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📡 The Plane

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Work (excerpts)

What Is Not in the Palm of Your Hand   VR App

2022. VR spatial-sound audio/video composition as standalone VR App.
Video is a screen recording excerpt of 'gameplay'.


go down & byway  4:59

2021. A sound/video nocturne in three movements. The main feature is the sloppy mimicry between the advanced electro-acoustic sound composition and the commonplace imagery.

In part one “Swinging Lament” signaling, beacons, the clocks watch time pass, stop or go for no traffic. We know this is a warm night, in all its pleasure, looking down we see the street. In part two, heading into the night, seen from behind a fence, vehicles on their way to homes or adventure, a drive-through restaurant, convenience-store/mini-mart, “Melt into Earth”, defying sleep in the dowdy setting we go down. Part-three, “That Whistle” a signaling to revival, looking up to the sky, rambling small like a whistle we wake.


Collaboration: Dance by Vasco Pedro Mirine  11:30

2021. Virtual collaboration between sound and dance. Dance by Vasco Pedro Mirine from Mozambique, he is a Maputo dancer and creator! And rebekkah Palov is an electronic sound and image artist from Hornell, New York State, USA.

In reply to the proposal of DUNA Festival chat about interest in doing a collaboration, Vasco Pedro Mirine responded he also would want to do a collaboration. After a few audio calls across six-hours time difference and sharing one another's art, and testing how to do the collaboration, the time and date were set.

On April 18, 2021, 06:33 her time and Rebekkah would live mix and make the sound and share this stream with Vasco Pedro Mirine who had his computer set up for the network collaboration. It was 12:33 his time. Vasco Pedro Mirine would do improvisational dance, responding to the live stream audio from rebekkah, and rebekkah would see the webcam feed of his dance. Vasco had the sound from Rebekkah playing on BlueTooth speaker from his computer, while his friend and colleague shot video of his dance.


Relics & Transmissions  2:52

2020 . The researcher (artist Rebekkah Palov) who is living in an electronic age, which is both near and far from that imagined by the subject of her research, Harald Bode (b. 1909) the historical pioneer of electronic instruments and music. Her hand touches the front plate of the instrument; a transmission from the surface crafted by Harald Bode, whom she has never met but knows about.

This performance of the camera panning across the relics, original instruments from music history, their age and elegance hand made by Harald Bode, read like a glossary of terms and contradictions of this era inundated by electronic transmission. The pot (knob) titles speak to us familiar experience; Input Level, Overload, Phased Mix, Feedback, Power Rate, Flip Level Hi/Lo, Number of Peaks, Input/Carrier, Squelch Threshold.


some real-time  6:54:59, Silent

2020. Seven hours performing for and with our friend the system: One small room, a hallway plus an elevator. Two black and white video cameras One Sandin IP One rebekkah palov

Featuring • no recorded materials real-time to you, network latency notwithstanding • open call in sessions - dial-in yes the telephone, we'll talk • all the striped clothing I can find …. • cheers it’s another 20 minutes of oscillators • bets are on for the number of times we pink!

Hope you’ll tune in, I’ll be here … chat will be ON. Thanks to the Division of Expanded Media, School of Art & Design at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.


Passage  Two-channel. left 4:51, right 13:04, Silent

2019. A second installment in a series of visual + text essays on the parameters of discipline, and how they are exploited by the individual and society to respond to material conditions, e.g., global cash and labor flows, social expectations, environmental and manmade physical barriers.

In this installment the relationship of discipline and passage are considered. The visual element of the vibrating vertical bars are an imagining of a fence as the edge of flow and the marker of trespass. Images of camels and pickup trucks in the desert bring to mind assisted transport and passage across treacherous and unregulated regions. These transport-modes and risks in passage leads to opening conjecture as to disruptions that have led to contemporary exodus and migrations.

Flashing text brings another register to the essay, a reference to tree-data-structure and familial ties. The words "Parent" "Child" and "Edges" reference networks, loyalties and dependencies that are used in control hierarchies, internalized in individuals to maintain cultural standards of discipline and used in the enforcement of acceptable lanes of passage.


Suspension Landscape After the Drought: Camera Views (intertitle)  17:44

2018. An episodic video piece. The title references a suspended state of emptiness, stasis found after a “drought” a dark, non-fertile period. In each episode there are rotating forms in orbit but without any apparent gravitational mass. This quality of floating in locked time with false changing perspective is dream like. A kind of yearning is experienced in the roll and yaw of the forms, this is intended to be directly experienced.

Then in pugnacious resistance, text appears on the screen and brings us from gravity to language and reminds us there are always secrets, and self-censorship and social censorship. The text fragments are remixed and extended from writings by Giorgio Agamben and Boris Groys.  The viewing angle is intended to visually look like a satellite fly-by and that we are looking at another world. This outside view could be seen as an allegory for an estrangement or fascination within unknown futures, handily obscured by the daily life and “run of things”.


The Silver Trade  12:40

2016. (III of the China Trilogy) We went to the Eija-Liisa Ahtila exhibition in Buffalo and that was great and of course I love Chris Marker, Sans Soleil is one of my favorites so that’s the slide I took into making The Silver trade. I was just trying to figure out what the videos mean in the time since they were recorded and indulging in my second and third thoughts. Also being OK with these personal and ‘poor images’, running them through SD image processing and cutting them up with home-grown electronic music, phone-calls and audio from gallery panel discussions.

The Silver trade is a diaristic-remix, that tags along with its voice-over of delinquent ideas about the birthday party, that trip to NYC, hotpot, and The War of 1812. The finished piece tenuously postures a global-historical formulation, which then neatly and easily called up the title reference to the 16th to 18th century Global silver trade.


