Here and Now
A blooming of lights in time with migratory bird song
*Art Club does not sell exhibit tickets through EventBrite, Ticketmaster, Seat Geek, and any other site that is not Eventrill.com.
Zugunruhe is a German term used to describe the restlessness animals exhibit when compelled to migrate. This new iteration of Here and Now reflects on this instinctive urge to move and expands the installation into a choreography of light and sound. Here and Now, is about resilience, referencing and features birds that migrate through East Texas and other parts of the world and how they’ve adapted to humanity’s environmental impact. It gestures to global connections across vast distances.
The compositions that make up this piece include a call and response in the form of bird sounds made by human immigrants to Houston. The musical components are built through granular synthesis, using small fragments—or grains—of these recorded bird calls to form new tonal instruments. These patterns then modulate the light, height, and blooming of the kinetic flower sculptures.
Here and Now points to Houston’s diversity and highlights the various ways that life on ear this marked by, and even sustained by, movement.
Special thanks to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Daniela Antelo, Siddharth Bharadwaj, and Josan Pinto for contributing their voices to the piece.
Artist
Lina Dib
Lina Dib is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Troy, NY and Montreal, QC. Her work highlights how our relationships with technological and natural systems are intimately linked to our relationships with each other. She creates pieces that push back on the demands of our current attention economy and that encourage moments for presence and connection.
Dib has a PhD in anthropology from Rice University, TX. She is a Research Fellow for the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice, and Senior Lecturer in design and innovation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in the Department of Science and Technology Studies.
She is the recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the City of Houston among others. Recent exhibitions include Verona Contemporary, the Houston Climate Justice Museum, the Houston Botanic Garden, Yerba Buena Gardens, Day for Night, Galveston Arts Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Governor’s Island NY, the Whitney Biennial, and Johnson Space Center NASA.