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Artist: Liam Mooney
Speaker: Ackbar Abbas, Ph.D.
Curator: Casey Anderson
Liam Mooney’s Flatland (2019) is a work loosely patterned after Edwin Abbott's novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott's examination of humanity—and the natural and constructed categories contained therein—still seems to have the sting of relevance, and the listener might not find it at all difficult to connect Abbott's observations to features of present-day societies.
Liam Mooney is a musician who composes for noisy, unwieldy wind and percussion instruments. This often relies upon the use—and misuse—of familiar objects and materials, such as balloons, vacuum cleaners, dry ice, triangles, rubber bands, drums, styrofoam, and pipes and tubes of all sorts. He currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.
An aficionado of fakes, Ackbar Abbas is the author of some of the most influential texts on Hong Kong culture and literature, and on culture, literature, film, art, architecture, and critical theory more generally. A professor of comparative literature and film at the University of California, Irvine, Abbas was born, raised, and—as he puts it—corrupted in Hong Kong. He insists on thinking with whatever is at hand, materially and ideationally, on finding the deeply revealing in the obvious, significance amidst desolation, possibility in vulnerability, a map of culture in the design it authorizes.
Casey Anderson (they / them) is designing and repurposing technologies to activate participatory practice, primarily involving explorations of sound, in diverse cultures and communities. Performances, exhibitions, and residencies include MOCA - Los Angeles (CA), ISSUE Project Room (NY), STEIM (NL), Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL), Mass MOCA (MA), The Walker Art Center (MN), and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (CA). Over the last two decades they have lead numerous initiatives at the intersection of arts programming and community organization, including hybrid web-journal/festivals (the Experimental Music Yearbook, with John P. Hastings and Scott Cazan), as well as community arts centers/venues like Trade School (with Arden Stern), the wulf., BETALEVEL, and Machine Project. As an educator they have taught at ArtCenter College of Design and UCLA. They currently live in Los Angeles, California, own and operate the organizational initiative a wave, and teach at KAOS Network.
A portfolio site for Los Angeles artist Casey Anderson