Nights in Between
an audio collaboration
I’d like to share with you all an audio piece I created in collaboration with Beatrice Marovich called “Nights in Between.” This piece is part of the project Machines in Between and they just published the episode featuring the piece last week. From the project website:
“Machines in Between is a year-long collaboration between artists and philosophers, historians and DJ’s, musicians and poets, biologists, sound engineers, dancers, conservationists. Together, we linger over a simple insight into the increasing entanglement between humans and machines. What is to be done as this entanglement intensifies in strange and familiar ways?”
Here is how our piece, “Nights in Between” is described on their website:
On this episode of the Infinity 88 Listening Hour, hosts Libby and John present a collaborative piece by the artist Krista Dragomer and the theologian Beatrice Marovich. It’s called “Nights in Between”—a bedazzling meditation on resisting a world of maximum brightness.
You can listen to the episode on the Machines in Between website, on apple podcasts, and on spotify
If you’d like to listen to the audio piece in context with the visual art that we discuss, you can go to my website.
Depending on when and how you’ve become acquainted with my work, you may be thinking: Krista does what with audio? So let me walk you through a bit of my background and the process of making “Nights in Between.”
As a child, I moved between drawing and music, playing old-time fiddle in local jam sessions, festivals, and competitions. In college, visual art was my disciplinary home-base, though I was disposed to wander. I fully embraced the interdisciplinary ethos of my undergraduate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, eventually letting my love of words bring me into working with sound. I wanted to encounter language as a physical presence, as a kind of dematerialized sculptural form, though the more I followed that interest, the less clear it was to me that any art form could be considered more or less material. A drawing is material and, upon completion, exists without us, holding its own space. But that drawing is no longer with me when I turn my head. To my sensorial self, that drawing disappears when I cease to make visual contact with it. A sound, on the other hand, can hit me like a wall and keep my body ringing for hours. A smell can stir my memories, cramping my stomach, filling my mind with colors, provoking me again and again for a lifetime.
I thus entered a visual art graduate program at the University of British Columbia with an all aural portfolio. I was accepted, partly out of curiosity on the part of the faculty, and I found a practice, and mentorship, by moving between the visual art department and school of music.
My artistic practice continues to involve visual and sound art, with writing as my bridge between the two. I wrote the opening text piece that begins “Nights in Between” in the fall of 2021, reflecting on the first pandemic winter while standing on the threshold of the next one. I had been creating mostly black drawings and paintings at that time, exploring subtle variations in surface through the use of different types of black paint.
The interview between Beatrice and I came about after a week of spending time together in Brooklyn and tossing around ideas. We recorded it, and the spoken word piece, at Harbor Studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
When I got to working on the soundscaping parts of the piece in the omicron wave of January 2022, my musician friends were once again loosing gigs from covid cancelations. I reached out to them in that now-familiar darkened, quieted moment to see if they might contribute to the project. I am very fortunate to have original compositions and arrangements by Aeric Meredith-Goujon, Josh Dunn, Kensuke Shoji, and Katie Martucci. Each of the musicians worked separately, creating sonic sketches based on my prompts, but with no information about what the other contributors were doing. They sent me their individual pieces which I wove together through multitracking editing software.
The work I did in the fall/winter of 2021-22 moved between resisting and embracing the darkness. I felt at times fearful, and fearfully liberated by the way it swept through my life as one cell in this larger earthly body. “Nights in Between” meant similar and different things to me and Beatrice, to the contributors of this piece and the curators of the Machines in Between project. I hope that this portrait of the night evokes the complex and life-giving presence of night in you.
The Drawing on the Senses exercises, posted every Monday, are on the Drawing on the Senses page.