⊡ Bow Box  4:21

2013. Visual Music, off-beats processed from acousmatic elements, let loose to open up to the rhythms of thinking and feeling the comforts of evening. Butho dance, turned into patterns, flicker, pause and blend along with digital dust particles.

Dance: Kota Yamazaki


⊡ Portsmouth  5:14

2013. Study of ghost menace, the inner-life, alongside that mundane experience of spaces and days. The view outside and empty chair; unnerving music brewing with an occasional disembodied female voice seeming to be excerting herself amid birds chirping. Surfaces and structures of the image plane disintegrate into a 3d spasm followed by a doubling resolve out of which, possibly the voice finds body and it's shadows.


⊡ The Sunsets There  Formatted for 3-wide HD (5760 × 1018) Sync, Silent 7:21

2013. (II of the China Trilogy) text 2013 New orientalism and manifest destiny, I have friends who are Chinese nationals and hear about China in conversations on my local bus. I share a current American fascination with this new engine on the world stage. “The Sunsets There” addresses this fascination and alien future which seems somehow locked with our own.

The visuals are of the national parks, Yosemite Valley and Joshua Tree. The Mao images are from a video recording I made flipping through Chinese currency a friend had brought back from his travels. The bills are from the fifth series of the renminbi (1999), in which all the bill faces have Mao Zedong's portrait on them. The footage of the shadowy figures is the only video from the alleged police attack on artist Ai Weiwei, the line-scan images are from the same documentary-footage on the artist. In the line-scans you can sometimes recognize subtitles and figures. The shadowy figures and line-scans from the documentary move horizontally, in the manner of something passing by. Lastly a sequence which mirrors the Chinese Currency sequence, this time it's the high desert of Joshua Tree at sunset, with coda of a last vertical pan on a western view.


⊡ The World in It’s Time Waits in Line just to Have Said It Had Been There  For two video projectors (left channel sample), 6:30 loop Silent

2011. A scroll, a continuous ‘rolling’ waiting line of people. The piece has eight windows — amplifying the disclosure/closure quality of the oval 'frames' .  The video has a relief effect on it, this and the proportions of the 'frames' place it in some implied context of a grecian column / frieze and notions of western history, history of civilization......which plays nicely against the tourists in line (the Louvre queue) and serves up a patientt and resonant take on one reality of globalism.


⊡ Snow Hole  Looping video for up to five screens variable, Silent

2011. Footage of snow on the ground with twigs & dirt peeking through. it snows a lot in the Souther Tier (NYS) and sticks around, so when the ground underneath begins to show it is an early harbinger of spring.

The source video was of these 'holes' in the snow, I  texture mapped the footage on a doubled torus shape. between the source video, the stress in the torus and the camera movement on the shape the tensions are organic, energetic and sexy.


⊡ Science Fiction  6:56

2010. A single take performance narration of ruptured texts about re-creations. The constellation of free flowing text fragments jump from personal to (inter) national narratives and functions under a thin guise of genre, science fiction.

This fictional distance very much echos vague implications in the piece including continuing post-war and utopian narratives,  which linger within a real framework of post-wall global liberal capitalism, and its identities based in consumer fantasy which operate within a reality of diminished resources. The text tethers numerous constructions, including mother-child, desire, (re)production, self worth, speed and success in an unbalancing  act which opens up new considerations relative to these human value systems.

The performer is comically androgynous with a childlike lisp, dressed in what might arguably be the world uniform, the Adidas warmup; this character makes insinuation to an electronically promulgated post-sex world over concerned with youth and international branding. The strange falseness of the performance is partly due to text which is read or not read from a piece of paper calling into question all that is said, leaving the viewer to wonder what is 'scripted' and what is not. In the background, 2 televisions play science-fiction-esque video with an obviously canned soundtrack; both access conventions of genre which further confound this intimate, amusing and unnerving performance.


⊡ The Creature  3:47

2010. Overlap of myth and drift through Paris with a video camera Narrative text & edited.

The creature is a section of text from the much longer performance composition, notes History.  This section of text has been augmented with musical sounds and effects. Tshe layered repeating voice and hand-claps remain.  I hope the combination of spooky tones, sparseness, silliness and flamboyant intonation; lend the listener a space for imagination, and perhaps an unease-ing from daily life.


⊡ Dear efficiency,  2:48

2008. The voice over text is a wry consideration of the American political and cultural ethos of productivity, that hard work brings success. The text, read by a heart broken female speaker misplaces, an economic discourse into the genre of the breakup letter.

The emotional space of the ‘bad relationship’ is deceptive in its dual criticism. On one hand, criticism of the self-absorbed melodrama inherent to consumption culture is used to criticize economics of Laissez-faire markets. Added in, is the titillating use of stagnate wages, increasing medical costs, possible police action and dubious sound effects within this swirling inner dialogue.

Visually the piece is sandwiched between 2 false constructions of 3 dimensional space. In the opening and closing are floating balls on a pleasant yellow background which are inscribed with the formula for efficiency, (W out /W in) * 100%. Next we enter the main body, which is visually inside the letter’s text. The pale gloomy grey space is animated by acid yellow hand written sentences. The words spin around like the considerations that lead to ‘the breakup’.


⊡ Serial Drift Test  8:56

2008. (I of the China Trilogy) A disjointed pastiche of speeches by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who served under Presidents Nixon and Ford. As a reflection on the manipulation of language, this work brings to the fore the ambiguity and subtle tone of fear as a statesman’s most powerful tool.