James Hoff, in collaboration with Ben Kudler

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 31, at 7pm for a performance by James Hoff, in collaboration with Ben Kudler. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with Hoff and the curator, Sanna Almajedi.

James Hoff and Ben Kudler will create an audio-visual work that inverts Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and transposes it onto an improvisatory performance context. GPS, a sonic technology, utilizes radio frequencies, doppler effects, oscillators, frequency modulation, and clocks; all tools inherent to electronic and computer music. It is also a visual technology, utilizing 2D images processed from multiple satellites to pinpoint a geographic location, which is then rendered onto a general user interface. On the consumer level, viewers navigate space by following these transmissions, while on the corporate and judicial level they are tracked for advertising and policing purposes.  

Hoff will use custom hardware and software to collect and apply GPS properties (pieces of what is termed the “GPS sentence”) to oscillators and sample banks, creating compositional structures that will then be transformed by visual image and network data collected by Kudler, who will be hacking traffic and security cameras throughout the performance. This feedback loop, all occurring in real time and relying on the whims of these public space trackers, will create a composition that relies upon the infrastructure of GPS to reimagine the technology as a generative musical system outside of its contemporary military and industrial applications.

Hoff views the composite of technologies that make up GPS as part of a larger ecosystem of ambient media; an ecosystem of media forms (both visible/invisible, audible/inaudible, sensory/non-sensory) driving economic, military, political, and social systems that influence and contour individuals as public subjects. Aside from its original use as a navigational system for military technologies (missiles, planes, ships, etc.) and eventual release for civilian navigation, GPS is one of the most precise clocking mechanisms, used extensively in telecommunications, financial trading, biometrics, many devices that form the Internet of Things, data mining, and other applications that intersect with daily life. The program of sound performances at e-flux is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.