Spectrum and Fou Gallery Present: Avian Annotations

A performance of new chamber music.

90 minutes, including intermission.

Date: February 7, 2026 (Saturday), 7:30–9:00 pm
Location: Fou Gallery, 89 5th Ave, #701, New York, NY 10003

Capacity: 45 People

Tickets: $20; $10 for students and seniors.

Fou Gallery and Spectrum are delighted to present Avian Annotations: Musical Explorations of Meng Du’s Sculptures and Mosaics, a performance of contemporary chamber music that will last 90 minutes (including intermission). The performance is based on Meng Du’s exhibit at Fou Gallery, which is running from December 6, 2025 to February 22, 2026.

A Call From… gently entwines human time with plant time through a cast-glass rotary telephone whose translucent body tenderly cradles the negative form of a cedar cone—an impression born from the artist’s encounter with a rare, sunlit cone in the Beijing Botanical Garden, where glass becomes a quietly luminous vessel for memory and suspended temporality. Two accompanying handset sculptures extend this temporal reverie: their spiral metal mesh tubes, softly branching outward, hold wooden beads that resemble seeds lying in patient dormancy, carrying ancestral information across decades with almost mythic persistence. Together, these intertwined components transform the vintage telephone into a subtly enchanted interface between temporal worlds, inviting viewers to imagine conversations with primordial flora, nascent life, or speculative future species. Like seeds awaiting their moment to stir, the work intimates that the echoes of vanished or not-yet-born lifeforms may still shimmer across time, quietly poised for reawakening. The musicians will present a composition that employs the asymmetric spatialization of the sculpture.

To Leave, To Arrive series draws formal inspiration from the bracts of the Davidia involucrata, commonly known as the dove tree due to its distinctive white bracts that resemble fluttering birds. Each spring, the tree appears to host countless small birds perched among its branches, hence its poetic name. The artwork recreates the ethereal quality of these bracts using organza, from which uniquely shaped glass seeds are suspended. Through this hanging arrangement, the soft sculptures form a floating arc within the exhibition space. The endpoints of the installation are anchored to modified clothing hangers—common household objects altered with minute barbs that deter touch. While we rarely maintain vigilance toward mundane objects, the sudden snag of fabric on a barb or an unexpected life incident reveals the inherent uncertainties embedded in daily existence. These barbs disrupt the assumptive comfort of the everyday, exposing the latent challenges concealed within ordinary routines.

Such human anxieties appear diminished when contextualized against the Davidia involucrata's biological legacy. As one of Earth's ancient floral lineages, its existence spans tens of millions of years. Having endured drastic climatic shifts throughout geological epochs, it ultimately persisted in the mountainous regions of central and western China. This enduring biological continuum renders the dove tree a living specimen, bridging the deep temporal past with contemporary presence. When viewed within this expansive chronological framework, the uncertainties of our present moment may merely constitute a minor annotation in the grand narrative of life's evolution. Involuntary Ghosts is a 20-minute, four-channel spatial audio performance that imagines birds in this changing environment singing for their lost kin. The piece uses a real-time simulation of interacting individuals, with vocalizations that are manipulated to hover between recognizable birdsong and spectral textures.

Integral to some of these performances will be live-composed video by multimedia artist Jim Tuite.

Musicians

and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty recordings out, including which came out on ECM, and more recently and . He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. In 2024 he won a Grammy Award as part of , in the category of Best Boxed Set. and are his latest books. and are his latest films. His piece premiered at the Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin in 2025. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Mason Youngblood is a behavioral scientist and sound artist at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, where he investigates the cultural evolution of communication, cognition, and creativity in both human and non-human animals. His recent research—published in journals like Science and featured by National Geographic and Scientific American—uses computational modeling to reveal the structural complexity and cultural richness of bird and whale songs. Drawing on over a decade of experience in electronic music production and DJing, Youngblood merges generative composition with scientific data to create immersive audio installations. His current work reconstructs the lost voices of endangered and extinct species, inviting audiences to inhabit non-human perspectives and experience the disappearing cultural traditions of the more-than-human world.

Jim Tuite is an artist working in video, drawing and photography. He holds an MFA degree from School of Visual Arts and BFA degree from Tyler School of Art. He has performed live visuals for various musical acts and venues in the NY, NJ, Philadelphia, Washington DC vicinity and others with an emphasis on metaphor and association. His projections utilize original and frequently modified video clips, video synthesis, 3D models with processing and found archival film footage. The visuals he creates feature the use of audio analysis and beat detection and various video effects that reflect the feel of the music.

He has performed at the Ab Uno Pluribus series, the Experimental Music Festivals 3-7, the eeeem festivals, NEEMFest 2023, 2024 and SVA Alumni festivals. He has done live visuals for the long running series called Ambient Chaos and the Modular Synth series. His portfolio of drawings appeared in Furious Pure in 2024.

Jaron Lanier has been on the cusp of technological innovation from its infancy to the present. A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams originating VR applications for medicine, design, and numerous other fields. He is currently the “octopus” (which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist) at Microsoft. He was a founder or principal of startups that were acquired by Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Pfizer.

In 2018, Lanier was named one of the 25 most influential people in the previous 25 years of tech history by Wired Magazine. He’s also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. Lanier’s writing appears in The New York Times, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, and the Atlantic. Jaron Lanier is also a specialist in unusual and historical musical instruments; he maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played instruments in the world. He has performed or recorded with a wide range of musicians, including Philip Glass, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, T Bone Burnett, Steve Reich, Jon Batiste, Les Claypool, Sean Lennon and Sara Bareilles. Lanier’s first book, , is held dear by readers as an expression of spiritual sensibility in a high tech world. It was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Time Magazine and The New York Times.

Glenn Cornett is the founder of Spectrum, an organization whose stated mission is to foster innovation and virtuosity in the arts. Since 2012, Spectrum has functioned mainly as an arts venue (sometimes more as a “venue concept” since the Covid-19 pandemic) in NYC, presenting a variety of arts events, the majority of them involving modernist music (here loosely defined as music composed form 1900 onward). As a composer/performer, Glenn uses guitar, electronics and keyboard, collaborating in a variety of ensemble contexts. For his “day job,” he is a biotech entrepreneur working in neurological and cardiovascular domains (including their intersection).

Glenn holds an MD from the University of Michigan and a neuroscience PhD from UCLA. His dissertation (roughly equal parts systematic musicology, neurophysiology and cognitive science) was on deep-brain responses to musical stimuli. Music training has included synthesizer performance while an undergraduate (“one of the few chemistry majors with a key to the electronic music lab”) and music theory, ethnomusicology and systematic musicology while a graduate student. He has also studied with several composers who will be neither blamed nor incriminated here.

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