S t u d i o F i v e B e e k m a n

sound and intermedia gallery

Dean Roberts

Absent Territories......and audio ghosts

an electro-acoustic installation

Saturdays

2 - 9 PM

March 6 - 27, 1999

photograph by Dean Roberts

Dean Roberts is an artist from New Zealand currently based in New York. He has performed, recorded and broadcast music in the USA, Europe and Australasia. He studied Intermedia Arts and Electronic Music composition at the University of Auckland. In 1997 he received a Grant from Creative New Zealand Toi Aoteraroa to perform work internationally. In 1998 he received an Artist In Residency grant from STEIM studios in Amsterdam for the purpose of developing work with live electronics, and in 1999 he is a recipient of an Artist in Residency grant from HarvestWorks, for the purpose of developing this installation and a recording project for CD. In December 1998 he released the CD 'All cracked medias' on the Mille Plateaux label which is his 5th solo album of music.

'Absent Territories...and audio ghosts' is designed for Studio Five Beekman, and will use the 10 speaker system to create a sound environment with parallel texts and sound sources which discuss the subject of memory and it's role in the construction of identity. With subjects discussing varying facets of memory, nostalgia, photography, memory synthesis, fabrication etc. etc., and the ways in which we adopt fragments as signifiers and materials in the construction of meta-realities, personal and social histories, and how parallelism or "the presence of absence" works and plays with process. The piece is intended to be an essay on the assimilation of these themes into an electro-acoustic environment, and will employ audio, text and photography as means to illustrate dialogues and discussions between the 'audio ghosts' as they re-iterate their experience and theories of absent territories.