Step in from the cold tomorrow and celebrate with us the conclusion of Ann Hamilton’s stylus. Join Ann Hamilton in reading concordance texts to Blue Black and enlivening her interactive, multimedia installation, through sound and gesture. These activities will culminate in a “Chorus of Waving Hands,” in which she asks those present to put on paper hands from the installation and silently wave together.

Ruckus Roboticus, “Here We Go” (Live), Grease Records

This Saturday is the closing of Ann Hamilton’s stylus, and there’s a lot on the schedule for the day. For one thing, Ruckus Roboticus, a deejay and performer, will be playing grown-up-friendly children’s music from 1pm to 3:30pm. Below are some words  from Chris DeVille, a writer and fan, about the bot and what to expect on Saturday.

Ruckus Roboticus is an entertainer of many stripes, and he’ll show most of them Saturday when he plays the closing reception for Ann Hamilton’s stylus.

“Play” is the operative word whenever Ruckus steps behind his extensive technological rig. The Dayton native, born Dan Haug, brings a youthful zest to his work, from his award-winning DJ mixes to his production work for TV networks such as Nickelodeon and MTV.

Then there’s “Playing With Scratches”, his 2008 debut album for Grease Records. The album found Haug building funky sound collages to tell a story about the wonder and confusion of childhood—think Girl Talk with more obscure samples but just as much playful ingenuity.

His cartoonish flair captivated kids but also struck a chord with grown-ups—everyone from Spin to NPR piled on the accolades, and stars like Bloc Party and Vampire Weekend lined up for remixes.

Recreating his madcap sample collages on stage forced Haug to step his game up from mere DJ sets. He developed an elaborate one-man show that keeps him busy hopping from one device to the next to rebuild each song sample by sample, scratch by scratch.

“I feel like I’m one of those plate spinners, like kind of a vaudeville performance, from playing samples and then running over to the laptop,” Haug says. “I’m kind of juggling these things to keep the song going.” Read the rest of this entry »

DJ Needles describes what he’ll be playing at next week’s sound waves: Hip Hop.

It’s almost that time again. Our second to last sound waves is next Thursday from 6-9 p.m, and judging by the guest list on Facebook, it’s going to be pretty crowded. Part of that is due to DJ Needles (a.k.a. James Gates), who hosts Rawthentic on KDHX and has quite a few fans around town. Several weeks ago, I was dropping a sound waves flyer off at a salon in Grand Center. As I handed it to the owner, he pointed to DJ Needles’s name and said, “That’s our deejay!”

DJ Needles has been deejaying in St. Louis since 1994. He was voted best Club DJ in the RFT for 2010 and has opened for national acts, such as the Roots and De La Soul. According to his website, “his style is heavily influenced by raw, traditional, sample-based Hip Hop…this style is the most true to the culture, he believes, because it not only sounds dope, it also teaches listeners about thousands of hidden gems and forgotten songs and artists while opening minds up to many different genres of music.” Next Thursday is going to be dope for sure.

Last Saturday’s “knit-in” with stylus was a success at bringing together multiple groups of knitters solely for the purpose of enjoying their craft amidst the soundings of stylus. Each conversation spun its way from one group to another while snippets of the concordance specifically devoted to the event were read over the loud speaker. “Word,” “of,” “mouth” spoken from the speaker drifted through conversations about the shooting in Tuscon, AZ that day. The trickling of speech from each guest mingled with the ever polite clinking of needles while stylus sang from its human voice, or one of many other worldly sounds.

Some knitters finished their projects in the three hours while others only merely tapped the surface of their lengthy projects. All in all there was camaraderie present that one only sees every great once in a while. Thank you to all who attended.  We hope you will knit with us again on January 22 for the stylus Finale–A Sounding.  Ann Hamilton will be in the galleries all day and would love to thank those who have participated in activating stylus.

For more photos from this event, visit our Flickr slideshow.

St. Louis Shape Note Singers sing in the Pulitzer galleries last November.

This Thursday, January 13, 7-9pm, the St. Louis Shape Note Singers will return to the Pulitzer galleries to sing Sacred Harp music. Sacred Harp is an a cappella tradition from mid-18th century America. Shape-note singing is designed for participation, not performance. (Download a lesson on it here.) In the following letter, one of the Singers reflects on singing here last November.

Thank you for the opportunity to sing in stylus last November. Our group has sung in many different spaces (cinder block churches, people’s kitchens and living rooms, old meeting halls, hospitals, nursing homes, funeral parlors, etc), and in every setting we look for “that sound,” an acoustic critical mass built from our four-part polyphonic voices singing fortissimo. Read the rest of this entry »

Ann Hamilton, a round, 1993

Within the exhibition of stylus, there are multi-sensory experiences that the audience is encouraged to interact and engage with. Ann’s artwork has often dealt with text and our human experience with its exchange, verbal, gestural and poetic. During the exhibition at the Pulitzer, various groups have been invited to come into the space and activate stylus with their voice, poetic movement or instrumental accompaniment. With “stylus” as its title, it seems appropriate to ask a community of knitters to come to the exhibition space and activate their art and sound. At early stages of installation, Ann was interested in experimenting with what kind of sound this might generate within the space as well as encourage this visual connection between the physical act of knitting and the title of the exhibition.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a final project for its concordance workshop, a St. Elizabeth Academy film class produced this video, “Juxtaposition.” Their teacher John Adams describes the ideas behind it in the following.

