Sean Rooney works with signal as raw material — radio transmissions, pop-culture detritus, sampled and synthesized sound — treating, recombining and re-broadcasting it through instruments he builds himself.
Across more than twenty years his practice has moved fluidly between net art, live computer music, digital noise, audiovisual work and, more recently, modular and standalone synthesis. The media change; a handful of preoccupations stay constant. The work is restless, often improvised, and shot through with a dry conceptual wit — equally at home in a gallery's net-art archive, on a noise record, and inside a homemade software instrument.
Now based in Seattle, with earlier chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area and in London (2009–2011).
Signal as collage
Found audio, broadcast fragments and pop-culture samples are cut, layered and reprocessed — sound treated as a sculptural material rather than a recording to be preserved.
Homegrown instruments
A builder's relationship to his tools. From custom software instruments to hardware synthesizers, the apparatus is part of the artwork, not just a means to it.
Obsolete & analog media
A fascination with the residue of the broadcast era — shortwave numbers stations, cold-war transmissions, analog texture — re-rendered through digital and networked means.
The unuseless idea
Named for chindōgu, the Japanese art of the gloriously useless invention: work that is deliberately strange, an implement that "exists on the edge of reason."
Improvisation
Live, real-time performance and treatment over fixed composition — pieces are played and risked rather than assembled, then captured.
One continuous practice
Code, sound, moving image and design treated as a single discipline. The same sensibility runs from a Flash net-art piece to a Eurorack patch.
Chindogu
Live, improvised computer music made with homegrown software instruments, with Clay Chaplin. Dense, frenzied, rhythmic and melodic collages of pop-culture samples — "a strange implement, an idea that exists on the edge of reason." Five tracks, released 12 December 2005. Both artists credited with programming, improvisation, treatments and mixing.
Internet Numbers Station
A net-art piece built to evoke the shortwave "numbers stations" that broadcast coded digit sequences through the cold war — relocating that eerie, anonymous transmission into the browser. Part of an ongoing collaboration with artist Yoshi Sodeoka, the work was hosted on Turbulence.org and singled out by Rhizome.org as "the new big thing."
Noise-Driven Ambient Audio & Visuals
A noise/ambient audiovisual DVD (YouWorkForThem, 2006) — the first comprehensive release of the decade-long Sodeoka / Rooney partnership; music by their duo KNBS, video by Sodeoka as C505. Sound and image are generated simultaneously rather than one scoring the other, treating the screen itself as the medium — light pulsation, footage stripped to a single narrative element, video-art conventions liquidized through code. Includes five additional works by guest directors (Lew Baldwin, Day-Dream, Jonathan Turner, WeWorkForThem).
Pseudoflora
Sound design, composition and musical direction for Susan Simpson's marionette theater work — conceived, designed and directed by Simpson, with lighting by Justin Townsend. Inspired by the stories of Bruno Schulz and transposed to the margins of Los Angeles sprawl, the piece sets hand-carved puppets against natural-history dioramas and architectural models.
The live score was performed throughout by Sean's band Crispus, combining instrumental playing (clarinet, saxophone, guitar, unusual percussion, toy piano) with handmade digital-noise software and processed samples — a collage of melody and found sound the production described as quietly eccentric, abstract melancholia. Performed live as Crispus at the Fifth International Toy Theater Festival (HERE, New York, November 2000) and at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles (2001).
Peakaboo Hudson
Solo digital-noise project (e.g. the track "Bunny Tarnish"), with the Commercial Ad-Hoc release on Illegal Art (2000). Catalogued on Discogs and Last.fm.
Crispus
Sean's live band — performing with both acoustic/electric instruments (clarinet, saxophone, guitar, unusual percussion, toy piano) and handmade digital-noise software, fusing melody, found sound and generated noise. Crispus performed the live score for Susan Simpson's Pseudoflora (above).
KNBS
An audiovisual noise collaboration with New York video artist and musician Yoshi Sodeoka — also performed live as The Knobs. Sean plays DSP hacks and pedal feedback; Sodeoka contributes guitar, sequences and samples — and, as C505, the video. Sound and image are improvised and generated together. KNBS is the project behind Noise-Driven Ambient Audio & Visuals (above) and the live sets at IdN DesignEdge (2005), OFFF (Barcelona 2003, Valencia 2004) and the .MOV / dotmov festival (2004) (below).
Macromedia Flash: Art, Design + Function
Co-authored book on Flash-based website conception, design and development, written out of an award-winning early-web studio practice — an early articulation of the same code-as-creative-material instinct that runs through the sound work.
sroons — recent solo work
An ongoing body of solo electronic and synthesis pieces published on SoundCloud (21+ tracks), including Glass Violin, Crab Nebula, Lord of the Hundreds, Pulses, Sirens and the METs set. Textural, exploratory work that runs alongside the modular and standalone-synth building.
Modern Furniture Records & standalone synthesis
Ongoing work: running Modern Furniture Records, an ambient and minimal-techno vinyl imprint, and building a custom standalone synthesizer that interfaces with Eurorack modular gear — the homegrown-instrument theme, made literal in hardware.
2005
2003
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2004
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Grand
2001
2001
2000
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Discography
Timeline of major work
01
2005
04
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"The new big thing."Rhizome.org — on Internet Numbers Station
"A strange implement, an idea that exists on the edge of reason… the art of the unuseless idea."Chindogu release notes