PAST EXHIBITION

MSHR solo exhibition
"Network Entity"

Open

2024/10/18 (Friday) – 11/03(Sunday)
13:00-19:00
Wednesday – Saturday, last Sunday
Free admission / Open by appointment outside the above hours.

CALM & PUNK GALLERY is pleased to present “Network Entity”, a solo exhibition by American artist unit MSHR, on view from October 18 to November 3, 2024. This is MSHR’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, following their debut, Frame Wave, in 2019.

MSHR is the team of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy, who collaboratively create sculptural electronic systems that often take shape as performances and installations. Their systems use analog circuitry and open-source software, incorporating light, sound and sculpture. Feedback is a fundamental inspiration and method in MSHR’s practice and can be found at all levels of their activities. In recent years they have initiated several series of installations that expand their compositional framework of audiovisual interaction.

The main work in the exhibition, Network Entity, is the newest composition in a series that was first commissioned by Vasulka Kitchen Brno, Czech Republic in 2023. Visitors can become part of a visual and sonic system that changes in real time as they engage with the sculpture.

Whereas Frame Wave, presented in 2019, was a work that one visitor explores and changes through a physical score; the new work Network Entity expands the scenario by opening the participation to four visitors who may collaborate together, materializing the simulation in the shared physical realm.

During the exhibition, MSHR will also tour Japan with a live performance. We hope you will join us for this event and experience the world of MSHR, who create ‘living’ works of art that are visually and acoustically expressed.

MSHR statement

“Network Entity” is a sculptural audiovisual instrument for collective exploration.
A quadrilateral slab serves as both substrate and interface for a generative software entity.

Visitors are invited to engage with the system via embedded sculptural dials and pushbuttons, transmuting their collective mental presence into and out of a simulated environment.

The system’s emergent material is output via projector and speakers, with the surface of the slab serving as a transducer between digital and physical signals, simultaneously an input device, a screen and vibrating membrane.

The simulation and its interface are overlapping and entwined: the map is the territory.

The system can be played together by up to four visitors, who share equal agency in shaping the simulation as it reassembles itself into ever unfolding novel configurations. They explore and improvise together, responding to the emergent structure of sound and light.

Network Entity draws on the formal complexity of living systems, presenting a physical scenario in which synthetic elements bounce between the machine language of a virtual environment and the human mental presence of its visitors. As always, we are nodes in the network.

MSHR
MSHR is an art collective that collaboratively builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their performances and installations integrate electrical signals and human presence, weaving dense networks of causality to form audiovisual environments that babble with life-like current. They explore intuitive and technical gradients between sonic and sculptural forms, using analog circuitry and open-source software to sculpt mutually resonant hyperobjects. MSHR was founded by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

MSHR WEB : https://www.mshr.info/

Beach Cooper WEB : http://birchcooper.net
Beach Cooper Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/nestedface/

Blaina Murphy WEB : https://lattice.tools/
Blaina Murphy Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/liquidtransmitter/