After returning to the classroom from seeing stylus in the fall, the class had a spirited discussion around the word “perception,” particularly with regards to the connection between perception and reality, and how the media shapes and forms perception through the juxtaposition of words and images. My students repeatedly stated that when they mentioned the city of St. Louis to friends and family who lived outside of the city or who had never ventured into the city, too often the words that were associated with St. Louis were dangerous, crime-ridden, and poor. As the students examined their concordance they made from their research, they developed a series of questions to guide their analysis:

1. What descriptive words or phrases are associated or juxtaposed with our spine words?

2. Are the descriptive words or phrases positive or negative?

3. What perceptions might readers/listeners/viewer form from these juxtapositions?

4. How does the media reporting shape the perception of the community, both by the people who live within and those who live outside of it?

Ironically in the midst of their analysis, local and even national media became fixated on a report that claims St. Louis is now the most dangerous city in America. My students, angered by the report, wrestled with a way to respond to it in light of their research and their personal experience of living in the city and attending a school that has been in same neighborhood since 1882. Taking their cue from stylus, they decided to respond by creating a concordance–in the form of a video–that uses juxtaposition “to create new possibilities and contexts for meaning.”

In the students’ video concordance, they themselves and their “I-am” statements become the principal words within the “walls” of the video. In Hamilton’s concordances, the “exterior register of the world’s events [. . .] culled from six world newspapers [are] pulled from their context in the newspaper to create this new field of text.” In the students’ video, the exterior register is culled from the broadcast videos juxtaposed against one another, the manipulated still images from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and the serenely idyllic video footage of St. Louis. The juxtaposition of the first part of the video with the second part with the students results in an ironic contrast and new possibilities of meaning and perception.–John Adams

Andrea Johnson, Young Adult Provider at the St. Louis Public Library, worked with the Pulitzer’s Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger during the concordance workshops. She reflects on the partnership in the following.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 26, 2010 about thirty students from St. Elizabeth Academy visited their high school’s neighborhood public library, the Carpenter Branch Library. The students arrived armed with paper and red pencils engraved with the school’s name. Their goal: to find newspaper articles about their community using the print materials and online databases available in the library. These articles would be scanned and used to create concordances.

As an employee of the St. Louis Public Library, working with St. Elizabeth Academy and the Pulitzer Foundation on the stylus teen program was a unique way to partner with two community organizations. As a part of Teen Services, outreach to city middle and high schools is a significant part of my job. It is important to us to reach as many middle and high students as possible in order to inform them of the many resources and programs that are available to them for free at their public library. Working with St. Elizabeth Academy through the Pulitzer Foundation provided a great opportunity for the students to not only learn about the library’s resources, but to actually get into the library and use them for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday evening marked the first time that contemporary dance has been featured within the walls of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Four Webster University dancers—Hope Harl, Julie Opiel, Matthew Schmitz, and Audrey Simes—activated Ann Hamilton’s stylus and the building’s architectural features through improvisational movement.

The performers moved in dialogue with the live percussion of local composer/musician Scott Rice, who, dressed in black, drummed mostly at the north end of the Main Gallery, but occasionally made his way through the gallery space playing on a portable drum.

The dancers, barefoot and clad in comfortable white clothing, transformed themselves into moving projections of stylus. Throughout the evening they moved freely about the galleries, dancing at different tempi and in a variety of configurations: as an ensemble of four, in solo, in trio, or as a duet.

Each performer identified a different source of inspiration within the installation.

“Working with the hands was a lot of fun for me,” Julie Opiel said. “I used them as props for movement, but also as a costume.” Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Case & Billy Barnett “My Home is St. Louis”

This Thursday will be our fourth sound waves and feature DJ Ron Edwards and musicians Bob Case and John Erblich performing blues. Ron Edwards hosts 88.1 KDHX’s “Nothin’ but the Blues” every Sunday evening and often links his playlists to the rich history of blues in St. Louis. Bob Case and John Erblich are both prominent musicians in the St. Louis blues community and have been playing live for years. Check out Bob Case’s style in the video above. His website claims that “he always involves his fans in his performance,” so tomorrow night may be an even more interactive experience than usual at our current exhibition.

Join us Thursday, 6-9pm, for a truly unique mixture of blues and contemporary art. There will be chairs to sit on and refreshments to drink. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit our main website.