ARCHIVE

On the occasion of Raven Chacon's solo exhibition, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, at Swiss Institute, NY (January 25 – April 14, 2024), Wave Farm Radio will serve as a listening station for Chacon's work, Still Life No. 4. In a new iteration of the work, Chacon sounded and recorded a Diné drum housed in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian that had rarely been sounded since being in the collection. Believed to have been made in about 1960, this Diné drum was acquired at Taos Pueblo in the 1970s. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the beat of the drum is played back at SI, and at other listening stations, including Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM. The beat of the drum is played at different tempi, ranging from fast to slow the further each station is located from the drum.

About the pacing of the drum pulse
The pace of the drum hits scale from the listening station's relative position to the physical drum. The pulse is scaled, on one end, setting the closest point as a point approximately 0.1 miles from the Cultural Resources Center, where the drum is housed, at 180 beats per minute (to avoid dealing with problems around approaching infinity). On the opposite end, the farthest listening location, at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway, is 3,864.30 miles by flight, and is scaled to one beat every five minutes, or 0.2BPM.

Each listening station in between these extremities is scaled in an inverse linear relationship (technically, using the equation f(x) = -0.047 * x + 180). That relationship creates the following pulse paces at these respective listening stations, in order of increasing distance from the drum:

CRC, NMAI, Washington, D.C.: 0.1 miles, 180BPM
Swiss Institute, NYC: 203.69 miles, 170.43BPM
Wave Farm, Acra, NY (Upstate): 283.28 miles, 166.69BPM
Ma's House, Shinnecock Reservation, NY (Long Island): 294.02 miles, 166.18BPM
Navajo Nation Museum, Window Rock, AZ: 1,770.55 miles, 96.78BPM
Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway: 3,864.30 miles, 0.2BPM

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more. As an educator, Chacon is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. http://spiderwebsinthesky.com/