PROJECT DESCRIPTION

TENDER TRANSMISSIONS

ScreenLab: Alex Beckman, Kaif Ghaznavi, Malak Helmy, Lynne McCabe,
Lauren Marsden, Mike Maurillo, Ranu Mukherjee, George Pfau, Kris Timken

Based at the Luggage Store Annex/ Tenderloin National Forest, 509 Ellis Street

Tender Transmissions is an aural network composed of individual sound works produced through site-driven research and community interaction. These auditory sojourns are made with the intention of opening up the social imaginary of the Tenderloin and providing spaces for listening for the community/audience. They reframe the neighborhood’s narrative, historical, spatial and musical layers.

The network will be broadcast daily via micro-transmitter for a one mile radius around a base of operations at the Luggage Store Annex/Tenderloin National Forest, where speakers will be placed to encourage gatherings of visitors to listen during opening hours. Various pieces will also be available at all times by phone and others positioned at different sites within the neighborhood. The pedestrian audience will be cued to call or tune in by bold and lighthearted graphics, potentially creating temporary listening sites around the neighborhood. By working with accessible technologies, combining radio (communal) with telephone (private) transmission and translating information into multiple languages, we intend for the network to be available to most residents and visitors.

We chose to work with sound because it is intimate and invisible. It has resonance precisely at the threshold of the private and public, engaging listeners in an immediately visceral way. The Tenderloin seems to be a place that is described from outside by a narrative derived from the visible- by what is seen when passing through.

By mobilizing the audible, we are hoping to reflect broader realities and more effervescent fictions, and to create a field of inquiry and rumination. We inquire, document, enhance, sample, translate, and remix, evolving a network through presence which embodies a spectrum of aural experience. The ever-present but sometimes unnoticed, condition of sound is an interesting point of departure from which to address such a densely populated, complex and diverse neighborhood.

Central to Tender Transmissions is the dynamic relationship between our base of operations at the Tenderloin National Forest and the larger radius of the neighborhood. Created by artistic directors Darryl Smith and Laurie Lazer of Luggage Store Gallery, this greened oasis and community commons provides a beautiful and open listening environment and a connection to the longstanding artistic communities of the Tenderloin. We are honored to be able to inhabit the forest (in the making since 1989) after its official dedication and opening in May.

Through our various interactions with community and graphic postings, we hope to gather groups of our diverse participants as well as listeners in the forest during the exhibition period for quiet listening and weekend events. We welcome the opportunity to meet the forest's visitors and to contribute to the rich history of this place, which has been an inspiring focal point for the transmissions. We will be posting radio schedules, phone numbers and other project information in the gallery, as well as installing a foley booth made from materials collected in the neighborhood.

Screenlab’s collaborative methodology is to set up unifying structures which allow for individual artistic ideas and sensibilities to be placed in relation to one another, for a common purpose. Tender Transmissions uses the figure of the network to defines the project’s form as well as the set of processes by which the artists work and engage with the neighborhood. The spectrum of approaches includes direct community participation, field recording, collecting and staging of interactions and events. We are interested in mobilizing the dynamic energy produced between these different sensibilities.

The transmissions artists are connecting with the neighborhood through a wide range of activity.

These different processes include;

- Recording community members of various ethnic and other social groups choosing and singing songs in various languages with the intention of making a Play List for the Tenderloin
- Collecting field recordings at specific intersections and in motion between locations
- Composing urban/synthetic sounds in relation to naturalistic sounds
- Composing a screenplay derived from interviews with strippers
- Meeting groups of seniors to discuss marriage, parenting and their memories of reading to children with the intention of setting up a childrens book library for young mothers
- Recording conversations with the seniors and readings from chosen children’s books
- Collecting materials from the neighborhood to be used for a foley booth in the gallery
- Composing a sound track with the foley materials
- Working with the youth poets group 
- setting up a call in Phone Fantasy Walk line where visitors can engage in a conversational audio guide of the Wonderland exhibition which is re-scripted each time.

In the end, each of these individually directed audio projects becomes a node, offering a point of access to the wider network, our group of artists and community participants and to the Wonderland exhibition.

The ScreenLab collective was born out of an intensive, shared investigation into the function of screens under wide ranging aesthetic, social and technological conditions. We examine the notions of architectural thresholds, (mis)translations, behavioral surfaces, filmic codes, and the ever-changing technological interfaces that shape our interactions.