CCAM Symposium: Illuminations: Opening Event: “ReVerb Room” with Sarah Oppenheimer
Join us for a transposition of Sarah Oppenheimer’s “N-04008,” created at Atelier Calder in Saché, France in 2024. Participants in this interactive workshop will explore the reverberations of the artwork in a new space and time. A reconstructed sonic network will simultaneously perform as documentation of the work at Atelier Calder and an exploration into new possibilities for documentation. Following this experiment, Oppenheimer will be joined in conversation by Vic Brooks and Pamela Jordan.
“ReVerb Room” and the transposition of Sarah Oppenheimer’s “N-04008” are supported by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), with collaboration on technical production by Simon Jeger, Ross Wightman, Konrad Kaczmarek, Maggie Schnyer, and the Yale Center for Engineering and Innovation Design (CEID). With special thanks to Atelier Calder and EFPL-CDH Enter the Hyper-Scientific for their invaluable contributions to this project.
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From Oppenheimer:
An artwork’s echo extends its physical footprint in space and time. Each re-telling is a process of translation and transposition. When an artwork is documented—through image, sound, language—its spatial and temporal limits expand to absorb contexts beyond its initial boundaries. The artwork changes form, and its contextual determinants shift in time and space.
ReVerb Room explores this complex teleportation. Using Sarah Oppenheimer’s N-04008 as a case study, the workshop will consider documentation as re-location.
Created at Atelier Calder in 2024, N-04008 embodied material potential in an energetic circuit. A network of instruments was activated by human touch. Visitors set in motion a chain reaction: by pulling a cable, air was routed through a pneumatic system, raising and lowering linked instruments in distant locations. The instruments communicated with one another, extending human connections through the building’s boundaries and across spatial gaps. Visual and sonic reverberations created questions of agency and causal attribution.
As a multisensorial network, the technical dimensions of N-04008 are profoundly social. Visitors become active participants in a choreography of spatial revelation, where the rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again.
How might this dynamic be documented?
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Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator whose work explores the emergent relations between human and non-human systems. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change. Oppenheimer lives and works in New York, USA and Rotterdam, NL, and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale School of Art. sarahoppenheimer.com
Vic Brooks is a curator and creative producer who develops films, exhibitions, performances, and programs. Her research centers on the production and presentation of time-based visual art, with particular focus on the technological infrastructures and architectural acoustics of the institutions that support them. She consults on new initiatives for the Calder Foundation, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, and is developing feature films with Aria Dean, Sierra Pettengill, and Martine Syms. Her co-edited book “Tuning Calder’s Clouds,” on the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna, is forthcoming with Athénée Press: Bogotá in 2025.
Pamela Jordan is a licensed architect (RA, LEED AP), heritage consultant, and writer who uses sound to disquiet our assumptions of built space and analyze and conserve historic built environments. She is the co-founder of the SHAARP network for interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners who incorporate the senses into their practices. Her work has featured in both academic publications and art institutions; she is also the co-editor of the forthcoming “New Sensory Approaches to the Past: Applied Methods in Sensory Heritage and Archaeology” (University of College London Press, 2025).