Music
Mail Art
about the art
This month highlights two artists who hack existing technologies to introduce elements of chaos, chance, and surprise into their work, expanding their practices beyond the boundaries of precision and predictability.
Sound artist and instrument builder Viola Yip operates at the intersection of composition, performance, and improvisation, using new materials and mechanisms to discover unexpected sounds. Her film performance, Liminal Lines, is an intimate experience of her self-built PVC dress, a wearable instrument interlaced with exposed speaker wires. This innovative design allows Viola to correlate sound with movement, creating complex sonorities as she explores new relationships between the instrument and the human body.
Liz Melchor is a visual artist who blends precision with unpredictability. When she first encountered a pen plotter, she was drawn to the challenge it posed: how could she use a precise and predictable machine to produce the surprises that drive her art? Her pen plot drawings explore layers and materials, embracing errors, mistakes, and glitches—traces of the perfect machine being imperfect. In this month's mail art, 'Call and Response,' she uses brief moments from Viola Yip’s performance to generate some of the code behind the drawing.