Checkpoint C Artist Talk with Ricardo iamuuri Robinson

Join artist Ricardo iamuuri Robinson for a closing reception for his current installation, Checkpoint C. This multimedia time-based audio installation explores the ways in which streams of information, entertainment, and consumerism widen the gap between civilians and military service members. It is an immersive art installation that includes visual and spatial elements, positioning listeners in the sand as sound moves throughout the interior of a retrofitted shipping container.

During the reception, Robinson will discuss the artwork and his collaboration with the post-9/11 veteran community of Pittsburgh. The artist talk will be followed by a Q & A and time to view the installation. Refreshments will be provided.

About Checkpoint C

Checkpoint C is a multimedia, time-based audio installation that explores ways in which streams of information, entertainment, and commercialization desensitize and widen the gap between civilians and our military service members.

In 2019 The Office for Public Art and RethinkVets announced Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson as the artist in residence with the RethinkVets coalition. Throughout this two-year initiative, Robinson engaged with members of the post-9/11 veteran community, facilitating workshops, discussions, and virtual forums. By embedding himself in the veteran community, a collaborative experience developed to create a final work of art.

This immersive art installation is the culmination of many perspectives on why division persists between civilians and military service members. Seven speakers have been arranged in a bi-rectangular ambisonic array, simulating a three dimensional composed soundscape. The installation positions listeners in the sand as sounds move throughout the interior, inviting a variety of complex questions but still leading to one automatic response: thank you for your service.

This project is supported by the Office for Public Art and The Heinz Endowments.

About Ricardo iamuuri Robinson

Ricardo iamuuri Robinson is an interdisciplinary conceptual sound recordist, composer, and visual artist whose work explores acoustic ecologies–a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment. His work activates and responds to the utterance: “The listener is always the composer.” Packed in this sentence is an expansive truth–humans, across time and space, encounter sound through entangled filtration. Humans experience the world and its multifaceted harmonics with who they are, their experiences, their positionalities. Sound is site-specific, yet world-trekking; It is planetary–if not experienced through the ear, then through the hum and resonance in the body.

Robinson’s work utilizes this unique capacity and wisdom of sound in order to (re)tell the story of production. It affects our sense of time and place, mood and affect. The exposure and relation to sound is mediated through our societal affiliations and afflictions–cities sound different from suburbs sound different from neighborhoods with emergency sirens sound different from high-rise million-dollar condominiums with valet. Each pocket of the Earth formulates its own soundscape, which becomes and continues to exist in convoluted relationship with the sociopolitical systems that be.

Employing research, field recordings, archiving, media archeology, filmmaking, performance art, and creative listening engagements, Robinson invites listeners to cultivate a deeper understanding of the ways in which listening and sound informs our sense of place and awareness while exposing the listener to its sociopolitical dimensions to encourage a heightened engagement with systems of power.

Registration

This event is free to attend; advance registration is encouraged. To register, please visit the registration link below.