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2019
MAMPROJECT 26: CURTIS TAMM
Sound sculpture (8.1 channels), chalk

Curated by Kenichi Kondo
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Through a research practice influenced by the history of improvisational music, Curtis Tamm (b. 1987 in California) locates cracks within Western systems of knowledge to expose playful propositions for what it means to be human. His recent work explores human and non-human responses to natural catastrophe.

During 2017 and 2018 Tamm traveled throughout Japan gathering hundreds of sound recordings. He met with seismologists to learn about the nature of waves, listened to the chants of blind shamans, and spent time with an engineer investigating the ability of other animal species to predict earthquakes. One such animal is the catfish, also the subject matter of Edo-period Namazu-e — satirical woodblock prints which hold the catfish responsible for the occurrence of earthquakes. In the spirit of Tamm’s work, the impact of an earthquake is both traumatic and rejuvenating.   

The artist’s field-recordings attempt to follow the radiation of seismic waves outwards as they vibrate through the whiskers of the Namazu, resonate with the syncopated buzz of cicadas, and chime against the ritual process of casting and striking multi-tonne bells known as Bonsho. Tamm explored ways in which waves interact with his own body by standing inside these temple bells. He surveyed the unique character of a dozen different bells throughout Kyoto and Ibaraki, recording rarely-heard frequencies which resonate and decay within the large open cavity — an empty space known as the bell’s “womb”.

The centerpiece of this latest MAM Project (Spelling for Protection Against Oneself) is a sound sculpture which invites visitors into the womb of the Bonsho. Tamm summons a state of deep listening within the body, a catfish-like condition in which our senses are recast by bandwidths usually obscured by noise.

Project support by Adam Audio, Arcus Project, and the Art and Technology Lab at LACMA. Illustration support: Andrew Paul Hunter, Maki Ohkojima

2015
TYMPANIC TETHER
Proposition for new-aural warning siren

Santozeum; Santorini, Greece.

While searching for mythological and contemporary identities of the ‘siren’ on Santorini, the island claimed by Plato as the one time Atlantis, I collaborated with volcanologists, firefighters, policemen, bird-breeders, ambulance-drivers, goat-farmers and airport personnel on a new aural-warning siren for that volcanic island, based in field-recordings rather than tritones. Over the course of a month-long residency with the Santozeum, I amassed an audio-library of 'siren-candidates' resulting in an hour-long live spatialized sound composition entitled Tympanic Tether, with accompanying text (written in collaboration with Hermione Spriggs), performed as part of Aural Lighthouses; an international symposium exploring sound and natural catastrophe, organized by PS1: Fluids States.

“One of the first devices to give man an extended voice was the horn. The first horns were aggressive, hideous sounding instruments, used to frighten off demons and other animals…” R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape.

2019
EC(H)SOPHICAL LISTENING LAB
Speculative educational department

School of Visual Arts and Design, University of South Carolina; Columbia, SC

The Ecosophical Listening Lab was a temporary rejuvenation-department within the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of South Carolina, where students and faculty could reserve one-on-one immersive sound performances consisting of live instrumentation played in tandem with multi-channel sound work, developed in a nearby sanctuary-swampland (Congaree National Park).

2017
CENTER FOR CELLULAR ALIGNMENT
Speculative community center

Arcus Project; Moriya City, Japan.

In his unique cross-disciplinary, research-based practice, Curtis Tamm engages with natural phenomena, geophysics, geology and animals, creating visual and sound works.

Tamm conducted the research project Tympanic Tether on the Greek island of Santorini, exploring his interest in volcanic activities, human or animal precognition of natural disasters, and the use of sirens as warnings. Working with firefighters, police officers, bird breeders, ambulance drivers, and others, Tamm built up a collection of various field recordings into a sound library. He then made an improvised performance where he played these sounds as a new kind of siren idiosyncratic to the island.

For Tamm, sounds, a tsunami, and an earthquake are all things that result from waves and, as such, inherently possess correlation. During his residency, he visited the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, and conducted research on the relationship between sound and Buddhism, Shinto, and folk beliefs. He also came into contact with traditional Japanese instruments such as the koto and continued to increase his collection of sounds in his audio library, recording the sounds of bells at temples in Kyoto and Ibaraki Prefecture as well as the sounds made during the casting of a temple bell at a foundry in the town of Makabe in Ibaraki. He also conducted a workshop involving an amateur chorus group in Moriya.

