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PAMELA Z
Pamela Z has made a wide range of installation work including stereo tape pieces, multiple-channel surround sound works, single and multi-channel video installations, and installations involving physical (found or fabricated) objects. Her fixed media sound works are appropriate for playback in a listening room or gallery space, a tape music concert, or for broadcast. The installation works that involve video, objects, or some kind of interactive element, are generally best suited for gallery/exhibition spaces.
Here is a partial list of the installation works:
Baggage Allowance
Media Installation with objects, video, and sound: 2010
Baggage Allowance is a sonically and visually layered work focusing on the concept of baggage in all its literal and metaphorical permutations. Through multi-channel sound, interactive video, and sculptural objects, Baggage Allowance explores the connections between people and the belongings (and memories) they cart around.Drawing from Ms. Z’s extensive traveling and cartage experiences, text from found sources, and interviews with travelers who speak poetically about their memories of train travel and flying and their numerous baggage-related stories, the work touches upon the ball-and-chain-ness of dragging one’s things all over the world.The installation consists of multiple audio, video, and sculptural elements including a weeping steamer trunk, a mock X-ray machine that reveals secrets when bags pass through it, and a vintage suitcase inside of which lies a woman sleeping and worrying. The gallery exhibition opened at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois on January 28, 2010 and will run through May 2010.
Sonic Gestures
Multi-channel video and sound installation: 2007
Sonic Gestures is a video installation that premiered in April 2007 at Recombinant Media Labs in San Francisco. Consisting of ten frame-locked channels of HD video composed of fragmented gestural images associated with sounds, Sonic Gestures surrounds the audience with a virtual chorus of chattering, whispering, singing, and ever transforming sonic entities. This piece, which was commissioned and presented by NexMap, utilizes 16 channels of audio (generated llive and from the audio of the multiple videos.) It was designed as a site-specific piece for the immersive 360º video and sound set-up at RML (18 minutes).
(video demo)
Parts of Speech
Four-channel sound installation (with cloth-bound books) 1998, (duration: ongoing)
This sound installation was an offshoot of Pamela Z's performance work and radio work "Parts of Speech". It involves four small, cloth-bound grammars with small speakers mounted on the front covers. They hang in a formation that surrounds the listener. Each has a channel of audio containing speech fragments making up the various grammatical parts of "proper" sentences. The four channels play in concert to create sentences, some of which make sense and others of which don't, but all are grammatically correct.
Lift
5.1 surround sound installation: 2005
Lift is a multi-channel, site specific sound installation commissioned by the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY for their "Elevator Music" series. The piece involves layers of sound recorded in various elevators with samples and voice-overs recorded in Pamela Z's studio. Lift had its premiere at the Tang Museum November 2005-January 2005, where it was exhibited in the museum's ample elevator. Quoted from the installation wall commentary from the exhibition at the Tang:
"You enter a small chamber; the doors seal behind you. When they open again, you find that your surroundings have changed. The change can be so complete and abrupt that it’s startling. An entirely different color scheme, a complete set of new sounds and aromas, the sudden presence of a person or people, or the sudden absence of anyone. The erection of an entirely new set of walls, or the replacement of existing walls with open air. Or the change is very slight. The differences so subtle that they are barely noticeable. But, something is clearly different. At first, it’s just a feeling. But closer inspection reveals that a single word or character on a sign has changed. The temperature is a few degrees warmer or cooler. A quiet buzzing sound has become just a little louder. There’s a small chair or a wastebasket. The light level is a bit brighter. Someone you can’t see is whispering. There’s a faint chemical smell."
Forensic
Art
Performance/installation
with Video, Solo Voice and processing, composed: 2002, duration: 30:00
(or ongoing)
This performance/installation
exploring physical identity, perception, and the act of spontaneous verbal
description premiered at The Exploratorium as part of an exhibition called
"Sight Unseen". People are invited to either sit one minute
for a camera, or to describe in detail (as if for a police artist) a face
that appears on a video monitor. Pamela Z performs with voice, samples
and real time processing– mixing and layering her sound with the
video "headshots" of people accompanied by the one-minute verbal descriptions
of their faces.
(This work can also be presented as a stand-alone gallery installation
with two channels of video & audio on a 30 minute loop.)
