The project initiates live musical collaborations with codfish, intertwining methodologies from contemporary music, zoomusicology, and political ecology. The project strives to investigation the connections between humanity and the more-than-human world while intervening artistically in the ecological crisis of the North Sea's disappearing cod population, while asking critical questions of how both science and industry relate to fish and the sounds they make.
John Andrew Wilhite is an Oslo-based composer, double bassist, and sound artist whose projects engage with a wide range of found sounds archival, and field recordings.
His compositions and arrangements have been performed at series and festivals such as Barents Spektakel, Sacred Realism, METEOR, and the Ultima Festival. Often working with large-scale and interdisciplinary projects, he is a recipient of a commission from The Norwegian National Opera, Norwegian Center for Technology in Art and Music, Motvind, Only Connect/Munch Museum, and was a featured artist at Nordic Arts Lab. As a performer, John Andrew works regularly with artists such as Elliott Sharp and the Andreas Røysum Ensemble.
Since 2018, John Andrew has led the scientific-artistic project Torsketromming with scientist Rebekah Oomen.
John Andrew holds master's degrees in both double bass performance and composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he studied with Håkon Thelin (bass) and Trond Reinholdtsen (composition), and at Reed College (Portland, Oregon), where he studied with David Schiff. He studied at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (New York) as a pupil of Reggie Workman. John Andrew studied Slavic art and philosophy. He worked for philosopher Boris Groys at NYU and was a research assistant to Evgenii Berstein at Reed College.
In contemporary discourses around "ecological music", practitioners most often claim that their music either connects us to our surrounding environments (and the non-human actors within them) or explores preexisting connections to these environments. It is taken for granted that these connections or the realizations of these connections are positive outcomes. My project poses critical questions to assumptions made within these practices (one basic such question is "do non-humans want to connect with humans?") and looks at materialist discourses to explore music's negative capabilities, which is not to say it is an exploration of "bad" or "ethically questionable" characteristics or movements, but rather an examination of musics capacity to create or produce, to and thereby dialectically negate, change, or disguise a relationship to a preexisting space, as well as its music's capacity to make visible or audible these relationships. Looking at my latest work, SignalCloth, or Three Cartographic Blinds, and referring to contemporary art-theorists like Oxana Timofeeva and Peter Osborne, my project asks questions of how materialist discourses on the medium of music may supplement or alter the current discussions on music and ecology.
This project aims to develop, and reflect upon live musical collaborations with codfish, intertwining methodologies from contemporary music, zoomusicology, and political ecology. Critically engaging with thinkers and artists like Pauline Oliveros, Elizabeth Povinelli, Oxana Timofeeva, and Cornelius Cardew, I hope to challenge contemporary artistic and scientific paradigms, investigating how our current "progressive" strategies and technologies for listening and collaboration may well be complicit with occidental societies extractive and administrative practices. At ARF he will share thoughts and rough documentation from recently completed field work in Vesterålen.