2021-2022 – John Roach

Colony (2022)

COLONY is an immersive sound installation that probes the complex relationship between bees and humans. It weaves together recordings of bees with interviews that explore our co-existence with these insects as well as our compulsion to understand them through a human lens. Voices include a blind beekeeper; a social practice artist who created an installation of hives in the shape of the notorious Pruitt Igoe housing complex; an architect designing a bee sanctuary in Tanzania; an author of a book about being raised among bees; and a Michigan beekeeper working in the field. All reverb applied in the work was recorded live in the cold war era surveillance radar station in Port Austin Michigan.

The Airborne Library – Teton Arts Lab (2022)

I am one of five artists selected for the Uncommon Art Residency in Jackson Wyoming. I will be working with local artists to enact a series of sound interventions that explore Charles Babbage's notion that sounds, once uttered, circle the globe for eternity.

Zion – Artist in Residence (2022)

I am one of three individuals selected to be an artist in residence at the Zion National Park in 2022. I will be in living in the park for the month of February recording, interviewing and seeing where the location takes me. I am the first sound artist to be selected for the program which has existed since 2010.

The Sound of Where We Are (2021)

Sound is intimately tied to our surroundings: wave energy bounces off surfaces, rooms have their own resonance, and our voices respond to the spaces they inhabit. What does it mean then to teach a class about spatial sound phenomena in an online environment? Particularly a class that ends with a site-based sound installation?

ArtEcho (2021)

A commissioned prototype for Cooper Hewitt Interaction Lab's Activating Smithsonian Access. ArtEcho explores a selection of the museum's artifacts through sound.

Green screen & other exercises

This ongoing series of experiments on a green screen work surface combine sound improvisation with post processed video images. These sketches are a chance to "limber up" to let ideas happen and then to contextualize them visually after the fact.