Heat Waves 2023 brings together artists and audiences to activate and perform on and with Whoop House, a solar-powered sculpture and sound amplification hub developed by Detroit-based artist, DJ, and organizer Ash Arder.
Installed at different sites across Amant’s campus, the mobile sculpture is designed to power a range of technical equipment, from cellphones to speakers, keyboards, turntables, and microphones. Whoop House also records and playbacks instruments and voices, creating a lasting soundscape of the summer.
Whoop House is part of Ear to the Ground, an ongoing series that brings together events, performances, and talks in parallel to Sung Tieu’s exhibition Infra-Specter between March and September 2023.
Heat Waves is our annual summer series dedicated to acoustic practices, inviting artists and musicians of different contexts to guide sonic experiences throughout Amant’s indoor and outdoor spaces. It is an occasion to gather, move, listen, and make sound.
Image by Ash Arder.
Ash Arder (b. 1988, Flint, MI) is a transdisciplinary artist, organizer, and educator who has spent the last decade transforming DIY, hacker, and experimental approaches to problem solving into formalized programs, projects, and collaborations. Her work and research use storytelling and speculative collaboration as frameworks to explore climate and social justice themes. Manipulating physical and virtual environments, her work uses mark making, mechanical portraiture, performance, and sound design as tools for complicating dynamics of power between humans, machines, and the lands they occupy.
Since graduating from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2018, Ash has received various awards and artist residencies including the Knight Arts Challenge (2021), University Musical Society residency (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art residency (2021), Recess residency (2019), and A Studio In The Woods residency (2018). Her upcoming solo exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum explores the relationship between human workers and large machinery through a lens of intimacy, tenderness, and connection.
