Do you know the old FURNITURE shop on Woodward Ave?
Landmarked by signage a few letters short, its broken smile gemmed with LEDs and inter-terrestrial orbs, the brick building otherwise stood anonymous, inaccessible, for months. Under the sun: a local business lost to rent hikes (#vote for Zohran). At night, the storefront glow offers just enough proof of life to spark whispers on the block of a cult. The truth's even better.
My first time crossing the metal threshold at FURNITURE, aka a new Ridgewood haven called INTERCOMM, reveals, in its current form, a makeshift house of worship. Priest-free, undogmatic, illuminated by a chorus of animations and machines. As if 50,000 files escaped their containers and painted the walls with new religion. Memory beamed 'til infinity, in tune with the infinite. Multichannel music, x-rayed earthmatter, laser scanners, fossilized hard drives, and two couches (which play the role of pews in the dark) offer a zone to sit, exist, and transform. This is the latest conjuring of 29 Speedway boss Ben Shirken (ex.wiish), whose album turned public séance, H.D. Reliquary, pumps the heart of this architecture — and offers a glimpse at visions of a new institution loading.
Constructing the realm itself required a braintrust of collaborators. Johan Michalove and Virginia Zangs, two megaminds behind Mutua (a support OS for mutual aid) and Studio ZM, co-developed the codebases, spatial designs, and laser sequencing alongside Ben. (The first CT scans used to test the exhibition's concept also came courtesy of Johan's father. Johan says their dad is doing aokay.) Virginia, who references the triptychs of the Renaissance era as inspiration, told us that "a lot of digital art or online art can force this one-sided experience where the participant is a user. We wanted to have difference pieces and details throughout the reliquary to explore." Muein, another brilliant artist, crafted physical artifacts to add an umpteenth dimension. Altogether, it's jazz.
On its own, Ben's 11-track project has tesseract depth, the sound equivalent of a mutating prism. Shirken braids, dissolves, summons, and intervenes against his own creation. Its ensemble includes ambient experiments, Gregorian chants, contributions from 29S pillars like Dorothy Carlos, phantom threads from imaginary sessions (generative complements to live improv), and eye-watering string sections that coexist with the noise of asteroid factories. Reliquary touches down in a moment of ongoing mass extinction and slaughter, waged in part to ensure we can send 20-gigabyte texts. Birdsongs and quadcopters share the air. USBs outlast DJ’s. Clouds rain data long after the uploaders evaporate.
Ben spoke with us about the makings of H.D. Reliquary, finding magic in an open-source colossus of medical scans, automation, shedding masks, and lots more. We hope you enjoy the interview. Stay safe out there <3
Experience H.D. Reliquary in INTERCOMM at 584 Woodward Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, through April 20. Ben gets paid the moment you buy his album on Catalog. Thanks for reading, watching, listening, supporting.
Siber: There’s a voice in the intro of H.D. Reliquary, on “Scattered Cipher,” that sounds like a child’s. One phrase wiggles through the layers: “once a year.” Who are they? Where are they?
Ben: That’s from Hitchcock’s film, The Birds. The movie is sort of about nature’s retribution against humans, and it starts with these schoolchildren singing this pleasant, naive song. I think that ties into the introduction of the album, as a moment of foreshadowing. “Scattered Cipher” has elements of the rest of the project, but it’s not overt. You don’t really know what’s going to happen next.
Siber: The calm before the storm. Is that foreshadowing true for both your album and your worldview at this moment?
Ben: That’s it. Yes.
Siber: Do you remember when the orcas were teaming up against the yachts? I think you’d be on the side of the orcas, is that right?
Ben: I think any other animal is the underdog in a world where humans believe they’re the master species. I’m not sure who would be on the boat… I don’t want them to die. Just wrestle with their reality. Shake that ego, their psyche.
