blake marques carrington     discography:     vimeo highlights:     contact     bio  

BIO:
Blake Marques Carrington works within the spheres of the sound, visual and performing arts. His work explores technology’s relationship with the natural world and the built environment, and is realized largely as audiovisual installations, performances, and inkjet paintings. He has had four solo exhibitions in the U.S. and has received a Jerome Foundation Travel Study Grant and NYFA Fellowship in Electronic Arts. His debut album “Cathedral Scan” was released in 2011 by the LA-based Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and in 2012 Radio del Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid commissioned a follow-up. Working collaboratively, he has created and performed concert visuals with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective, and co-founded a platform for contemporary video art projections in public spaces called Urban Video Project that featured the work of Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, and Miranda Lichtenstein. Blake currently lives and works in Brooklyn, where he teaches in the Digital Arts Department at Pratt Institute.

STATEMENT:
My work is about technology's relationships with the natural world and the built environment, and how the latter two are becoming (or perhaps have always been) the same thing. I explore the tension between a materialist worldview – one informed by scientific realism and the existence of a mind-independent reality – and a postmodern worldview – one informed by semiotics and the network of signs and symbols that constitutes our psychic environment. These ideas take form in a practice of experimentation with tools. Through writing code and utilizing new technologies, I produce interactive installations, audiovisual compositions and performances, album releases, inkjet paintings, and single-channel videos. Though trained as a visual artist, the flexible material that is digital media led me to a practice highly focused on sound as well. In general, I treat the materials of my work – not just sound and image but also data, architecture, and space – as formal objects of translation. They are all proportional elements in an equation, like energy and mass, flowing into each other. Soundscape pioneer R. Murray Schafer said “all visual projections of sounds are arbitrary and fictitious”. I extend this idea to all materials and embrace the fiction of these projections. The ultimate goal of my work is to discover a fiction that rings more deeply true than our everyday perception of the world.