At Open Studios, visitors are invited to lie down and listen to the sounds. This “listening session” is an attempt to use sounds in order to evoke some hereditary ability within our bodies, similarly to how catfish can supposedly sense tremors before earthquakes happen, and that has perhaps lain dormant since ancient times. In Tamm’s way of thinking, we can find the connectivist idea of trying to locate links between things that initially seem unrelated.

Kenichi Kondo (2017 guest curator, Arcus Project)

2014
A ROOM IN WHICH THE ONLY WALL IS IN THE MIDDLE
Cinematic Trap

Experimental Digital Arts, UCLA; Los Angeles, CA.

Modeled after the Malaise Trap, this installation redesigned a theater to mimic a ubiquitous tent-shaped flying insect trap, which has a single wall protruding down its center. The piece was performed live with 11 channels of audio, long swaths of black-out darkness, showcasing a 16mm film work shot along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in locations at sea, throughout the Faroe Islands and Iceland; all locations where Rene Malaise (inventor of said trap), believed to be the lost site of Atlantis.

A Room In Which The Only Wall Is In The Middle was an attempt to re-vision the food-chain as a closed loop, and proposes that the cinematic space of the theater, has always/already been itself a hungry being; with human psychology being its primary food source.

“To set such a trap requires a deep sensitivity to the materials at hand - a responsiveness, that is, to the opportunities available in the environment: an unnerving ability to coax effects from it, rather than imposing effects on it by the application of force alone; an activation of hidden possibilities, rather than, as it were, barking instructions at the world” - Benedict Singleton

“The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning you can forget the words.” - Zhuangzi

2014
FLY CAUGHT IN THE EYE OF A FILMMAKER MAKING A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT AN INSECT TRAP
Effigy of the obsolesce of cinema (Icelandic midge, ionized 24k gold, insect pin, publication)

with Hermione Spriggs
New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

“My body is all eyes. Look at it! Be not afraid. I look in all directions!”

In the summer of 2013, while shooting 16mm film of a Malaise Trap (ubiquitous trap for gathering flying insects), I temporarily lost my vision when a small flying midge landed right in my eye. The sting forced me to stop the camera, everything went black as I squeezed the muscles in my forehead. It was a complex situation, a fly caught in the eye of a filmmaker making a documentary about an insect trap.... The Malaise trap is considered by initiated entomologists as a passive entity, because it gathers its bounty of flying insects while standing still, intersecting with their flight paths, which as it seems, are largely determined by currents of wind which flow through the immediate surroundings, interweaving with higher-level weather patterns. We were shooting near Iceland’s most powerful fumarole, and standing near to it with my eyes closed made me realize just how loud this breathing entity actually was. It was at a volume which made the deep roaring sound inseparable from the force which was apparently creating it. I wasn’t just listening to the center of the earth, but encountering it as it spilled out into this completely empty, frigid landscape. Having finally removed my gloves I was able to pry my eye open for a moment and remove the still intact specimen.

Minuscule, around two millimeters in size, the midge lay dead in my cupped palm. Wings and legs out, perfectly intact. The impact of this situation was phenomenal, phenomenological even, questions slipped into my awareness without pressure or extended effort:

What happens when bodies of knowledge shift back towards the body itself?

What does it mean to accept the worldviews which study life through its carcass?
 

2016
VISCOUS SHAPE
Geo-philosophical exploration

Skaftfell Center for Visual Art; Seydisfjordur, Iceland.
With Hermione Spriggs

Where does “hard” science (in this case the geological study of rocks and their formation) collide with a “runnier” pre-scientific understanding of the world as animate, imbued with agency and soul? What personal, corporeal compulsions drive scientific research, beneath the visible crust of objective knowledge production?

George Walker was a British volcanologist who helped to popularize the worldview of Plate Tectonics through a seminal study he conducted with Icelandic lava flows. His films and manuscript, known as the “The Viscous Shape”, are filled with intimate perceptions and encounters with geology: listening to the sound lava makes while cooling, descriptions of its transient color and even its smell. For Walker, the lava-flows of Eastern Iceland were embedded with a pattern, which he called the  “language of stone”, that when decoded, “reveal the record of their making”. Walker referred to all lava as having but a single shape-shifting form, illusory and inversely proportional to its current trajectory.

