ABOUT ArtHyve:
ArtHyve is a community built archive at the intersections of art, archives and social justice, committed to transcending, and challenging mainstream art representation while celebrating, preserving and documenting the creative communities throughout our city and state.
Archives as Muse seeks to demystify archives while giving artists the chance to mine our collective stories for inspiration. ArtHyve has dedicated the third annual Archives as Muse to the mediums of music and performance. Four Colorado-based artists were chosen to explore archival e collections and to create one-of-a-kind artwork inspired by their exploration.
About ERKANU
ERKANU: The Girl Cut In Two is a sistersister multi-disciplinary art collective consisting of Mongolian American artists, youngest sister Jennifer Tsogo and oldest sister Eriko Tsogo.
We are fascinated by the concept of gender and cultural identity. We are interested in expressing the embattled emotional middle space of the marginal woman; one who lives in two worlds, a person of no origin – at once related to all, and at once devoid of identity.
Since our childhood, we lead a nomadic way of life following the immigrant footsteps of our parents. We are first generation Mongolian Americans; one born in Mongolia and the other in America. In living within the occupation of two contrasting cultures, we understand the world through the periphery of a marginal paradox – naturally growing to form an adaptive yet spilt sense of identity.
Our identities as a first generation Mongolian American allows a life of duality where opposing traditions, values and norms of the East and West constantly clash and fuse; creating a marginal periphery of absent origin. Our art is an extension of us and our perpetual search to identify, empower and inspire by way of exploring the conflicting marginal meeting periphery of the East and West.
We utilize mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, performance, photography and multimedia as confessional means to shed light on our experiences of insight recollected from living on the margins. We like to fuse binary concepts and techniques of representation; from contrasting languages of wet and dry textures, precision and chaos into stimulatory juxtaposing layers as to create conceptual proximity between disparate things.
Brief description of ERKANU performance project
ERKANU: The Girl Cut In Two is a sistersister multi-disciplinary art collective consisting of artists youngest sister Jennifer Tsogo and oldest sister Eriko Tsogo. For the 2019 Archives As Muse program, ERKANU proposed to create unique multimedia art piece combining data, sound, dance composition using the Clyfford Still Museum Archives – choosing one Clyfford Still painting or drawing to examine/explore how the visual (art) / In Still images transform into sound? Extracting melodies from image. How does the visual translate into sound and movement?
Part 1: DATA / MAPPING / MUSICALGORITHM RENDERING
ERKANU used the Clyfford Still Museum archives as muse for final project.
Using combination of data, mapping and Musicalgorithms (pronounced music algorithms) program, ERKANU composed one fully rendered musical song piece from a chosen Clyfford Still archive painting/drawing by transforming the visual data into sequences of proportional musical notes; creating a musicalgorithms system that will help decode/translate the two dimensional abstraction into notes.
ERKANU’s musicalgorithm “image to sound” program is experimental with adjustable parameters, not intuitively obvious. The theory is based on examining/scanning the vertical columns of pixels in an image, drawing from left to right. Each column of pixels is then digitized and transformed into a representative audio tone. By analysing the changes in hues, saturation and brightness to generate the mode, scale, chord, progression and melody. As the program sweeps across the adjacent pixel columns, the resultant tones are merged into a melody. Compositions can range from a basic series of multifrequency notes to complex sequences of various durations complete with adjustable frequencies, variable harmonics and both in- and out-fading.
Musicalgorithms is more literal with the ability to create its own unique sequence of tones from a list of the differing widths of all the rings. Just as a sculptor reveals a figure encapsulated within solid rock, the ERKANU musicalgorithm method extracted the melodies hidden within capturing the tonal sequence that can be adjusted from low to high pitch.
In other words, the pitch of each tone produced by musicalgorithms is proportional to the magnitude of the number from which the tone is derived. Therefore, the tonal sequences from a string of numbers is an organized, audio representation of the data. The proportional conversion of images into numbers into sound provides even a blind person with an entirely new way to grasp changes in data.
Part 2: MUSICAL COMPOSITION / SONG
Once the completed sheet music was produced, ERKANU collaborated with Mongolian “huumii” (throat singer) and “morin khuur” (horse fiddle) player Batkhuu Sukhbaatar to reiterate the notes into actual musical composition. The intent was to connect and demystify the abstract through the ethnic, translating the abstract though the ancient and current.
Part 3: DANCE / MOVEMENT
ERKANU composed a 13-minute silent body performance routine in response to the completed song composition. The ending dance number was performed live at the November 23rd, 2019 Archives As Muse event.
Body performance theme: Clyfford Still’s use of vertical lines denote the figure/life line – notion of equilibrium, tension, duality, upright, binary, repetition. One sister wears the others clothes, while the other unravels from having work pile of clothes. Two sisters mirror opposing actions, the transparent mirror as vertical divide + contrasting uniforms.
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