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Snarkitecture And Chromeo Unveil Mystery Collaboration

The Creators Project Talks To Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham of Snarkitecture about The White Room.

Last night, electro wunderkinds Chromeo and Brooklyn-based design duo Snarkitecture unveiled The White Room, a unique two day audio-visual project at Milk Studios in New York City put on by Tumblr’s brand-new IRL series. Half pop-up performance piece, half album listening party, The White Room offers Chromeo fans a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the band’s Helmet Newton-referencing forthcoming record White Women in a specially created monochromatic installation designed by Snarkitecture.

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If you could summon an artist’s blog to life – in real time – what would it feel like? That’s the question driving Tumblr IRL, a new immersive multimedia series that promises to throw music fans into the creative universe of their favorite performers. Using space, design and music, Tumblr IRL wants to change the way we experience new music – in real life.

Tumblr Music Evangelist Nate Auerbach sees the new IRL series as a way to retool the album listening party for the digital age. “As a music fan and someone who has worked in the music business for almost ten years,” Auerbach said, “I sometimes get annoyed when I go to album listening events and all I see are people talking and standing around the bar. I really want people to be able to feel the music. I want to give them a window to the artist’s creative mind in a media and experience rich way.”

We caught up with Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham of Snarkitecture and talked about pop ups, what people can expect from The White Room and how architecture can impact the way we experience music.

Madison Moore: Snarkitecture does a lot of work with temporary, pop-up installations. What is the conceptual gesture behind that approach?

Alex MustonenSome of the temporary works that Snarkitecture started doing were running concurrently with another long term project, so we were working on longer, more permanent works. Temporary projects were a way for us to move ideas through the studio at a little bit of a quicker rate. For instance, when we were working on A Memorial Bowing in Miami,that’s a project that took over two years from commission to completion, and in that time we were able to complete five or six different temporary installations that year. Each one was a conceptual exploration or testing ground.

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Moore: There has been so much secrecy around The White Room. What kinds of things can people expect?

Mustonen: A lot of our work uses this reduced, monochromatic palette that brings things either down to all white or to the absence of color. That was in some ways the very basic starting point for the collaboration. But what we’ve done in The White Room is kind of bring elements of the world Snarkitecture – ideas of combining architecture with irrational or illogical gestures – with the kind of references that come from Chromeo’s world. There’s an intersection between these two arenas that happen in the gallery, so there’s an installation component that will exist for two days in New York. It will also be on Tumblr. The other component of the project is obviously the music of Chromeo, so they will be doing selections from the new album at the listening event.

(Above: fans wait on line for the chance to glimpse the collaboration. Below: NYC's Milk Studios is transformed.)

Moore: What was the actual work of building the installation? How did you alter the space?

Mustonen: One of the very first things we did with Chromeo was we went to the recording studio with them and they came to our studio. We were listening to tracks, we were showing them art work. All of these things entered the collaborative process, even if there’s not a moment that’s not directly inspired by a lyric or an instrumental or something, there is definitely a back and forth that informs the overall language of the project. The installation is definitely something unexpected, particularly in a gallery context and especially at Milk. It is such a high-profile venue, an incredibly active site in terms of fashion, music and design. Everything from the way people enter the space to the way they are greeted to the way that they come into the gallery – it is all designed as a way to bring people into a different world, to transport them into this space that we’ve created for Chromeo.

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Moore: It sounds fairly theatrical and performative.

Daniel Arsham: Theater is something that has been a big influence on our practice, and we’ve worked numerous times in stage design. So there was definitely a theatrical element, both about the arc of the audience’s experience of the evening but also in terms of lighting and staging.

Moore: And with the sort of immersive experience you’ve created in the space for Chromeo, the performative element certainly gets the audience to think about sound and space in new and interesting ways.

Mustonen: One of the main goals of Snarkitecture is to make architecture perform in ways that are unexpected. And part of that is creating experiences that are unexpected, outside of the everyday and also something that’s memorable. Whether it’s tonight when they get home or a week from now or ten years from now, they will remember this moment of hearing Chromeo’s new album and seeing this world that Snarkitecture has created for that sound. We want people to carry that away with them for a long time.

Moore: The White Room is part of the new Tumblr IRL series. What do you hope the Tumblr platform adds to the overall experience you’ve created?

Mustonen: I think what’s really interesting about having Tumblr involved in the project is when Dave 1 first contacted us, one of the main ideas he had was creating a democratic installation. Chromeo has quite a large fan base, so the fans of Chromeo can actually be in a gallery context and in a VIP context, so the event was really about bringing both of those sides together: VIP, design and music with the fans of Chromeo. Those are the sort of people that Tumblr would be able to reach out to.

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(Above: Chromeo with Tumblr's David Karp, posing in front of the installation.)

Moore: How do you think has social media platforms like Tumblr have changed the way we experience art, technology and music? Does it inform your practice in any way?

Arsham: Social media has changed how people view things. The world is a much smaller place with social media, and I think that for us we’ve seen that there are audiences that we have that exist or that see a lot of what we do through our Tumblr feed or through our Instagram feed.

Mustonen: Yeah. We’re not expecting to have commissions from people who follow us on Tumblr, although that would be great. But it is always great to have people who are interested in the work, even if it’s a teenage kid from the middle of nowhere.

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