Free For All: Mitral Transmission / *Andy Warhol* (1967)

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This winter’s Free For All featured Philadelphia’s Data Garden, which makes and promotes sound art at the crossroads of the digital and the biological. In the museum lobby, visitors, seated on vibrating subwoofers, could listen to the sounds of apples (and other produce) via sensors and headphones, a subtle music that varied with the pressure of hand on fruit. Indeed, despite the high attendance, the general tenor of the evening—as choreographed by Grace Ambrose with ICA’s Student Advisory Board—was subtle and sparse. The museum front desk was transformed into a work table for inking up and rolling out small linocuts on plantable paper made with compressed wildflower seeds. Visitors, including Penn students and Data Garden fans, took turns crowding into ICA’s auditorium where they sat on poufs and the floor to hear Greg Fox generate live music from his own biorhythms, which he accompanied on drums. Part of ICA@50, the Free For All took inspiration from ICA’s 1967 first-ever solo museum show of the work of Andy Warhol (and from Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia, multisensory events he was organizing around that time) and was also a launch for Fox’s new record, Mitral Transmission.Visitors ate hand pies from West Philadelphia’s Wishbone, tweeting and instagramming into the night.
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ICA@50: Free For All Mitral Transmission exhibition card (front)ICA@50: Free For All Mitral Transmission exhibition card (back)

Andy Warhol ICA@50: Pleasing Artists And Publics Since 1963Free For All ICA@50