Andrea Polli

April 18-September 5, 2008

EXHIBITION: N. in Melting Ice / A Hot Topic: Envisioning Change, an exhibition sponsored by The Natural World Museum, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago IL

May 1-October 31, 2008

EXHIBITION: N. featured in Feeling the Heat - Artists, Scientists and Climate Change Deutsche Bank Art, 60 Wall Street, New York NY

Ongoing Project: SONIC ANTARCTICA

Sonic Antarctica is a series of natural and technological sound recordings and sonifications made by artists, scientists and sound enthusiasts who have lived in Antarctica.

"When most people picture Antarctica, on the few occasions that they even think about that frozen continent, they probably think of a bare, eerily silent, and unforgivable landscape. Andrea Polli, on the other hand, pictures a land of mystery and sound as well as a saving grace for atmospheric scientists all over the world...As multiple projectors and television screens played footage of the Antarctic landscape and the scientists working in such a landscape, Polli played numerous and varied audio clips that illustrate the unusual sort of soundscape that can be found in such a locale. As she transferred from audio recording of the various forms of transportation used in the area (helicopters and planes) to the sounds of nature (glaciers melting in the summer sun, emperor penguins and elephant seals) she eventually revealed the sounds of the earth itself through a process called sonification...As the evening ended Polli left a sonification recording of a rare earthquake in Antarctica playing, as viewers trailed out of the room the sound vibrations followed, shaking even the floor with intensity." -Alyssa Perez, The Colgate Maroon News

Ongoing Project: N.

"The overall effect is mysterious; while giving an approximation of windswept desolation, it is also as melancholy as a whale song...It is remarkable that this work, almost entirely constructed from empirical scientific data, manages to produce such a palpable and emotive sense of loss." -David Barrett, Art Monthly

N. is collaborative project between UK sound and web artist Joe Gilmore (creator of rand()%) and Andrea Polli commissioned by the Lovebytes 2005 Festival and shown at the Site Gallery in Sheffield, UK

REVIEWS: Read an excellent review of an exhibition of several of Polli's works at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in the The LATimes by Shana Ting Lipton and another by Jit Fong Chin in Squeeze OC February, 2007

AWARDS: N. nominated out of over 2600 entries for the Viper International Awards, The 2005 VIPER International Festival for Film and New Media in Basel, Switzerland

Ongoing Project: THE QUEENSBRIDGE WIND POWER PROJECT

"The Queensboro Bridge is a beautiful artifact of the industrial age and this project represents the transition that can and must be made from the industrial age, dependent on fossil fuels, to an industrial era that lives off of solar income...wind is solar energy too, and all sustainability is about getting the income to expense ratio on solar income to something that can be sustained by living systems." Paul Hawken, author of Natural Capitalism

The Queens Council on the Arts awarded Polli an Individual Artist Support grant, funded by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Greater New York Arts Development Fund, for a public installation/screening of this work and related projects.

EXHIBITIONS: The Queensbridge Wind Power Project has been presented in a solo exhibition on public art at Contemporary and Classic Navy Pier Art Expo, Chicago and in The SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery: Intersections, Boston among other venues.

More information on the project available at http://www.andreapolli.com/queensbridge/

Ongoing Project: HEAT AND THE HEARTBEAT OF THE CITY

WEB PROJECT: Heat and the Heartbeat of the City commissioned by Turbulence, a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) launched December 1, 2004. This project has been funded by the Greenwall Foundation.

PAPERS: Short papers on Heat and the Heartbeat of the City have been published in the online Landviews Journal of Landscape, Art & Design and December 2005 Hz Journal #7.

EXHIBITIONS: As a part of Biennale of Electronic Art in Perth/Australia BEAP, [R][R][F]2004 --->XP September 3, 2004, through 2006

Sounds in Space [Ääniä tilassa] May 19, 2005 23:00-24:00
Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE Radio 1, 87.9 MHz.
http://www.aureobel.com/Sounds_in_Space.html

The SoundLab Channel presents Polli's sonification of Central Park climate data from 1901-2001. More information on the project available at http://www.andreapolli.com/centralpark/

Heat and the Hearbeat of the City in The JavaMuseum final online exhibition. Also be featured on the [R][R][F]2005--->XP global networking project and in the Images Festival for Video and New Media in Toronto April 6-17 2005

Ongoing Project: ATMOSPHERICS/WEATHER WORKS

"ONE PULLS ONESELF AWAY only with a strenuous effort of will. The sounds inveigle their way into one’s ears, slowly, subtly, insidiously inducing a sense of muted and desperate panic. When one draws away, one cannot help but blink, dazed; one feels something unenviable on the spectrum between that feeling of being released into daylight after a long captivity in darkness and the feeling that the daylight is itself merely another form of captivity, an equally distressing and unarming tool for jarring the soul. There is a lull, but it is only momentary. The sounds begin again. They are like the wormword, nonsense imbued with terrible meaning, burrowing irretrievably into the mind." -From a reaction to Atmospherics/Weather works by Michael ‘Six’ Silberman on fiveplusone.net

on THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART'S ARTPORT:
<http://www.whitney.org/artport> Artport is the Whitney Museum's portal to net art and digital arts, and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. The artport's archive of "gate pages," function as portals to net artists' works.

Listen to a WAMC Public Radio feature on Atmospheric/Weather Works in Elevator Music 10

on neural.it http://www.neural.it/nnews/atmosphericse.htm

UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2003, Digital Pluralism Honorary Mention

NOW AVAILABLE!

MP3 RELEASE July 2004:
<http://www.stasisfield.com/releases/sf-3006.html> Stasisfield presents Retina Burn, a 27 minute composition by Andrea Polli. The Stasisfield record label focuses on instrumental experimental music that is minimal in nature.

"In Retina Burn, soundwaves generated by the sun are manipulated by movements of the performer's eye, thereby allowing the listener to audibly 'view' the sun without the usual risk of damaged vision. The composition's low hums and fluttering sine waves combine with percussive blinks and squints to gradually move through a series of sonic dilations; a feast for the ears prepared by the eye."
-John Kannenberg, Stasisfield Founder/Curator

"SUN-KISSED MP3: One of the beautiful things about electronic music that's derived from conceptual art is that it provides its own readymade metaphors....Case in point, Retina Burn...Polli's work — 27-plus minutes of low-level interference and broken whirs — takes as its source "soundwaves generated by the sun." Polli then manipulates this sonic information, transforming it with what she's termed "intuitive ocusonics," or computer-aided musical interfaces that track eye movement....Conceptually, Polli's point is self-apparent: by manipulating sound from the sun with her eyes, she's doing what we otherwise must not, which is to look directly at the sun. What's interesting, though, is that the resulting sound art, as heard on the overtly slow Retina Burn, doesn't suggest the scorching, brilliant center of our solar system (although the crackles do bring it to mind) so much as it sounds like data being processed meticulously in the name of science: pristine data sets published for peer evaluation."
-Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet: reflections on ambient/electronic music. www.disquiet.com