Hazardous Phenotypes explores the presence of toxicity within psychological and ecological systems using sound, sculpture, robotics, choreography, lighting, music, and performance for video.
Each allegorical vignette reinvents the term, “soundscape,” typically used to describe a single-channel audio recording of an outdoor sonic environment. In these variations, strategically placed sound sculptures scroll from left to right like notes on a piano roll, a 3D live-action animatronic visual listening score. Within the toxic soundscapes, mechanical objects perform ritualistic interventions, warnings about what may come or what might already be upon us.
HP has been projected outdoors at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, streamed on social media during COVID, featured on a video wall in Las Vegas, and exhibited with synched robotic musical accompaniment at FIMP21, Sonoscopia, Porto, Portugal 2021. In 2023, it was featured in an online exhibition for Not Real Art.
This project was generously supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Mid America Arts Alliance, and New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from the Helen F. Whitaker Fund and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
