Friday, September 4, 2020, 7 pm ET
Free and suggested donation
Upon registration, you will receive an email with information on how to view the event. If you encounter any issues, please send us a text message at 716-427-4125.
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Johann Diedrick’s Prelude to Wake is a ~20 minute, urgent, mournful, and world-building sonic performance that centers the loss of ourselves and environments due to climate change. The work is performed by a fictional character named “The Sound Collector” who collects buried vibrations and releases them from material through an ancient technological device. Combining field recordings, original music composition, and generative audio techniques, Prelude to Wake stages an encounter between the audience, a past that we are losing due to catastrophe, and what may exist in the future.

This digital, online performance is transmitted digitally from Tortoise Town in Brooklyn, NY. The artist’s original proposal – titled Wake – was a site-specific, in-person performance at Silo City’s Marina A, set as an encounter between the Sound Collector and the histories and ecology of the Buffalo River. Due to the pandemic, his in-person performance in Buffalo is tentatively rescheduled for late Spring 2021.

Audiences will be able to participate in a Q&A with the artist through Google Docs at 7:30 pm ET.

Johann Diedrick is a Caribbean-American artist who makes installations, performances, and sculptures that allow you to explore the world through your ears. He surfaces vibratory histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He was a Spring 2020 technology artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works and a recipient of a 2020 Brooklyn Arts Fund grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council. Along with receiving an Asian Cultural Council grant, his work has been featured in Wire Magazine, Musicworks Magazine, and presented at MoMA PS1 (in collaboration with Jonathan González), Somerset House (London, UK), Social Kitchen (Kyoto, Japan), Common Ground (Berlin, Germany), Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY).

Workspace Residency is supported by generous support by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, and individual members, businesses, and supporters. Special thanks to Scribe Video Center. See more information about the Workspace Residency here.

Banner image by Johann Diedrick: “A view of the sunrise as seen from the summit of Panther Mountain, a mountain in the Catskills which sits atop a meteorite impact crater from around 375 million years ago.”