Last August, Null Point presented “Art Music Uncomposed” on the lawn of Kleinhans Music Hall. As an encore to this show, the group – a platform for experimental music – plans to continue the series next summer.
Intentionally, Null point present events and projects in various institutional settings: artistic institutions, community organizations, universities and architectural reorientation projects.
In the meantime, they have a new series they are launching on a vacant lot on the west side of town – 450 Rhode Island Street (corner of 18th Street) aka Sublot 37 (main picture).
“Art and activism,” replied the founding artistic director Colin Tucker, when I asked him what was driving the project. “To get people thinking about the politics of space, when music is presented in unconventional spaces. It is the intersection of music and place, based on contemporary art – site-specific art. We focus on the 60s and 70s – re-enacting a variety of plays that were written during that era. We perform a piece of David Dun (acoustic ecologist) which was never carried out. And the works of a number of artists known as Flux (Yoko Ono, for example), with open scores.
“We also focus on the relationship between colonial politics and carbon-based infrastructure. It is vacant land, but it is also European colonial private property. It evokes the policy of urban space.
“It was interesting to work with this space – our last work was a piece about musical representations of water. We had a pool of water that participants could manipulate with musical samples. Art, music and water. It is the long-standing investigative relationship between aesthetics and everyday. What does something everydayand why?”
The new Null Point series, which is already underway, is called Demappings.
“Un-mappings” features public presentations of Null Point’s latest work in development. This work focuses on the exploration and dismantling of racial-colonial-bourgeois spatial politics through experimental musical techniques such as open scores, interactive and integrated audio, and archival investigations. Set in open land on the west side of Buffalo, the events take this outdoor public space (land occupied by Seneca) not as an incidental backdrop but as an integral part of their fabric.
Null point is a music research group founded in 2014 and based in the Seneca/Haudenosaunee territories.
Details:
October 6, 3-7 p.m.: Music by Megan Kyle and Colin Tucker- October 20, 4-7 p.m.: Music by Colin Tucker and Yoko Ono
- October 27, 4-7 p.m.: details to be confirmed
Free to attend