It takes more than guts to peer into an erupting volcano... Or to stand beside a river of lava moving at 40mph... Or to gaze at a cloud of tephra larger than any skyscraper. It could even be said that in doing these things it's not just the earth's stomach that you witness but also your own insides, your human guts and sense of scale. During the later years of his life, George P.L Walker turned to investigating active volcanoes as a way to perpetuate and develop the then little-known science of rheology (the study of fluid dynamics). Walker used cinema to record his rigorous explorations of lava flow during the 50's and 60's, and only now have his films been rediscovered and preserved for the public to share in his life's work. With an eye for the unlikely and ineffable, artists Curtis Tamm (USA) and Hermione Spriggs (UK) reopen the unseen cinematic and textual archives of George Walker through a multi-faceted research project entitled Viscous Shape. Through a collaboration with Breiðdalssetur, a geology center in East Iceland, the artists work with Walker's archive as a way to engage the literal and metaphysical implications raised by the groundbreaking work of this scarcely known geologist. 

As collaborators our ongoing work involves a search for this space wherein science itself “drips” into other belief systems, becoming inversely proportional to the calcified stereotype of objectified progress and colonial discovery. Our fingernails grow at the same rate that the earth’s plates move during continental drift. Where and in what is this pattern uncovered? Can we find ourselves revealed in the layers of our geo-sophic making?

2016
FLATLANDERS
Ceremony for dissipative entities (quadraphonic sound, water cast bronze)

Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Omaha, Nebraska.

Flatlanders is a performance and sculpture series inspired by Omaha's last major tornadic swarm (May 6th, 1975). The work consists of bronze sculptures (made in collaboration with Vivian Chiu), and a multi-channel sound performance making use of never-before heard archival recordings taken by Omaha’s 911 emergency response call center.

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception…” ― Edwin A. Abbott

2014
THE THING IS ALL AROUND ITSELF
Relationship Trap (16mm, HD Video, publication)

Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Iceland, Faroe Islands, Museum of Natural History at Stockholm.
with Hermione Spriggs

New Wight Gallery, University of California Los Angeles, 2013
Lecture/Performance + exhibition, Art/Sci Gallery, California Nano-systems Institute, University Of California Los Angeles, 2013
Live Cinema, Structural Materials and Engineering Presentation Space, University of California San Diego, 2014
Lecture/Performance, Lorquin Entomological Society, BIOQUIP supply warehouse, San Pedro, CA, 2014
Live Cinema, Exteresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, Mexico, 2014  
Film Screening, Eyes as Sieves group show, Global Committee Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2015
Film Screening, Aesthetica Film Festival, York, England, 2015

What began as a research expedition retracing the casuistry of Swedish Naturalist/Entomologist Rene Malaise in his 1940s search for Atlantis, became a series life-threatening encounters with an Icelandic volcano, a ruptured ovarian cyst, a coincidental Los Angeles earthquake and an argumentative kidney stone. In the end, The Thing Is All Around Itself articulates the need for those working in the arts and sciences to adopt a physical and conceptual flexibility whilst pursuing any spiritual or scientific investigation; that investigations are hungry beasts in and of themselves. This seemingly endless labyrinthine project follows the steps of two friends as they learn to dance with the reality of their imaginative research, rather than demanding it into obedience. The Thing Is All Around Itself is documentary research project about an animal trap, which eventually turned to entangle its makers.

"...yes - and just to play devil’s advocate, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you... but what if the lure of the trap is recognized by the animal as such, but its – its making the active decision to enter into the unknown, to accept death and enter directly into the trap, to have this thing that its presenting – you know, to have this like, insane, y’know manufactured piece of delicious sardine or whatever is being used as the lure, there’s a chance the animal is saying to itself, y’know, this is worth it...then wham!...the film begins..."  

"I don't think either of us realized just how entangled up we'd get with the concept and conundrum of death. Upon reflection, two years later, it makes perfect sense; between Malaise (the inventor of a trap which suffocates flying insects) Atlantis (the majestic site of a mass extinction) and the Natural History Museum (an institution which glorifies the bodies of knowledge derived from carcasses), along with your multi-day trip to the Swedish emergency room, the end result of this research thoroughly lodged the question of death into my guts. And yet, two years later, I am still no closer to understanding how these carcasses are revered into bodies of knowledge after they cease to move. Though, since working on this thing I've learned to admire and appreciate (and even seek out) experiences in which I tingle from the chance of being swallowed up by another, stronger and smarter animal. I've realized now that this work in an ongoing project which connects the history of our species, and the development of our culture, back to the prehistoric sensations of being eaten alive. "