This workshop uses sound to express and manipulate debt.  Cassandra Thornton and Amber Vistein will lead participants to visualize debt as a substance, a thing, or a space, and then will train in vocal and phonation techniques to ground the visual debt translation into sound and/or movement-- creating a debt choir. The product of this workshop may be used for therapeutic reasons or to disrupt complacent economic sociality.

Performance: Communal Debt as Sound

Saturday, October 20, 5:30pm

Following the workshop, a performance by MassArt Chorus and the Communal Debt as Sound workshop participants, will take place at EFA Project Space. The project is expected to begin at EFA Project Space and then travel.

Cassandra Thornton may be found standing behind things and smiling. The smile may be misinterpreted as a sign of enthusiasm but it is in actuality a carefully implemented tactic developed to deter attention from her disappointment and skepticism about popular understanding of the limitations presented by reality.  This life-long frustration inspired a curiosity about the unknown and a series of projects that question or interact with what seems to be the regulating bodies of reality: institutions.  If an institution is a place, rhythm or habit that an individual subject and others can return to, then it creates many types of structures for Thornton to lurk behind.  Thornton is adept at the detached observation of how systems resonate in the unconscious of the individual and the collective. She has investigated aspects of the impact of debt through the assignation of physical shape and form, and most recently published interpretations of the manifestations of debt as related by contemporaries at the California College of the Arts. Learn more about her work at: www.cassiethornton.com, www.debt-visualizations.tumblr.com, www.physical-debt.tumblr.com www.physical-audit.tumblr.com.