Static Room
by Scott Arford (US)

Scott Arford is one of the leading figures of new media arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has produced numerous works for sound and video including multichannel installations, live performances, CD and DVD projects. He was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica.

Arford has shown his in numerous venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dissonanze 7 in Rome, Italy; LUFF Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland; Observatori Festival in Valencia, Spain; the Sounding Festivals in Guangzhou, China and Taipei, Taiwan; the LEM festival in Barcelona, Spain; Liquid Architecture in Melbourne, Australia; the Festival de Video/Arte/Eolectronica in Lima, Peru; Sonic Light in Amsterdam; and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Kitakyushu, Japan.

Arford received a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Architecture and Design at Kansas State University in 1991. He is currently an instructor at the California College of Arts in! Oakland, CA. In 1995 Arford founded 7hz, a warehouse/performance space. From 1995 to 2002, 7hz was San Francisco's leading venue for noise and experimental music featuring numerous international artists including Francisco Lopez, Kit Clayton, Blechdom from Blectum, Zbignew Karkowski, The Haters, Mayuko Hino, and John Duncan. It still used as a studio and workspace for Arford and others.

Static Room is an ongoing series of performances and installations for sound and projection. These projects merge the audio and visual environment into a single whole. The raw video signal itself generates the audio component. Thus, the video is composed and created for its sound qualities as much as for its visual qualities. The result is an immersive, synesthetic environment where the perceptual and physical qualities of sound and light merge to create a very direct singular experience. Tones and abstract color fields break down into vibrating sheets of interlaced flickering and shredding static, the abstract projections and resultant sounds make it possible to hear the buzzing images and see the flickering sounds.

• – Scott Arford website