PROGRAM

the interior of objects (2019):

“…if communications are the elements that compose social systems, then communications refer only to other communications and never anything outside of themselves. Here communication is not something that takes place between systems but is strictly something that takes place in a system. Another way of putting this would be to say that a system cannot communicate with its environment and an environment cannot communicate with a system.” – Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects

small eddies of interlocking lives (2024):

small eddies of interlocking lives explores forms of interaction drawn from ecological systems responding to climate change and extraction-capitalism. Disturbance enables remarkable growth, generating new forms, renewing structures, and exposing buried strata, which offers a small optimism for the resiliency of the natural world.

“People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives. Peasant oak-pine forests have been eddies of stability and cohabitation. Yet they are often put into motion by great cataclysms, such as the deforestation that accompanies national industrialization. Small eddies of interlocking lives within great rivers of disturbance: these are surely sites for thinking about human talents for remediation. But there is also the forest’s point of view. Despite all insults, resurgence has not yet ceased.” - Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

BIO

Seth Cluett is an internationally active composer  and artist whose quiet, patient music explores the territory between the senses, with a compelling attention to perception. His work is driven by themes of ecological collapse and resilience, often expressed through materials found in nature. Cluett's “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). His research interests and critical writings investigate embodied cognition, sound in virtual and augmented reality, computational creativity, the media history of the loudspeaker, and speculative acoustics. Cluett is on the composition faculty at Columbia University, where he is Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program, and is affiliate faculty in the Data Science Instutitute and the Center for Comparative Media. Since 2017 he has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs.