Helen Thorington, Writer, Sound Artist


				Open Places was reviewed in the New York Times (1980). Thorington also composed the sound score for Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition (1987). She received a New York State Council on the Arts Music Commission to create a second sound score for Hammer's Endangered, presented at the Whitney Museum's 1989 Biennial. Since founding Turbulence.org, Thorington has created three works for the Internet, among them Solitaire, a narrative experiment that exploits the fun of a game and the challenge and satisfaction of telling a good story. In 1998, she initiated the multi-location networked performance, Adrift, that combined movement through 3D space, multiple narratives, and richly textured sound streaming between virtual and real geographies. With collaborators Jesse Gilbert and Marek Walczak, Adrift was presented at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the tenth anniversary celebration of Kunstradio, Vienna; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City in 2002, as well as multiple times online. Adrift was supported by a Creative Capital grant. Thorington is a 1995 and 1997 recipient of a Meet the Composer grant, and a 1995 and 1998 recipient of Music Commissions from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is also a 2001 recipient of an Emerging Forms for Digital Art Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Deep Wireless Radio Art Festival, Toronto, Canada, commissioned Calling to Mind which premiered there in May 2005. Two recent prizes include Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, New Mexico and Honourable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia. Thorington has lectured on radio art, net art, and networked performance, including: MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (2007); Digital Arts Weeks, Zurich (2007); Music in the Global Village in Budapest (2009); and Sounding Cultures at Cornell University (2011). She has also been included in numerous exhibitions of sound art in the US and abroad. Her writings have been published in numerous periodicals including Contemporary Music Review (2005, 2006); and Intermedia Art (Tate Modern, London, 2008). Rip on/off (Switzerland) published a collection of Thorington’s texts, Il est si difficile de trouver le commencement, in 2017. Thorington is co-author with Jacki Apple of the recently published, limited edition, artist book, The Tower (2015). The Tower is already in the collections of the Huntington Library; MoMA NYC; Fales Library, NYU; Art Center College of Design Special Collections; The Getty; Virginia Commonwealth University Artist Book Collection; Frank Ellsworth Collection; and Baylor University Book Arts collection.

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