Tunes from Trash, Making Music from What We Leave Behind

is an invitation to reimagine our place along the Jones Falls River and the Chesapeake Bay in a distant future beyond our fossil-fueled present. Consider what local landscapes and cultures might look like in a time far beyond the Baltimore we know now. What artifacts might people of that future time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind?

Artists and exhibition curators are thrilled to lead, Tunes from Trash, Making Music from What We Leave Behind: Crafting instruments and thinking about music with Jordan Tierney and the International Arts & Mind Lab. Participants will consider the many natural and human-made sounds reverberating across the Jones Falls watershed. What does it sound like? How can we listen better in order to understand our environment better? How might we translate what we are hearing to engage our community? Using materials found in stream beds and river banks, participants will play with sound, motion, and material to build a sound vocabulary based on the unique flotsam and jetsam of this place.

The workshop will include an exploration of our sensory systems grounded in the science of neuroaesthetics: the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change our brains, bodies, and behaviors. Around the world, this knowledge is being translated into specific practices that advance health and wellbeing.

We will provide a collection of found objects in the workshop, but we also encourage you to bring any found objects you would like to share or include from your wanderings.

Jordan Tierney is a visual artist based in Baltimore. As a Symbiocene Epoch Shaman, she acts as a catalyst for deep kinship with our planet. She shares her artwork to inspire other human earthlings to slow down and reconnect with themselves, each other and the living breathing planet that is our home. Her most recent work grows from over a decade of inhabiting and studying Baltimore’s urban streams and tangled forest buffers. She pulls refuse from the streams and woods, removes invasive plants and vines, and tries to live sustainably. To manage the distress over what we have lost, she uses her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of the trash she collects from negative to positive, imagining a more soulful future for us all. She received her BFA from MICA. In addition to teaching immersive outdoor workshops, her work has been featured in galleries across the DMV and she has fabricated exhibits for the Smithsonian, the BMA and AVAM.

Karen Alexander is Director of Outreach and Education for the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab) Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. This neuroaesthetics research-to-practice initiative is focused on accelerating translational approaches in the field of neuroarts. As part of her work, Karen leads IAM Lab’s Intentional Spaces initiative, a global project to expand the foundation for collaboration between scientific researchers, technologists, social scientists, and design practitioners. The network is co-developing a shared framework that advances the field by amplifying the impact of design on the human experience within the built environment. Prior to joining the IAM Lab, Karen worked in program management, research, and communications across a wide range of arts and education policy issues at local, state and federal levels. She holds an M.P.A. (Master of Public Administration) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an Honors A.B. from Brown University.

International Arts + Mind Lab: The Center for Applied NeuroaestheticsInternational Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab) is a multidisciplinary research-to-practice initiative accelerating the field of neuroaesthetics. IAM Lab is pioneering impact-based thinking, an outside-in approach to health, well-being and learning.www.artsandmindlab.org

Host or Publisher The Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture