Aritis:        Yann Novak
Title:         Indoors / Outdoors | ©
Date:        2009
Duration:  8′59

photo by: Robert Crouch

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THE SOUND

Recording something that was uniquely, Los Angeles posed a challenge at first.  When you think about the traditional identifiers of a city, Los Angeles falls short–there is no central core, no common meeting place.  Los Angeles seems to be a conglomeration of smaller areas, each with its own history and culture.  No single place or experience felt uniquely Los Angeles to me.  I stopped looking for a place and started thinking about the lifestyle of Los Angeles. Then it dawned on me. I had never experienced a lifestyle where the line between indoors and outdoors was blurred or even nonexistent.  This blurry line is built into many buildings, restaurants and homes in Los Angeles.  For this piece, I decided to focus on my own blurry line, the roll up door in my loft that is open so much of the year.  This door acts as the main passage to the outside and supplies the space with 90% of its light.  This blur is not just structural. During the night this door casts light and sound out into the ally, tinting it with the activities of the loft’s inhabitants.  In exchange, crickets make their way towards the light, and find small notches indoors to chirp through the night.  The resulting recording was done in this blur, sitting somewhere between the indoors and the outdoors.

THE ARTIST

Yann Novak (b. 1979 Madison, WI) is a sound artist, composer and designer based in Los Angeles.  His work utilizes different forms of digital documentation as a point of departure.  Through the digital manipulation of these sound and image files, his works serve as a translation from documents of personal experiences into new compositions fueled by the original experience.  His compositions have been published by Dragon’s Eye Recordings (US), The Henry Art Gallery (US), Infrequency (CA), and smlEditions (US). Novak’s installations and performances have been presented internationally at prestigious events and venues including American Academy in Rome (Rome, Italy), Decibel Festival (WA), Henry Art Gallery (WA), Las Cienegas Projects (CA), Lawrimore Project (WA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA), Mutek Festival (Montreal, QB), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), TBA Festival (OR) and Western Bridge (WA).

Links: www.yannnovak.com | www.dragonseyerecordings.com

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