In May 2023, PhD candidate Liz Heise-Glass traveled to the east coast to attend performance events and conduct archival research in support of her upcoming dissertation. Invested in the crossovers between contemporary art, music, and media as a primary area of research, Liz was thrilled to attend performances by several pioneers of experimental music as a part of New York’s Long Play Festival. Organized by Bang on a Can, the festival included performances of works by avant-garde performer Meredith Monk, minimalist composer Philip Glass, and electronic musician Morton Subotnick.

In addition to attending the festival, Liz visited the archives of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Archive at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, and MoMA. Rounding out her trip, Liz also trekked up to North Adams, Massachusetts, to experience artist Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality works, The Chalkroom and The Moon, at MASS MoCA, and ended up in Boston where she conducted research with the city’s public broadcasting archives at WGBH.

The trip was generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant and the Myroslava M. Mudrak Graduate Research Fund in the History of Art.

Images:

1. Nam June Paik’s collaborative video project, Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), installed on four simultaneously-playing monitors in MoMA’s exhibition, Signals: How Video Transformed the World.

2. An installation view of Jason Moran’s STAGED: Studio Rivbea (2022), as part of the artist exhibition Black Stars: Writing in the Dark at Mass MoCA.

3. Morton Subotnick performed a new work, As I Live and Breathe, as part of the Long Play Festival at the BRIC Ballroom in Brooklyn on May 6^th.