::SPATIAL 012 :: Micah Silver | Laura Splan

::SPATIAL 012 :: Micah Silver | Laura Splan | Ivy Fu

Sunday, December 07, 2025
169 Bowery NYC
8:00 PM

Micah Silver works with an expanded idea of composition. Composing means organizing attention—negotiations of a life through space, energy, and time. These are musical acts as much as sonic events themselves are considered musical: the composition of events as a conscious or transcendent act relating the interaction of things, regardless of conscious intention to do so. Composition is fundamentally relationship, not emotional realism on the part of an author or autonomy of object and space.

The questions animating this work trace how inner life is shaped by the mind’s entrainment with the senses through time. This has often meant working with algorithmic/dialectical systems and multichannel/place-scale audio as methods for constructing question-based practices—compositions that place the listener/visitor at the center of perceptually constructing the work for themselves rather than receiving a finished authorial plateau expressive of good taste. The computational and spatial are not technical flourishes but epistemological tools: ways of distributing the compositional act across time and space such that the work completes itself only in the visitor’s process of attending, moving, remembering, desiring, rejecting.

This ethos has gathered projects largely intersensory: audio not as music but as attentional artifact, sculpture, scent, controlled airflow, invisibility, video, the language of themed entertainment, archival/curatorial projects, and writing. His book Figures in Air, repositioning audio as an affective AI, is in its second printing with Inventory Press. He is co-founder of Polytope, an audio scenography collective bridging gaps in how listeners are considered in the design of cultural spaces.

Laura Splan’s “Movements” features an ethereal octophonic soundscape accompanied by hypnotic projections from her immersive planetarium show “A Guided Sublimation”. This hypnotic journey from the perspective of molecular entities evokes the interconnectedness of realms defined by permeable boundaries. Part of an expansive art practice combining 3D animations with spatial sound, Splan’s work creates arresting explorations of micro and macro worlds through the lens of epigenetic science. Texts from scientific research serve as a foundation for prompts for AI-generated imagery in the animations. Molecular processes associated with environmental influences on gene expression serve as aural and visual materiality to create a space for reflection on past and present.

The soundscape was created in collaboration with musicians, scientists, and engineers to generate a layered composition combining data, vocals, and guitar. The “movements” of the score oscillate between goopy and glitchy, soothing and unsettling, offering a sonic meditation situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological. The ambient foundation of “Movements” was created from sonifications generated in collaboration with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson using data from his computational simulations of molecular processes. Splan composed the data-driven sound files into MIDI instrument arrangements. Biotech lab instrumentation engineer and musician Frank Masciocchi created an original electric guitar composition inspired by a symphonic structure with four movements. Heavy metal musician Jared Warren (Big Business, Melvins, Unwound) contributed haunting vocals that permeate moments in the composition.

This premiere presentation of this newly spatialized composition celebrates the release of Splan’s limited-edition double vinyl box set. This special vinyl version of the soundscape was produced in collaboration with arts technologist KamranV of CyKiK using Phonocut, his unique push button vinyl recording device. The double disc LP has a running time of approximately twenty minutes with each side featuring a different movement of the symphonic structure. The collector’s edition includes two clear 10” discs housed in a custom acrylic box designed by Splan. The accompanying metallic print portfolio features a series of five kaleidoscopic stills from “A Guided Sublimation”. The stills are also featured in “Portals”, a photographic flip-book that includes the “meditation” narration script from the planetarium presentation of “A Guided Sublimation”.

PROJECT SUPPORT: A Guided Sublimation was originally commissioned by the Vanderbilt Museum with support from the Rochester Area Community
Foundation. This work was also made possible by the Simons Foundation and created in collaboration with Adam Lamson, theoretical biophysicist at Flatiron Institute. Additional support provided by the EY Metaverse Lab Residency at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator. Additional science collaboration with Dr. Hannah Lui Park and the UCI Park Lab was facilitated by the Beall Center for Art +Technology Black Box Projects Residency at UC Irvine. This work was also made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature through the Media Arts Assistance Fund a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm.

Ivy Fu: Tether is a performance with ambisonic soundscapes, body movements, and e-textile installation consisting of 8 individual strings crocheted with conductive yarns. Fragile and visceral materialistic, the yarns starve the electrical current moving through the circuit that outputs an 8 channel soundscape. As the artist and audience interact and change the tension and shape of the yarn, the intimate, ephemeral shape of the installation creates a spatial sonic image that is constantly morphing. The bodies struggle in negotiating its relationship to the yarn, currents thin and waver, the analogue signals stutter or flow, air and breaths becomes deep, all consuming low vibrations, ocean waves fly away like birds, and harmony turns into architecture. The spatial composition of sounds form psychic spaces where time is fluid and things that are lost recapitulate. In inviting the audience to participate in this destabilizing, constantly collapsing, and regenerative world of yarn, the artist seeks to navigate the complexity of the human spirit, and find comfort in the gentleness and lightness of grief.

About the Artists

Laura Splan is a New York City based artist working at the intersections of Science, Technology, and Culture. Her research-based studio practice and
interdisciplinary collaborations culminate in multimedia exhibitions and events that explore possibilities for understanding complexity through curiosity and wonder. Her work cultivates intuitive comprehension of the interconnectedness of cultural and biological systems by reframing artifacts of the posthuman landscape. Her sensory experiences allow embodied encounters with what she calls the “GUI/gooey” or liminal interfaces mediating our relationship to nature and to our bodies.

Splan’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), Santa Mònica Art Centre (Barcelona), Nantes Museum of Arts (Nantes), and The Nobel Prize Museum at Liljevalchs (Stockholm). Commissions include projects for Museum of the Moving Image, CDC Foundation, Vanderbilt Planetarium, Beall Center for Art+Technology, and Bruges Triennial. Her work is represented in the collections of the Spalter Digital Art Collection, Thoma Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, BOMB, and Frieze and she has been featured on Science Friday. Her research has been supported by the Simons Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Creative Australia, EY Metaverse Lab, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as a dedicated mentor for artists at NEW INC at the New Museum, and for the Plexus Projects Remote Residency. Current projects include collaborating with scientists at Open Fung to foster engagement with micro and macro worlds through creative research and explorations with fungi.

Ivy Fu is a sound artist. She makes sound installations with textile and spatial-audio compositions. She’s interested in the potential of musique concrète in exploring the unreachable inconcreteness of diagenetic sounds. In her electroacoustic compositions, she seeks the almost sounds, the slight ripples caused by the computer trying its hardest to interpret what is or is not happening following an auditory event, and the vibrational nature of a future which can never be determined. As audio stretches beyond their transients, the space of oscillation opens between particles that manifest the fictionally concrete world of digital sounds, as if Pangu opened the world from ambiguity.

In Ivy’s sound and textile installations, she aspires to reach the site of the near silences as a space of continual becoming. She is interested in the moments when materiality causes sounds to tremor, fragment, and open itself. She seeks and holds the physical and psychic space of sounds where the body begins to breathe, where untold stories find temporary resonance, and where fixed systems momentarily reveal their own insecurities.