While at Open Studios in Somerville I came across conceptual artist JT Bullitt. According to his website:
"My studio work is an ongoing series of conceptual listening experiments that investigate the invisible, inaudible, intangible forces surrounding us and underlying human experience.
I am particularly fascinated by questions of identity & name, language & symbol, and the fluidity of our perception of time & space.
I work primarily in sound — both large and small — and in mark-making."
I was also fascinated to see he evaporated the novel Moby Dick--we will explain later!
What made you move from Maine? How do you like working along with the community of artists at the Joy Street Studios?
I’m originally from the Boston area but I lived in rural Maine for about 12 years. I loved the wildness of the coast and the deep silence of the night sky. It was really the perfect spot for a studio. But I eventually missed the stimulation of Boston’s art and science scene, as well as my two young granddaughters down in Massachusetts. So I moved back to the area and found a studio at Joy Street, where I’ve been working on a variety of projects involving sound and making marks on paper.
I’m primarily a conceptual artist, which is a rather peculiar niche, so it’s been wonderfully refreshing to meet outstanding artists here at Joy Street who are grounded in more traditional art practices. We’re an eclectic group, but there’s a good sense of community here. Lately we’ve been organizing ourselves to respond to the threat of displacement by high-end real estate development in the neighborhood. It’s a challenge for artist communities all across the city, but we’re doing our part. It feels good to be a part of that.
Your main work seems to be conceptual listening projects. Can you explain this endeavor and how it is presented to the public?
Listening is all about making deep connections with the world. Because sound is so intimately tied to the flow of time, those connections shift and change from moment to moment. It’s a very mysterious thing! My projects in sound and in other media are all “experiments” that explore these mysteries and try to get to the heart of things.
Over the years I’ve shared my work in many different ways: by publishing CD’s, presenting recordings at galleries and museums, and sharing them with dance choreographers, composers, musicians, and film makers. In my multichannel sound installations I invite listeners to walk around my studio and explore the shifting soundscapes, to give them a chance to tune in to the act of listening itself. It can be a powerful inward-looking experience. In some of my sound experiments I translate seismic recordings of the Earth’s slow vibrations into audible sound. In others I’ve recorded the sounds of snails eating, the sound of the tides, or the “sound” of the grooves that the glaciers carved like a phonograph into bedrock 12,000 years ago. It’s a way to experience the world at different scales of time and space and to contemplate where we fit within it all. I’ve also enjoyed streaming the sounds of the Earth online and broadcasting them into the air via FM radio. There’s nothing quite like turning on your car radio and hearing the Earth speak!
It’s always fun to see how people respond to these sounds. Sometimes when young children hear the seismic background “noise” of the Earth, they will curl up in their parent’s lap and settle into a very relaxed state. At the Joy Street open studios events I’ve had some really fun conversations with artists, mathematicians, philosophers, and people who are just plain curious about what I’m trying to do. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn from others.
Were you influenced by such minimalist music composer such as John Cage, etc...
My background is in science, so I feel some camaraderie with artists who borrow techniques from the world of science and technology to explore the nature of sound and silence. Cage himself was a master of silence, but he also did some brilliant compositions that used randomly tuned radios. His compositions raised deep questions about our assumptions about “noise” and “silence”. Sometimes it takes just a little bit of technology to make a profound esthetic discovery. When conceptual artist Juan Geuer shone a thin laser beam into a suspended drop of water, it filled the walls of a dimly lit museum gallery with a spectacular world of shimmering light and color. Who knew that the humble water drop contained such beauty! Seeing technology applied this way has had a huge influence on me. It expands the idea of what “art” can be. At the other extreme, I also enjoy the use of maximal technology when it can reveal fresh minimalist ideas. For example, Janet Cardiff famously used forty loudspeakers to create a sonic sculpture from a choir of forty individual singers, while Tristan Perich built a wall of 1,500 loudspeakers, each softly playing a different tone. All of these artists who use technology to various degrees have made an impact on my approach to art. But I’ve also found inspiration from painters like Mark Tobey, Lee Krasner, and Hossein Zenderouti, among others. And of course, sometimes the best inspiration comes from simply listening to a field cricket on a summer evening.
Although your interest is in sound, you published a version of Melville's "Moby Dick," entitled the "The Evaporated Moby Dick." Your conceit was never to use the same word twice from the original novel-- after a world appears—it disappears-- never to be seen again. What is the germ behind this idea?
I seem to be one of those strange people who actually loved reading Moby-Dick. I’ve read it three or four times. There’s something deliciously compelling about Ahab’s inevitable doom that’s foreshadowed beautifully in Melville’s story-telling and use of language. I was fascinated by the idea that something as concrete as language can propel a reader’s imagination towards an imaginary event as dramatic as (spoiler alert!) a shipwreck, where it seems that the entire world disintegrates into a floating pile of debris. The story’s crescendo is really the point where language itself breaks down. I wondered what would happen if language were allowed literally to disintegrate, until all that’s left is a sea of broken bits and pieces of punctuation? So I wrote some software to sift through the text, eliminating words one by one, but leaving the punctuation intact. I think that when the text “evaporates” this way, it reveals the ultimate fallibility of language itself. Evaporating Moby-Dick also surprised me because it revealed Melville’s impressive vocabulary. Even in the last chapters of the book, where the text consists mostly of white space sprinkled with punctuation, he’s still introducing new words. I think today’s best-sellers would probably run out of new words after the first few pages!
