The FriForma concert season kicks off with a guest appearance by an American duo dedicated to the design of tools, instruments and systems for audiovisual research. M S H R will present their project Mesh Manifold at Osmo/za, an art production, residency and cultural space in Ljubljana.

This time FriFormA\V will be carried out in collaboration with the collective ⁂ ᑎīᗩᑎᔕᗩ⁂.

Entrance fee: 10 EUR

MSHR (USA) is an art collective that builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their practice is a self-transforming entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, expressing its form through interactive installations, virtual environments and live improvisations. MSHR was established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Their name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time.

Mesh Manifold is a live sound-sculpture composition by the duo MSHR, consisting of a multitude of devices in a complex and unruly feedback system of sound and light. Developed over the course of a summer residency in Santa Cruz, California, Mesh Manifold introduces a fresh population of autonomous sculptural entities, cohabiting across simulated and substantial substrates. The resonating bodies contain custom-built electrical circuits with sensors and amplifiers that emit and respond to signals rippling throughout the system. The entities converse through these physical connections as well as engaging with an invisible software canopy inscribed across the terrain through various programming languages.
As elements of the system themselves, MSHR move throughout the sculptural array, adjusting the waveform micro-climates while modulating their own decisions in response to the unpredictable audiovisual results of their active presence. The entities and agents together form a babbling biome for electrical current, cultivating a life-like chorus from inert components.
Mesh Manifold was commissioned by Indexical and The Lab, with in-kind support from the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County and Idea Fab Labs, Santa Cruz.

Brenna Murphy (born 1986) is an American artist based in Portland, Oregon. Murphy was born in 1986 in Edmonds, Washington. She holds a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2014 Murphy spent a five-month creative residency at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York. Her works combine digital and physical input, combining psychedelic visual forms with three-dimensional objects. Murphy's work has been called strange, but with an "uncanny familiarity." Murphy thinks of herself as a channel that mediates between the digital and the physical. She privileges neither the physical nor the virtual and her sculptures are models of her net-based works as much as her net-based works are models of her sculptures. Her exhibition Liquid Vehicle Transmitters appeared at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2013. The exhibit featured prints and physical representations of her internet-based work, forming "an interactive arena of labyrinthine sculptures". An auxiliary installation featured the audiovisual work of MSHR, her collaboration with Birch Cooper. Her work has been exhibited online via the New Museum and in group shows including This is what sculpture looks like, at the Postmasters Gallery in New York City. Her work has been collected in the book Domain~Lattice.

Birch Cooper's work remains open to various tools, approaches and substrates, but almost always involves electronic media. He is a frequent collaborator, particularly in his collective MSHR, together with Brenna Murphy. He maintains designing live electronic music systems for performance and installation as a central node of focus. His digital sculpture is a byproduct of collaboration and electronic music, but it is enacted alone and with no linear correlation to sound. Sculpting inside a computer is a place of refuge that exists outside of reason. Cooper views his art practice as a high complexity feedback loop- a living organism that needs constant attention. He lives nomadically with MSHR and considers Portland his spiritual base.