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Lou Mallozzi

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

BFA, 1978, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions: Sector 2337 Chicago; Portland Art Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Diapason, Brooklyn; Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Indiana University Bloomington; Donald Young Gallery Chicago. Performances: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Arts Club Chicago; Ausland, Berlin; FRAC-Bretagne, Rennes, France; Radiorevolten Festival, Halle, Germany; Fylkingen, Stockholm; TUBE Audio Art Series, Munich; Podewil, Berlin; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Subtropics Experimental Music Festival, Miami. Curating and Organizing: "Sexing Sound: Gender Sound Music," 2015, Goethe-Institut, Chicago; "Sound Art Theories Symposium," 2011, SAIC; "Outer Ear Festival of Sound," 2000–2009, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago. Publications: Leonardo Music Journal; The Drama Review; Experimental Sound and Radio, ed. by Allen S. Weiss (MIT Press); Sound Generation, ed. by Alexis Bhagat and Greg Gangemi (Autonomedia). Bibliography: New City; High Performance; The Wire; Signal to Noise; Paris Transatlantic. Awards: Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center; Emily Harvey Foundation Venice, Italy; Chicago-Lucerne Sister Cities; Harvestworks New York; Illinois Arts Council Fellowship.

Experience at SAIC

I have been teaching at SAIC since 1985. Since then, the school has evolved into an increasingly humane and rigorous educational environment. This evolution continues, since SAIC is an institution fundamentally built on inclusiveness, self-criticism, honest re-evaluation, and thoughtful experimentation.

Personal Statement

Though varying in form, complexity, and presentational context, my work as a whole focuses on efforts to dismantle and reconstitute sound, image, language, gesture, and signification in order to expose and explore the unstable relationships among perception, mediation, ideology, power and image. My artistic practice includes performances, drawing, installations, fixed media, improvised music, and sound design for cinema. I draw on the range of contexts and relationships between research, idea, collaboration, intuition, materials, and making that I explore in this multidisciplinary practice in order to inform how I develop course content and teach particular subjects. In my teaching, I seek to create an atmosphere of mutual respect for and among students that is encouraging and challenging. I connect material, technique, strategy, and theory to emphasize the fact that meaning and making are inextricably bound together in any informed artistic practice.

Current Interests

Body, impediment, duration, over-determination, redundancy, and site. Navigating the acousmatic gap, seesawing between seeing and saying. Exploring interference patterns between enacting and representing. A non-futuristic collision of past and present, passage and presentation. Microphony and its discontents. Technology as a prosthetic enactment of will or desire. Sounds sounding and voices voicing.

 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This is a 0 credit study trip placeholder course. Specific credit courses will be applied to your enrollment for the term based on your Study Trip Preregistration information.

Class Number

1290

Credits

0

Description

This course focuses on the relationship of sound to moving image, and introduces post-production techniques and strategies that address this relationship as a compositional imperative. Thorough instruction is given on digital audio post-production techniques for moving image, including recording, sound file imports, soundtrack composition and assembly, sound design, and mixing in stereo and surround-sound. This is supplemented by presentations on acoustics and auditory perception. Assigned readings in theories and strategies of sound-image relationships inform studio instruction. Assigned projects focus on gaining post-production skills, and students produce independent projects of their own that integrate sound and moving image. Artists include Chantal Dumas, Walter Verdin, Deborah Stratman, Lucrecia Martel, Martin Scorcese, Abigail Child, Frederic Moffet, Gyorgi Palvi, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Hill, and others. Writings in theory include texts by Michel Chion, Rick Altman, and others. The student?s independent image-and-sound work is foregrounded and supported; supplemental assigned projects include sound sequence composition and ADR recording and mixing.

