Hastings & Mayock’s The Former World is a multi-media essay on “deep time,” geologic history, the environment, humanity, and the artist. The work uses two focal points: the life and writings of the artist Robert Smithson and the writer John McPhee’s tome on American geologic history, Annals of the Former World. 

John Hastings and Benjamin Mayock are artists and musicians from New York and Vermont respectively. They focus their work on the environment, ecology, and the historical record. They have been working on a collaborative project, the New Cartography, for over 5 years, exploring the American landscape. Along with Chris Kallmyer, they studied at the California Institute of the Arts.

Fraufraulein is the ongoing duo of Billy Gomberg & Andy Guthrie, generally concerned with improvisation, using location recordings, object play, and their more familiar instruments as markers to drift away from and return to. Their collaborative recordings include Extinguishment, released by Another Timbre in early 2015, Heavy Objects on Marginal Frequencies in 2017. Most recently, Solum was published by Notice Recordings in 2021. They are based in San Francisco.

Chris Kallmyer’s Mountain Language is a silent film documenting two jazz drummers in a vast desert landscape. Filmed at dawn on the traditional territory and homelands of the Cahuilla people, the piece uses the form of a duet – its ethics and aesthetics – to model the shared stakes of our social, ecologic, and poetic moment.

Kallmyer is an artist and musician whose work explores the relationship between architecture, sound, and performance. Drawing on his interests and training in music, Kallmyer redeems spaces through cathartic installations and collective actions. His work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the National Gallery of Singapore among other spaces.