Brian House + Sue Huang

Since 2004, Brian House and Sue Huang have worked together as Knifeandfork. Culture guide Flavorpill writes, "the imaginative bicoastal duo['s] installations utilize unorthodox media, including text messages and video clips, in their expository repositioning of traditional art forms." Knifeandfork has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati; Rhizome at the New Museum, New York; the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine; and Kulturhuset, Stockholm, among others. House is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College, and he holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University. Huang is currently Assistant Professor of Art & Design at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and holds an MFA in Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Contact

A series of musicians are situated along a path winding through the historic jute mills of the Blackness area of Dundee, Scotland. When participants type a message at computer consoles on either end, their words are encoded via rearranged fragments of the “Jute Mill Song,” a folk work written in 1920 by Dundee mill worker and labor activist Mary Brooksbank. The musicians subsequently pass the music to one another by ear until the message is decoded on the opposite terminal. Along the way, the melodies reverberate in the urban spaces associated with Dundee’s industrial past and connect historical textile production with the contemporary labor of computation.

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is performed by a chamber orchestra from Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. Though the musicians are perfectly synchronized in time via networked devices, they are spatially distributed throughout the Contemporary Arts Center building—they play not only on the distinctive zig-zag staircases and in the gallery spaces that open from floor to floor, but also in the administrative offices, the maintenance rooms, and other concealed areas that are nonetheless essential to the institution. The audience, while prevented from hearing the ensemble as a whole, is invited to roam, encountering intersections of sound as they traverse the space.

A carefully choreographed, repeating reenactment allows participants to play the role of Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend who scored the illegal but unpenalized “Hand of God” goal against England during the 1986 FIFA World Cup. TVs throughout the museum show the event as it is repeatedly remade.

In MOCA Grand Prix, game consoles in the plaza let participants race real remote control cars through MOCA’s permanent collection exhibition. The wifi-enabled cars stream back images of Pollocks and Rothkos now appropriated for the background of a retro-style racing game. Awards are presented for the fastest times of the evening.

Knifeandfork appropriates MOCA's architecture for a unique mini-golf course in which visitors show off their skills, are rewarded with phone calls, and are served fresh, vegan donuts.

Hundekopf uses Berlin’s Ringbahn as a literary (and literal) vehicle to investigate the nature of private experience in public space. After texting a phone number printed on flyers distributed throughout the city, a participant is told to board a specific train arriving in the next few minutes. Once on the train, Hundekopf knows the location of the participant because it scrapes train times from the BVG alert system [Ed. note: this is before GPS in phones]. Participants receive a text-message after they pass each station on their way around the Ringbahn that is place-specific, and both the landscape outside of the train and the passengers within it are recontextualized into the narrative.