Keith Rodgerson (b.1975, Bridgeport CT) is a Southwest Detroit-based sound sculptor, curator, urban planner, and former politician surveilling amplification and leakage in coeval acoustic phenomena, often across urban topographies and within remote sensation. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe and has received coverage in outlets such as The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Negative Guest List, AP News, Washington Times, Fox and Friends, Dutch Public Radio, The Times of Israel, Preservation Sound, and Artscope Magazine. He founded the Boston “inconvenience store.” Outside of America, he co-founded the NYC sound ensemble “The Chinese Restaurants” and currently serves as director of the Center for Natural Music in Detroit, MI. He has collaborated in his sound practice since 1996 with artists as diverse as Jon Brumit, Jason Mones, Alvin Lucier, and Mattin. Previously studying philosophy at Harvard (BA, 2001) and Columbia Universities, he is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
La Nave (Vista Este), 2022, Steel, amplifier, microphone, transducer, telecommunications device, and live eruption data
East view of corridic installation of sounding steel ellipses mounted in square vessels, regulated by real-time communication of data from geo-hydrological events. Vessels form the nave of a sacral space, sounding the natural frequencies of their material structure, intermittently emanating the natural frequency of the standing human body—the tone of maximum displacement between the organs and skeletal structure.
Corazón de Péndulo (1Hz), 2021, Glass and infrasound, 6 x 6 in.
Black glass vessel formed by sound pressure waves from filtered live environmental sound. This sound was calibrated to the natural resonant frequency of both the human heart and pendulum, the infrasonic frequency of 1Hz.
La Nave (Vista Norte), 2022, Steel, amplifier, microphone, transducer, telecommunications device, and live eruption data
North view of corridic installation of sounding steel ellipses mounted in square vessels, regulated by real-time communication of data from geo-hydrological events. Vessels form the nave of a sacral space, sounding the natural frequencies of their material structure, intermittently emanating the natural frequency of the standing human body—the tone of maximum displacement between the organs and skeletal structure.
Latas (Advertisement), 2021, Two performers, steel cans, neodymium magnets, magnetic clothing, and sound performance
Two contact improvisers are deprived of sight, outfitted in ferromagnetic clothing, and navigate a room filled with paint cans and strong magnets. The participants echolocate and move “only with one’s ear" improvising extempore sound through movement within uncontrollable, imperiled circumstance (with Aidyn Lorraine Mills.)
Using sound as conceptual material in improvisation and architectures of spaces, materials, and beings, I work from sound into material (as opposed to sound as material) within a speculative acoustic in the genesis of performance, installation, and writing, exploring systemic adjacency through pathological modes of inquiry. Pathology towards leakage, emergence/emergency, and states of intimacy between artist, public, and work, illuminating disproportionality between sonic presence/public expectation, labor/quantities of artistic production, amplified/source. The role of resonance in the continuation of open, perpetual works is critical to the material intimacy it creates, proximities it dematerializes and amplifies.