Barnard Movement Lab Residency – ongoing journal

During the Fall ’25 and Spring ’26 semesters, I am fortunate to be able to work at the Barnard Movement Lab as part of the Student Artist in Residence program. I’m still the very early stages of my project, but I’ll be keeping track of my explorations and experiments on this page over the course of the residency!

Current Fascinations

Perhaps I’m still in the Halloween spirit – I’m finding myself drawn to art and ideas that embrace a sense of monstrosity (but beautiful, vulnerable, eerie monstrosity). I’m obsessed with curled bodies and stuttered sounds, writhing limbs and keening instruments, and charged stillness. Thinking lots about movement, gesture in connection with sound, and film/projection as magnification of sonic bodies.

Some art and literature that’s been inspiring me recently…

Words: Lauren Elkin’s fantastic book Art Monsters. Elkin explores how feminist artists for decades have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their bodies. She looks to the work of many disparate artists, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, to Hannah Wilke’s portraits to Carolee Schneemann’s films, to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures. This has been a hugely informative and inspirational read, sparking lots of thoughts about beauty, excess, embodiment, extraction, decay, touch, the personal, and political.

Image: I’ve been fascinated by the work of Dora Maar recently, since being introduced to it this past summer by friends while on a road trip in the south of France. Every image I see of hers is so intriguing. Surrealist art has always been something I’m drawn to, and there’s something about Maar’s traversing of media that really appeals to me. I like the fashion/theatre allusions, such as in Model in Swimsuit, 1936 and Untitled (Fashion photograph), c. 1935, and the fragmentation/distortion of the body that is common in much of her work, such as in Untitled (Handshell), 1934 and Sans titre, 1935 below.

Sound: I’m super interested in vocality at the moment, especially fragmented vocality and collage. I love the way that Erin Gee uses hushed nonverbal sounds in her Mouthpieces – there’s an enchanting vulnerability and delicacy to the fragments that I find really striking. I’ve also been enjoying coming back to John Cage’s Roaratorio (as audio only, and with Merce Cunningham’s choreography), which also has a fragmented quality to it, of a very different character, with many complex layers of tape.

Multimedia/Installation: I’ve recently started exploring the work of artist Toni Dove, who uses embodied interfaces as human operated instruments to tell stories. Her work is absolutely incredible, and resonates with the monstrous, more-than-human, otherworldly themes that I’m interested in exploring within my Movement Lab project through an experimental theatre approach. Here’s one example from her body of work:

Previous Work in the Movement Lab

I made a project last semester in the Movement Lab with collaborators Shira Kagan-Shafman and Nathaniel Otley. The clip below is an extract of our ongoing project which explores connections between gesture and sound.

I’m really keen to continue experimenting with projection in the space over the course of my residency at the Movement Lab, especially playing around with many small screens, like at the end of the above extract.

Playing around with ideas

I’m obsessed with the idea of a room filled with giant mouths, separated from the body, which whisper, murmur, hiss, soothe, groan, stutter, lament, screech, hum, and so on – in some sort of uncertain communication that swings between complacency and urgency. There’s something about this picture that feels pertinent to existing in our current time, the same way that Florence Welch screaming into a hole in the ground feels so very relatable…

I want to make a work which embraces ideas of fragmentation, interrupted utterance, and the disembodied voice, using audio-video recordings of various vocal sounds, and production techniques which enhance/distort/augment the voice. I’ve made a tiny, very rough audio-video sketch – it’s recorded on my phone, without any video or audio processing, and very roughly chopped together. Just a teensy insight into where my brain is at in this moment.

I really like the idea of having some sort of live improvisation with the giant mouths. Perhaps the mouths could be triggered through a keyboard with some sort of randomization, so that I can be improvising between a keyboard and the recordings in a sort of continuous loop. The project will likely involve many (100+) voice recording snippets so that I can build banks of recordings for randomization of different parameters, to then build a structure around for the longer form piece. This will take a bit of figuring out in Max MSP, which I intend to work on as part of a seminar at the Columbia Computer Music Center next semester. I’m also continuing to collaborate with Shira, a wonderful choreographer, so it would also be exciting to explore movement tracking in relation to sound, perhaps having her movement either trigger or augment the sound/video files.

Next Steps

I’ve been taking a class on Studio Production for Composition this semester, where I’ve been learning more about recording and producing. In the coming weeks, I’ll be heading to the recording studio to capture some fun mouth sounds! And then producing the tiny fragments of sound and video that will form the key materials of the piece. I’ll then be spending the winter holiday reacquainting myself with Max MSP.