Reviewing

Rheostat Rotary Rack

Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel, Bryan Jacobs

Rheostat Rotary Rack is the second instrument of Women’s Labor, a feminist-activist project that repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments, to interrogate gender inequality in housework division. Itis based on a mid-20th century umbrella-style rotary dryer embedded with a rotary encoder and potentiometers, performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand or by wind.

Saturday August 19, 2023 OUTDOORS

1-4 pm

Location: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island


Women’s Labor is a feminist-activist project that repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments, integrating the massive but invisible gender inequality in housework division in the home. Using embedded technologies, these household-devices-turned instruments are explored in interactive installations, commissioned compositions by women, workshops, and performances.

While policies have made progress in tackling gender inequality in the workplace, such inequality stubbornly remain in the household: women globally spend disproportionately more time doing unpaid housework than men. According to the UN, the feminization of care and domestic work is a pressing worldwide social, cultural, and economic challenge that not only compromises women’s employment opportunities and ability to build assets for themselves; it also significantly impacts women’s health and education, and increases vulnerability to violence and exploitation. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle with these gendered tools that are visible — and now audible — symbols of domestic labor gender inequality.

The first instrument that won the 2021 International Alliance of Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize is the Embedded Iron, based on an early-20th century wooden ironing board and antique iron. Rheostat Rotary Rack, the second instrument,is based on the Australian “Hills Hoist” dryer, an outdoor steel rotary clothes line that can spin in the wind, designed to maximize wind drying. Embedded with a rotary encoder and potentiometers, it is performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand or by wind.

The audience is invited to participate by hanging their own clothing on the Rack, listening to the sounds of housework in a collective gender-equal houseworking performance. Rheostat Rotary Rack is both a human and post-human instrument, making for equal collaboration between humans and non-human agents in the Anthropocene.

Documentation of the instrument:


BIOS

Jocelyn Ho

Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves exploring the relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary, collaborative performance projects, including the sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground in which she performed works created by fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers in an interactive, multimedia piano recital. Her latest project Women’s Labor that interrogates domesticity through sound installation and performance has won the IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, Hellman Fellowship, Harvestwork residency, and UCLA Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music, and has been featured at Governors Island, New Music Gathering, Design Museum of Chicago, ISEA, NIME, Alliance of Women in Media Arts and Technology Conference, CCRMA at Stanford, and UCLA Art|Sci Gallery.

As pianist and composer, Ho is a Steinway Artist. She has performed and had her works premiered at Radio France, the Sydney Opera House, Berlin’s Radialsystem V, the Melbourne Recital Centre, New York Symphony Space, Spectrum NYC, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Spotify’s NYC Headquarters, NSW Parliament House, Victorian Governor’s House, the Boston Isabella Gardner Museum, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival.

She is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.

Margaret Schedel

With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. Her diverse creative output spans the interactive multimedia operas, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. A Professor in the Department of Music, at Stony Brook University she currently serves as the Chair of the Art Department and teaches computer music at Peabody Conservatory. 

Bryan Jacobs

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-build electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

Embedded Iron, first instrument of Women’s Labor:

PRESS QUOTES

“Ho’s work brings attention to how our bodies interact with music, sound, and each other. And her mission isn’t over yet.” – Entropy Magazine

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

https://www.facebook.com/piano.jocelynho/

http://schedel.net

http://www.bryanjacobsmusic.com

COLLABORATORS

Jocelyn Ho, Creative director

Margaret Schedel, Technical director

Bryan Jacobs, Engineer

Jocelyn Ho

Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves the exploration of the
relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as the rethinking
of the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity,
and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary performance projects
involving collaborators from vastly different fields. Most recently, she is the
artistic director and performer of the sold-out music-art-tech concert project
Synaesthesia Playground, in which she leads fifteen composers, visual artists,
technologists, and fashion designers from all around the world to create an
interactive, multimedia experience. Ho is also a Steinway Artist, and her
ground-breaking concert programs have taken her to venues including Radio France,
the Sydney Opera House, Berlin’s Radialsystem V, Abrons Art Center, the Melbourne
Recital Centre, New York Symphony Space, Spectrum NYC, and the Boston Isabella
Gardner Museum. Ho’s compositions include multi-disciplinary collaborations as
composer and sound artist with software developers and visual artists featured at
the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Stony Brook Faculty Art Exhibition, and the
University of Florida Art Gallery. She is an Assistant of Performance Studies at
UCLA.

Dr. Margaret Schedel

With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning interactive multimedia operas, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video games, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments and custom controllers. She is internationally recognized for the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data; she co-authored a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroscience on using familiar music to sonify the gaits of people with Parkinson’s Disease. She serves as a regional editor for Organised Sound and served as an editor for the open access journal Cogent Arts and Humanities. As an Associate Professor of Music with a core appointment in the Institute at Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University, she serves as the co-director of computer music and is the Chair of Art while teaching computer music composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She is the co-founder of www.arts.codes, a platform and artist collective celebrating art with computational underpinnings.

Margaret Anne Schedel

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She is a joint author of Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on the aesthetics of sonification. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and the percussion ensemble Ictus. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data. She sits on the boards of 60×60, the International Computer Music Association, and is a regional editor for Organised Sound. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a Williamsburg Gallery focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. In 2010 she co-chaired the International Computer Music Conference, and in 2011 she co-chaired the Electro-Acoustic Music Studies Network Conference. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is the Director of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.

Bryan Jacobs

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on
interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His
pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs
against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic
patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-build electromechanical instruments
controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoutic sound worlds.
These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based
gallery works. Jacobs, a Guggenheim Fellow, has been lucky enough to have his music
and sound art presented at a number of festivals around the world. Bryan is the
co-founder of Qubit and a member of Ensemble Pamplemousse.