In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves, 2012

for multi-tracked viola

(This note is about the limited-edition vinyl, available for purchase on New Amsterdam Records)

In 2011, SMoCA curator Claire C. Carter invited visual artists Luke Batten, Neil Donnelly, Mary Voorhees Meehan and Jonathan Sadler—working under the pseudonym New Catalogue—and composer Judd Greenstein to create a cross-disciplinary exhibition, which they named This is a Present from a Small Distant World. The interactive, multimedia art installation incorporated each artist’s creative language—music, video, photography, design and architecture. The experimental collaboration was inspired alternatively by the 1971 Voyager spacecrafts’ Golden Record, mass media, NASA typography and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. The resultant record is the final collaboration of four visual artists, a composer and two musicians. These striking recordings are encased within the record jacket and liner notes—itself a work of art. The jacket and liner notes feature the artists’ photography and design, as well as essays by the curator and composer. In a final physical alchemic collaboration, In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves deftly straddles the line between music record and museum exhibition catalogue.