Timepiece Triptych
Surround sound installation: 2008 (total duration: 22 minutes or continuous)
Timepiece Triptych is a suite of multi-channel sound works exploring time-related processing on vocally-produced sounds. Various time-altering digital processes including extreme time-compression and time-expansion, delay, granular syntheses, reversal, and reverb are applied to spatialized layers of text fragments and brief melodic material. The only sound sources used in the three segments are Pamela Z's voice and (in Syrinx) the voices of birds. The suite is comprised of three sound works that can either be cycled consecutively on the same 4-channel system or individually on three proximate, but acoustically separate systems.
i Declaratives in the First Person
ii Syrinx
iii De-Star Spangled Banner
Declaratives in the First Person
Six-channel sound installation: 2005 (duration: continous)
Declaratives in the First Person (2005) was originally created as a six-channel audio installation for an exhibition entitled "The Art of Artist Statement" at the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center in Chicago. The work was composed of three stereo pairs of varying lengths playing through 6 speakers surrounding the listener– all looping continuously to create ever-shifting layers of sound, so that one could listen all day without ever hearing the exact same combination of fragments. In response to the exhibition's subject matter, Z sampled her own voice speaking this sentence: "I would like to think that the art itself would be enough of a statement." The text was then cut into fragments, compressed, expanded, and layered in various combinations. A stereo mix of one possible iteration of the six channels can be heard here.
De-Star Spangled Banner
Four-channel surround sound installation (2008) duration: 10:19 (or continuous)
De-Star Spangled Banner is made entirely of samples from a leftover artifact of a project Pamela Z did with conceptual artist Kelly Heaton. Ms Z describes the work this way: "Samples of a time-expanded recording of my voice singing a bel canto rendition of The Star Spangled Banner are processed to create varied lengths and then densely layered. Pitch correction is consistently used whenever the time is expanded or compressed, resulting in a palate of sounds that remains completely within the pitch range of the original melody. Embedded in the texture are passages of the anthem stretched to as much as 35 times it’s original length so that, if played in its entirety, the normally under-two minute song would become fifty minutes in length. The opening phrase “O say, can you see”, which normally takes approximately 4 seconds to sing, lasts for a full two minutes in some of its iterations here. Likewise, there are samples where the time is compressed to the extent that the entire anthem takes only five and half seconds from beginning to end. My vibrato (which is already so wide you could drive a truck through it) forms incredible hills and valleys when stretched, and creates a kind of warbly underwater opera sound when compressed. I found that, when layering the longer stretched passages, I not only achieved a good deal of the customary beating one generally gets from phase-shifting, but the clashing of my hideously wide vibrato morphs quite convincingly into air-raid sirens, vacuum cleaner motors, and bad refrigerator compressors. When heard un-layered, these same stretched passages sound more like crying or plaintive moaning".
Syrinx
Four-channel and Eight-channel surround sound installation: 2004
Syrinx is a multi-channel sound installation based on samples of birdsongs. To create this work, Pamela Z slowed down a birdsong numerous times in Pro Tools until its individual pitches and melodic material were revealed. She then learned to sing the melody and sped her voice up until it was the same length and pitch as the original birdsong. The piece is made from multiple layers of the various permutations of the birdsong and the human interpretation of it. She originally created it in a four channel version for an exhibition called "Sound Migrations" at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles (2004), and later revamped it as an 8 channel (plus sub-woofer channel) work for the "New Sound New York" exhibtion at the Kitchen Gallery in (2004). A shortened, live two-channel version also exists as a small segment of the performance work Voci, leading into a section called "Bird Voice".
Just Dust
Six-channel site specific sound installation: 2004
Just Dust is a six-channel audio installation created by Pamela Z for for Dak'Art Biennale. Originally exhibited at the Maison des Esclaves on Gorée, Just Dust combines layers of spoken text in English, French, and Wolof with sampled concrète sounds recorded during a December of 2003 site visit to Dakar. Through language and sound, Just Dust chronicles the artist’s first visit to Dakar.
Speaking voices: Pamela Z, Alassane Paap Sow
Additional sampled voices: Joseph Ndaiye, Koyo Kouoh, Amina
French tranlsation: Thierry Rosset
Wolof translation: Alassane Paap Sow
Metal/Vox/Water
Two-channel video installation (with amplified metal) 2001, (duration: 12:00)
Two monitors (one horizontal & one vertical) display two separate, coordinated feeds of video and audio
edited from footage shot of Pamela Z manipulating, singing, and interacting
with the an amplified metal sound installation she created in her studio
during a residency at Tryon Center for Visual Art. The third componant
of the trio is her live perfomance with vocal processing and samples. This piece can also be shown with the metal sculpture hanging in proximity.
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