Space.html

The SoundLab Channel presents Polli's sonification of Central Park climate data from 1901-2001. More information on the project available at http://www.andreapolli.com/centralpark/

Heat and the Hearbeat of the City in The JavaMuseum final online exhibition. Also be featured on the [R][R][F]2005--->XP global networking project and in the Images Festival for Video and New Media in Toronto April 6-17 2005

Ongoing Project: ATMOSPHERICS/WEATHER WORKS


"ONE PULLS ONESELF AWAY only with a strenuous effort of will. The sounds inveigle their way into one’s ears, slowly, subtly, insidiously inducing a sense of muted and desperate panic. When one draws away, one cannot help but blink, dazed; one feels something unenviable on the spectrum between that feeling of being released into daylight after a long captivity in darkness and the feeling that the daylight is itself merely another form of captivity, an equally distressing and unarming tool for jarring the soul. There is a lull, but it is only momentary. The sounds begin again. They are like the wormword, nonsense imbued with terrible meaning, burrowing irretrievably into the mind." -From a reaction to Atmospherics/Weather works by Michael ‘Six’ Silberman on fiveplusone.net

on THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART'S ARTPORT:
<http://www.whitney.org/artport> Artport is the Whitney Museum's portal to net art and digital arts, and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. The artport's archive of "gate pages," function as portals to net artists' works.

Listen to a WAMC Public Radio feature on Atmospheric/Weather Works in Elevator Music 10

on neural.it http://www.neural.it/nnews/atmosphericse.htm 

UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2003, Digital Pluralism Honorary Mention