I’m originally from the Boston area but I lived in rural Maine for about 12 years. I loved the wildness of the coast and the deep silence of the night sky. It was really the perfect spot for a studio. But I eventually missed the stimulation of Boston’s art and science scene, as well as my two young granddaughters down in Massachusetts. So I moved back to the area and found a studio at Joy Street, where I’ve been working on a variety of projects involving sound and making marks on paper.
I’m primarily a conceptual artist, which is a rather peculiar niche, so it’s been wonderfully refreshing to meet outstanding artists here at Joy Street who are grounded in more traditional art practices. We’re an eclectic group, but there’s a good sense of community here. Lately we’ve been organizing ourselves to respond to the threat of displacement by high-end real estate development in the neighborhood. It’s a challenge for artist communities all across the city, but we’re doing our part. It feels good to be a part of that.
Your main work seems to be conceptual listening projects. Can you explain this endeavor and how it is presented to the public?
Listening is all about making deep connections with the world. Because sound is so intimately tied to the flow of time, those connections shift and change from moment to moment. It’s a very mysterious thing! My projects in sound and in other media are all “experiments” that explore these mysteries and try to get to the heart of things.
Over the years I’ve shared my work in many different ways: by publishing CD’s, presenting recordings at galleries and museums, and sharing them with dance choreographers, composers, musicians, and film makers. In my multichannel sound installations I invite listeners to walk around my studio and explore the shifting soundscapes, to give them a chance to tune in to the act of listening itself. It can be a powerful inward-looking experience. In some of my sound experiments I translate seismic recordings of the Earth’s slow vibrations into audible sound. In others I’ve recorded the sounds of snails eating, the sound of the tides, or the “sound” of the grooves that the glaciers carved like a phonograph into bedrock 12,000 years ago. It’s a way to experience the world at different scales of time and space and to contemplate where we fit within it all. I’ve also enjoyed streaming the sounds of the Earth online and broadcasting them into the air via FM radio. There’s nothing quite like turning on your car radio and hearing the Earth speak!
It’s always fun to see how people respond to these sounds. Sometimes when young children hear the seismic background “noise” of the Earth, they will curl up in their parent’s lap and settle into a very relaxed state. At the Joy Street open studios events I’ve had some really fun conversations with artists, mathematicians, philosophers, and people who are just plain curious about what I’m trying to do. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn from others.
Were you influenced by such minimalist music composer such as John Cage, etc...
My background is in science, so I feel some camaraderie with artists who borrow techniques from the world of science and technology to explore the nature of sound and silence. Cage himself was a master of silence, but he also did some brilliant compositions that used randomly tuned radios. His compositions raised deep questions about our assumptions about “noise” and “silence”. Sometimes it takes just a little bit of technology to make a profound esthetic discovery. When conceptual artist Juan Geuer shone a thin laser beam into a suspended drop of water, it filled the walls of a dimly lit museum gallery with a spectacular world of shimmering light and color. Who knew that the humble water drop contained such beauty! Seeing technology applied this way has had a huge influence on me. It expands the idea of what “art” can be. At the other extreme, I also enjoy the use of maximal technology when it can reveal fresh minimalist ideas. For example, Janet Cardiff famously used forty loudspeakers to create a sonic sculpture from a choir of forty individual singers, while Tristan Perich built a wall of 1,500 loudspeakers, each softly playing a different tone. All of these artists who use technology to various degrees have made an impact on my approach to art. But I’ve also found inspiration from painters like Mark Tobey, Lee Krasner, and Hossein Zenderouti, among others. And of course, sometimes the best inspiration comes from simply listening to a field cricket on a summer evening.
Although your interest is in sound, you published a version of Melville's "Moby Dick," entitled the "The Evaporated Moby Dick." Your conceit was never to use the same word twice from the original novel-- after a world appears—it disappears-- never to be seen again. What is the germ behind this idea?
I seem to be one of those strange people who actually loved reading Moby-Dick. I’ve read it three or four times. There’s something deliciously compelling about Ahab’s inevitable doom that’s foreshadowed beautifully in Melville’s story-telling and use of language. I was fascinated by the idea that something as concrete as language can propel a reader’s imagination towards an imaginary event as dramatic as (spoiler alert!) a shipwreck, where it seems that the entire world disintegrates into a floating pile of debris. The story’s crescendo is really the point where language itself breaks down. I wondered what would happen if language were allowed literally to disintegrate, until all that’s left is a sea of broken bits and pieces of punctuation? So I wrote some software to sift through the text, eliminating words one by one, but leaving the punctuation intact. I think that when the text “evaporates” this way, it reveals the ultimate fallibility of language itself. Evaporating Moby-Dick also surprised me because it revealed Melville’s impressive vocabulary. Even in the last chapters of the book, where the text consists mostly of white space sprinkled with punctuation, he’s still introducing new words. I think today’s best-sellers would probably run out of new words after the first few pages!