The Rhizome Commissions Program, which each year awards grants ranging from $5,000 to $1,000 to facilitate the production of original works of art, was founded in 2001 to support emerging artists working with media and technology. At this panel, we will present three artists that will present recently finished projects: Sam Gould of Red76, Michael Kontopoulos, and Tristan Perich.

Sam Gould of Red76 will present The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) (2009—). This forum allows guest historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through the assemblage of clips found on YouTube, recycling surplus knowledge as a means of shedding new light on the landscape of past and present sociopolitical history. Red76 initiatives utilize overlooked histories and common shared occurrences to create a framework for public inquiries. Social histories, collaborative research, parallel politics, free media, alternative educational constructs, gatherings, masking, and public dialogue play a continuing and vital role within the methodology and concepts of Red76’s work. The group, often in flux and geographically dispersed, is the moniker for initiatives most often conceived by Sam Gould, and collaboratively realized with the assistance of Gabriel Mindel-Saloman, Zefrey Throwell, Dan S. Wang, Mike Wolf, Laura Baldwin, and many others.

Michael Kontopoulos will present Measure of Discontent (2010), a series of domestic sculptures that respond to three common physical habits of anxious people: sighing, pacing, and foot-shaking. Kontopoulos is a Los Angeles-based artist interested in constructing mechanical systems and tools for exploring the poetics of everyday, eccentric human behaviors. His work draws from strategies in speculative fiction in order to investigate the circumstances under which people might build custom devices to suite their nuanced needs or respond to various societal failings.

Tristan Perich will present Microtonal Wall (in 1-bit) (2010) an installation that features 1,536 small speakers blanketing an eight-by-twelve-foot wall. Each emits microtonal tones, spanning eight octaves (dividing each half step into sixteen pitches). This dense cluster of sound sources is the subject of a series of musical compositions, continuing Perich’s investigations into the foundations of electronic sound. Each speaker, emitting a single, primitive one-bit tone, becomes a microscopic voice in the total composition, substituting individual pitch for larger sonic masses. Perich is a composer and visual artist inspired by the aesthetics of math and physics and works with simple forms and complex systems.