Reese Donohue
Tempo is an interactive design studio founded by Reese Donohue. Tempo builds experiences that harmonize music, art, and technology to create interactive experiences rooted in sound, with the belief that sound and form are inextricable.
Tempo’s work has exhibited in MoMA, the New Museum, and Serpentine Gallery, and has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, and Pitchfork.
Donohue studied at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and is an alumnus of The New Museum’s art and technology incubator NEW INC.
Project : Mutable / Elegy
‘Work noise, noise of man, noise of beast, noise bought, noise sold, noise prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.’ - Jacques Attali
Mutable / Elegy is a site-specific sound work that examines sonic ecosystems in New York City. The work explores the duality of sound as noise pollution and sound as a materially-elusive ephemeral performance.
Sound, the articulation of space, is territorial. Noise pollution in natural ecosystems decreases biodiversity and is driving a sixth global extinction event. The average resident of a city like New York loses more than three healthy life-years to noise pollution. But New York City policy defines noise as ‘any unwanted sound,’ a qualitative approach that encourages selective enforcement on subjective differences, positioning listeners as cultural arbiters and the membranes through which this tension is actively unresolved.
Noise in cities and at the edges of human development provides a critical focal point to investigate the complexities of sonic materialism, spatial audio, and the physiological and psychological effects of sound on both natural ecosystems and humans.