About Steve Roden

steve roden is a visual and sound artist from los angeles. his work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. roden's working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. these scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. the inspirational source material then becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon. in the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, and image building. in the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or 'possible landscapes'. the sound works present themselves with an aesthetic roden describes as "lower case'' - sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.