Class Number

1604

Credits

3

Description

This course focuses on the relationship of sound to moving image, and introduces post-production techniques and strategies that address this relationship as a compositional imperative. Thorough instruction is given on digital audio post-production techniques for moving image, including recording, sound file imports, soundtrack composition and assembly, sound design, and mixing in stereo and surround-sound. This is supplemented by presentations on acoustics and auditory perception. Assigned readings in theories and strategies of sound-image relationships inform studio instruction. Assigned projects focus on gaining post-production skills, and students produce independent projects of their own that integrate sound and moving image. Artists include Chantal Dumas, Walter Verdin, Deborah Stratman, Lucrecia Martel, Martin Scorcese, Abigail Child, Frederic Moffet, Gyorgi Palvi, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Hill, and others. Writings in theory include texts by Michel Chion, Rick Altman, and others. The student?s independent image-and-sound work is foregrounded and supported; supplemental assigned projects include sound sequence composition and ADR recording and mixing.

Class Number

2056

Credits

3

Description

Class Number

1294

Credits

3 - 6

Description

Class Number

1296

Credits

3

Description

This seminar takes an audio-centric approach to cinema, emphasizing an integrative approach to sound design. Topics include audio post-production techniques, auditory perception, and strategies and theories of sound-to-moving image relationships. We will explore this topic working primarily from the ear outward, privileging the sonic as the core of this investigation. Presentations on auditory perception and the basic physics of sound will inform a hands-on study of studio techniques including recording, foley, voice and sound effects editing, equalization, dynamics processing, reverberation, and mixing via thorough instruction on the ProTools digital audio workstation. Readings on theories and strategies of sound and sound-image relationships, and screenings of cinema works in which sound plays a central role, will provide a diverse context for understanding and interrogating the audio-visual experience. Student work will be critiqued from the seminar?s audio-centric perspective. Works by Deborah Stratman, Lucrecia Martel, Francis Ford Coppola, Alain Resnais, Abigail Child, Gary Hill, Martin Scorsese, and others. Readings by Michel Chion, Rick Altman, Kaja Silverman, Clarice Lispector, Jean-Luc Nancy, Brian Kane, Trin T. Mihn-ha, and others.

Class Number

1924

Credits

3

Description

The seminar approaches sound as a field of exploratory and experimental work that emphasizes diversity and rigor in its aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical approaches intertwined with histories, genders, margins and identities. Although it is audio-centric at its core, the seminar welcomes discourses from other disciplines as they relate to sound. It addresses artistic practice through readings, discussion, critiques, resource sharing, and in-person interactions with artists and organizers currently working in sound. Topics include sound as discourse, sound as flux, cultural and racial dimensions of improvisation and composition, how artists build their practice, how practice becomes public. No technical instruction is given nor is any particular technological approach assumed or favored.

Class Number

1676

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the use of the human voice in performance, sound art, text-based work, social practice, installation, etc. The root of our investigation is the voice as human utterance and material encounter, both live and mediated. We shall interrogate and experiment with the interaction of the voice’s semiotic and acoustic aspects, its potential to unite and rupture, and the aesthetic, situational, technological, gendered, racial, political, historical, and social aspects of text, language, voice, expression, and communication. Critiques of student work are supplemented by readings and screenings of works by artists, writers, historians, theorists, and linguists. Works by artists, writers, historians, theorists, and linguists include Sarah Hennies, Christine Sun Kim, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Alessandro Bosetti, Norie Neumark, Clarice Lispector, The Last Poets, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Roland Barthes, Jaap Blonk, Pamela Z, Mladen Dolar, Douglas Kahn, Sarah Nooter, Frances Dyson, Gregory Whitehead, Daniela Cascella, F. T. Marinetti, Timothy Donaldson, Alfred Wohlfson, and others. All speech acts and vocalizations -- and the way those are listened to by others -- carry with them a panoply of cultural, gendered, historical and political implications, overtly or covertly. Thus, the topic is inherently one that embraces discourse on diversity, inclusion, identity, and power relations.

Class Number

1835

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1735

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2547

Credits

3 - 6