JEFF TALMAN

Award-winning artist Jeff Talman has created installations for the Cathedral and the City of Cologne, Germany; the MIT Media Lab, The Kitchen, bitforms, Eyebeam, St. James Cathedral, Chicago; Art Interactive, Art Omi and others. Talman's unique achievement in sound art is a process of self-reflexive resonance, in which the inherent ambient resonance of an installation site becomes the sole sound source for an artwork. Talman's installation VANISHING POINT 1.1 (1999) was his first work using this technique. The New York Times, WIRED Magazine and other publications immediately recognized the resulting installations.

Portrait of the artist with readings from "MIKA"
the wind turbine in Kökar, Åland, Finland, June 2005

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Recent major awards include a 2006 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Sound Art and a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Computer Arts. Recent artist residencies include those at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy (2007), the Künstlerhaus Krems, Austria (2006); the Rodriguez-Amat Foundation in Les Olives, Spain (2006); the Åland Archipelago Artist Residency in Kökar, Finland (2005); the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany (2003) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2002). He has been awarded numerous residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY including residencies in 2002, ’03 and ’04 and '07. Other residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Millay Colony and I-Park.

Talman's video, sculptural and graphic work relates to the nature of light and sound as primal radiant forces. Recent video includes elemental spectral light projection, multi-faceted views of cathedral columns and the mist of a simple human breath as framed by the sky. Large-scale steel resonators, rods and aluminum plates are among the resources for recent sculpture. Print media work includes spectrographic images of architectural spatial sounds from important interiors including those recorded on site in the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, the Temple of Debod in Madrid, the Pantheon in Rome, Hagia Sofia in Istanbul and over 100 religious sites in Europe and America.

Jeff Talman was born and raised in Pennsylvania (USA) where he studied piano while enjoying a mostly idyllic youth of daily hikes through the woods, swimming, bicycling and baseball. He attended and eventually taught and directed orchestras at Columbia University and the City College of New York. Later he taught at the Massachusetts College of Art. Studies in music composition were with Jack Beeson, Jan Meyerowitz and Lester Trimble. Visual art studies were with Seong Moy, Bill Barrett and George Preston. At Columbia, Talman also studied composition with Chou Wen Chung a former student and the current literary executor of Edgard Varèse, who with Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis created the world's first site-specific, new media/sound installations, Poème Électronique and Concret PH in the Philip's Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.

He began shaping sounds with computers in 1984. Two years later he produced and hosted a weekly show of new music that continued to run for six years on WKCR-FM, New York City. At this time he was also reviewing for EAR Magazine. In the 1990’s his career path also turned to educational and commercial audio with BR Productions in Manhattan, where he orchestrated numerous works and directed the mastering of over one hundred audio CD's.

In 1996 his sound work moved from concert stage to the Anna Kustera art gallery in Manhattan when a collaboration on a small video installation featured his sound design. The mode of presentation spoke to him: later that year, feeling bound by tradition and the formality of most classical music presentation, he moved to Prague in the Czech Republic and explored alternative modes of expression. After numerous trips to the Cathedral of St. Vitus, the building yielded a revelatory moment for Talman. In the cathedral he began to first understand that ambient resonance itself might possibly serve as a sound source and plastic art material. He returned to New York in 1997 and began sound tests in Old Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Little Italy, while working in the radio software industry for Dalet Digital Media Systems, a part-time position he dropped in 1999 in order to devote more time to art.

Today Jeff Talman's precedent-setting installations are featured in museums, galleries, universities, religious buildings and other large, dramatic and historic spaces. Often noted for their conceptual and visceral impact, the installations offer an electrifying, sensual range of sound, light, gesture, object, image and physical force. While urging the observer to a reevaluation of the tactile, they introduce metaphor and underscore the physicality of space through which sound emanates and soars.

With continuing artist residencies, speaking engagements, panel discussions, colloquia, formal presentations of academic papers and recent exhibitions in America, Europe and Asia, Jeff Talman is recognized as an international artist of merit, an engaging presenter and an advocate for the arts. Recent presentations were given before the International Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Paris, France; at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at Hamburg-Holzhauer Galerie in Hamburg, Germany; at Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA; at panoramaART in Cologne, Germany during World Youth Days, at the WALD – Symposium in Waldmünchen, Germany, before the Society for Literature Science and the Arts, Chicago; for open-node Chicago; at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, at Columbia College, Chicago; the University of Illinois-Chicago and elsewhere.

In September 2006 a new, commissioned installation, SENTINEL TO THE WIND, was featured as part of the WALD - International Symposium of the BBK Niederbayern/Oberpfalz in the Bavarian-Bohemian Forest. In 2007 four new installations were presented: EVENT HORIZONS went up in St. James Cathedral in Chicago, WAVE SHADOWS opened in Munich and UNDER SOUND UNDER... was presented by the Galerie Klatovy/Klenová in the Czech Republic. A new installation in the Bavarian Forest went up in December, WHITE SOUND DOWN, which features the sound of snow falling as its only sound source.

INNER NATURE, Talman's Bavarian Forest Triptych, will be completed and presented for the first time in entirety in late May-June 2008 near the Gibacht and Pucher sites of his previous Bavarian Forest installations. This quasi-symphonic work, about sixty minutes in duration, will incorporate the previous Bavarian Forest installations to offer a massive, multi-channel sound-space environment all derived from recordings made in the forest.

MIRROR OF THE MOON an installation for the Museo d'Arte Conptempranea Villa Croce in Genoa, Italy and the Eighth Annual NIME Conference, will go up in June.

Jeff Talman lives and works in Manhattan
and is an Assistant Professor at Emerson College in Boston
where he teaches Sound Composition, Installation and Time In Art.