Reuben Son

I’m a Korean-American artist and technologist based in New York City, working primarily with software, sound, and ceramics. My recent and ongoing body of work engages what I call “choreographies of listening”, in which the act of listening situates the body within the larger environment of the sculpture or performance. This emphasis on listening introduces a somatic consideration of materiality and phenomenology beyond traditional qualities of surface and form in sculpture.

In “After Orpheus”, the exhibition visitor interacts with a sound sculpture first through reverberations in a ceramic bell, and then through a paper cup held against a vibrating steel wire. The poetry-sound collection “Airs”, emerged from my practice of plein air listening, and uses the wind as a force on both language and sound. And in the piece “Frog Chorus”, smartphones generate a self-evolving sound installation that folds machine listening into the broader environment.

My studio practice prioritizes the poetics of contingency, whereby works cannot be reduced to exercises in abstraction or conceptualism. While my works are often motivated by readings in poetry and theories of mind, my studio practice is essentially an experimental one, through which an originating idea or spark may eventually find its form.