JAM-D-JAM is a new interactive call-in radio show format where you create new material entirely from live call-in samples from ATL rush-hour traffic.
About
JAM-D-JAM! is a project by renowned contemporary artist Mel Chin and rising art star Severn Eaton. JAM-D-JAM! is a response to a dilemma shared by all Atlantans, traffic congestion. This radio based intervention will invite participants to use rush hour moments to contribute to an ever-changing soundscape. Calling in from vehicles, commuters’ unscripted words of frustration & anxiety will be transformed into musical invention and looped back to the public through their radios. Chin & Eaton will be working with a diverse set of Atlanta music makers and producers to collaborate in the live sampling of these highly improvisational recordings as the composed sound is transmitted back into cars during daily traffic jams.
Opportunity
The Jam-D-Jam team is currently developing this concept with leading Atlanta radio stations, the goal is to highlight talented Atlanta producers that can transform sounds contributed by trapped commuters into music that is looped back into the gridlock. We are seeking out talent that can utilize their sampling skills to create work that evolves over the course of a one-hour show.
About the Artists
Mel Chin
Mel Chin was born in Houston, Texas and began making art at an early age. He is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. He developed Revival Field (1989-ongoing), a project that pioneered the field of “green remediation,” the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. A current project, Fundred Dollar Bill/Operation Paydirt, focuses on national prevention of childhood lead-poisoning. Mel is also well known for his iconic sculptures, works that often address the importance of memory and collective identity, and for inserting art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. His work is exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad and was documented in the popular PBS program, Art 21: Art of the 21st Century. Mel is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including four honorary doctorates. A monograph of the installation, The Funk & Wag from A to Z, was published by the Menil Collection and distributed by Yale Unversity Press in 2014. His traveling retrospective, REMATCH, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, features forty years of his effort is currently on view at four museum venues in Houston, Texas. His latest installation, SEA to SEE features cinematic portraits of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, derived from animated oceanographic data projected “flowing” through two opposing massive glass hemispherical screens.
Severn Eaton
Severn Eaton has taken his life and work in a number of different directions, but art has always provided a solid framework for his thoughts and ideas. Whether through sculpture, painting, an outdoor sound environment or construction, his work is a means of exploring and questioning the world around us. A North Carolina native and graduate of ASU and UNC-Chapel Hill, Eaton approaches each idea and project as its own entity with its own set of challenges, both technically and conceptually, and strives to strike a balance within any set of circumstances. He questions the motives of the human race and its long-term endeavors. His daily thoughts and actions are colored by such an outlook, and occasionally he comes across a common object, structure or event that speaks powerfully and directly of the comic tragedy of human progress. These striking metaphors he encounters have become the basis for the majority of his work. He is most known for his interactive art installations, some of which have been featured at Black Mountain College Museum's {Re}Happening, Moogfest, and Push Gallery in Asheville, NC.
