overhearings is a site-specific sound installation created by Regina Martinez in response to the peregrine falcons who have resided at Mana Contemporary for over two decades. This work is commissioned by ESS, Monira Foundation, and Mana Contemporary.

A small train going a long way is a work of abstract sonic interventions in public spaces, documented through videos, sounds, maps, scores, and performance ephemera. It unfolds in collaboration with the unpredictable sounds of its environment, facilitating transient experiences of familiar places.

The Roedelius Cells is a multi-channel audio installation created by Grammy-nominated US composer/sound artist Tim Story, constructed from thousands of short extracts culled from a decade of informal piano recordings made with friend and colleague Hans-Joachim Roedelius. This exhibition is presented in parnership with the Goethe-Institut.

Recorded over three years, A Sound Map of the Danube traces the second longest European river's run from the Black Forest in Germany to its delta into the Black Sea. The recordings comprise sounds from the banks, from above and below the water, animals, insects, and interviews with people who live by the great river.

A musical performance and immersive art installation inspired by seismic data from an ailing iceberg.

As part of the Outer Ear Residency, Luftwerk presents an immersive sculptural exhibition at Audible Gallery, November 8th, 2019 - January 26th, 2020. Illuminated objects will fill the space with shadows and reflections creating a visual topography enhanced by amplified sounds mimicking the calving of glaciers, created by collaborator Katherine Young.

Walter Kitundu presents Careen, a composition arranged from a series of improvised scores performed by Douglas R. Ewart, in response to time-lapse imagery of ferns emerging from the soil, scaled to the plant ‘s sense of time.

For Florasonic, C. Lavender presents Terraforming a Sanctuary, a 4-channel sound installation that features the Lincoln Park Conservatory fern room as a place to assist visitors in finding a state of well-being.

For Florasonic, Anne Guthrie presents Hackle 2, an installation that connects with themes of transparency and hidden information.

bregne is a site-responsive installation inhabiting Lincoln Park’s Fern Room by Nomi Epstein. The work looks at the visual blooming process of ferns and uses the unfurling pattern as framework for instrumentation and environmental listening experience.

‘Mt. Shamao’ is a site-responsive installation by Milad Mozari and Mitsu Salmon as part of ESS’s Florasonic series at Lincoln Park Conservatory.

Set in the Fern Room of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory, Lakshmi Ramgopal’s installation A Half-Light Chorus features a ninety-minute, four-channel recording of vocalists imitating the calls of birds from India and Sanskrit literature. Punctuated with original Tamil odes to individual birds, this tapestry of arias, whistles, clicks, and cries plays with the diurnal rhythms, forms, and functions of birdsong.

A Grid Against The Sky aims to fill the interior volume of the Fern Room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, organizing the air molecules into evolving cross-hatched patterns.

ESS is excited to present installations by Hong Kong multimedia artists Cheng Lee and Vvzela Kook at Mana Contemporary this June-July. The exhibition opens on June 27th.

In 2006, Joan and Mildred met at a party and through friendship and an evolving series of conversations and activities––movement-based performance, video and audio field recordings, historical research, photography and writing––generated something like a collaboration that looks something like a palindrome with Mildred's train as the central mode of conveyance for wide-ranging ideas about narrative, place, nomenclature, travel, race and class, and freight. Coming in from the North––a performance in two parts and one installation––presents a portion of that collaboration.

A composite of sound recordings from inside and outside the Cook County Jail, as well as a video pan of the 25’ jail wall examine the blurry line between the inside and outside of the largest single-site jail in the country. Situated within a working class immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and the artists’ native community, Gaspar has been recording the social behaviors and informal architectures surrounding a place of incarceration to make visible the politics of location. In this piece, she juxtaposes the acoustics of the interior life of detention alongside a local summer carnival that takes place outside the jail wall every year. The artist negotiates the psychological experience of of the carceral state and the effects of mass incarceration. It includes an excerpt from a series of personal conversations and interviews with Adolfo Davis by his collaborator, Elyse Blennerhassett. Convicted at the age of fourteen, Davis is currently serving a mandatory life sentence.

Fourth Horizon is a meditation on living in a city with water as a constant eastern horizon. Inspired by a theater stage constructed over water and an early commercial radio broadcast of a telepathy experiment, the exhibition explores the relation between the built and natural environments—and the spaces for imagination, connection, and alienation in daily urban life. Fourth Horizon incorporates sculpture, video, text, and sound into a process-based installation that meets Chicago at the shore of Lake Michigan.