James Hoff, in collaboration with Ben Kudler – Brooklyn, NY

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 31, at 7pm for a performance by James Hoff, in collaboration with Ben Kudler. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with Hoff and the curator, Sanna Almajedi.

James Hoff and Ben Kudler will create an audio-visual work that inverts Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and transposes it onto an improvisatory performance context. GPS, a sonic technology, utilizes radio frequencies, doppler effects, oscillators, frequency modulation, and clocks; all tools inherent to electronic and computer music. It is also a visual technology, utilizing 2D images processed from multiple satellites to pinpoint a geographic location, which is then rendered onto a general user interface. On the consumer level, viewers navigate space by following these transmissions, while on the corporate and judicial level they are tracked for advertising and policing purposes.

Hoff will use custom hardware and software to collect and apply GPS properties (pieces of what is termed the “GPS sentence”) to oscillators and sample banks, creating compositional structures that will then be transformed by visual image and network data collected by Kudler, who will be hacking traffic and security cameras throughout the performance. This feedback loop, all occurring in real time and relying on the whims of these public space trackers, will create a composition that relies upon the infrastructure of GPS to reimagine the technology as a generative musical system outside of its contemporary military and industrial applications.

Hoff views the composite of technologies that make up GPS as part of a larger ecosystem of ambient media; an ecosystem of media forms (both visible/invisible, audible/inaudible, sensory/non-sensory) driving economic, military, political, and social systems that influence and contour individuals as public subjects. Aside from its original use as a navigational system for military technologies (missiles, planes, ships, etc.) and eventual release for civilian navigation, GPS is one of the most precise clocking mechanisms, used extensively in telecommunications, financial trading, biometrics, many devices that form the Internet of Things, data mining, and other applications that intersect with daily life.

James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. His work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. Hoff’s multidisciplinary approach is situated within the user space: the social and political space created through our interaction with consumer technologies, media, and data. Within this fraught arena, a site that manufactures and conditions political, economic, and social subjects, Hoff seeks to create new potentials for the tools, devices, and media we have inherited for the navigation of said space. He has worked with computer viruses, inaudible data signals, earworms, culture bound illnesses, dead zones, and hacked google maps as tools and framing devices for visual, audio, and multimedia works. Hoff’s most recent record, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands, was released by Shelter Press in May 2024. He has exhibited and performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), The Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, The Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among many others.

Ben Kudler is an artist, computer scientist, and professor living and working in New York City. His work is focused on sound, in particular improvised electronic music, audio-installations, and speech/text synthesis. Curation, activism, and critical writing also figure prominently into his practice. Releasing small run audio multiples—cassettes, records, CDs and web native releases—and performing in what is often tersely termed the Noise Underground, Kudler’s work is heavily influenced by the experiences of living and organizing in Baltimore’s long running, but now defunct, art warehouse spaces, The Bank and Tarantula Hill. Kudler holds an M.S. in computer science from NYU and a B.A. in a self-directed major focused on music and narrative nonfiction from Hampshire College. He has taught and participated in research at the New School For Social Research, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, Hampshire College, Goldsmiths College of London, NYU, UCLA, Wave Farm and Otisville State Prison. His latest release is We All Go Through What We All Go Through, released on Superpang in 2024.

The program of sound performances at e-flux is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Doors open at 7pm, and the performance starts at 7:30pm.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.