Siber: Introduce them to discomfort. There’s a bear in that Skitter side project you released…
Ben: That’s wild cam footage ripped from YouTube, with other animals running around the screen too. Bears, foxes, owls. It’s a proof of concept: the idea for that project, if I had developed it more, would be to have a live cam feed of a nature preserve that you can look around in, and as you look around and animals appear, the sounds change. I was learning how to put music on the web in response to a cursor. As you move it, the reverb and rhythm shift. I used a language called RNBO, which lets you place Max MSP code in a site or export it to Arduino.
Siber: Those offshoot experiments feel like little gifts. They make the term “worldbuilding” still feel worthwhile to me. The artists in People’s Coalition of Tandy are generous in that way, too. Is this a lifelong pattern for you, using every tool you can?
Ben: I think it’s a later-in-life development, though I’ve always pushed myself to go beyond a single medium, while maintaining a mostly-music practice until recently. I’ve always directed music videos. I’ve always worked deeply with graphic designers, animators, dancers. I’ve delved, in private, into creating abstract video works, but never released them until now. Once you learn how to use a tool really well, you realize you can use other tools in the same way. You see the connections between them. Some people realize that immediately. Sometimes that takes time.
Siber: I can imagine younger you being asked to write an essay and handing in a bonus painting.
Ben: I was thinking about this earlier today, so the memory’s fresh: we were learning how to draw single-point perspective in an art class in fifth grade. It was a popular technique during the Renaissance. It didn’t exist before because it’s not how we actually see, really, but it helps define space. It changed art and architecture immediately. It’s very mathematical. We drew a street widening from this one point, to simulate distance—lined with buildings, each with a balcony drawn at the same angle. The teacher told me, “You’re good at this,” and that gave me confidence as a kid. That really clicked for me.
Siber: Was this before you started digging into music?
Ben: It was simultaneous. I studied modern art in college. Ancient art, too. I covered the whole spectrum.
Siber: Did those lessons shape this exhibition in any way?
Ben: I was really into Italian Futurism. It’s like early 20th-century sci-fi. Big, blocky characters. Utopic cities. Very shiny, bright, and sharp. Acute, in a way. It has movement to it. It feels refreshing now when I look at it. That was around the same time as Bauhaus, ish, which focused on performance-based and architectural experiments. Both of those movements affected my outlook. Brutalism is very in right now… obviously there’s a movie called The Brutalist. But if you even look at Travis Scott’s Coachella performance… a lot of minimalism now feels harsh and monochrome. We joke that it’s fascist, but… you see people in those big, black cars…
Siber: Tesla trucks…
Ben: People barely wearing color… it’s fashionable, but it feels oppressive to me.
Siber: Putting the fascist in fashion. There’s definitely been a backlash to the Silicon Valley monotony, of taking the UI/UX “frictionless” principle and using it to suck the life out of everything, but only in pockets.
Ben: It’s popular. Populist! But art movements aren’t always misaligned with, or a rejection of, the politics of the time. So we might give art a little too much credit for being art, for being inherently rebellious. We should be careful about propagating certain ideologies that are imposed upon us.
Siber: The INTERCOMM poster for the H.D. Reliquary exhibition — the one Jesse Osborne-Lanthier of Éditions Appærent made — feels to me like it matches how you described Italian Futurism.
Ben: Jesse’s an amazing artist.
Siber: Another person who can seemingly create anything they envision, whatever medium it requires. Éditions also put out one of my all-time favorite albums, مذاهب النسيان – The Tenets of Forgetting, by Ismael and MSYLMA. But going back on topic: the writeup for that flyer mentions “democratic dissolution” and “decaying institutions.” Do you see this project as a kind of fight against that?
Ben: At the start of this process, we were speaking about the role of religion in modernity, and how music often feels individualistic. Our society is pretty secular, but we still need spaces of respite, spaces to breathe and feel real spiritual connections during a time when “democracy” feels like a falsehood.
Siber: It’s always been illusory, but especially now. Spending a half-hour in The Reliquary offered me that respite. Like being in church — not during mass, but alone, after hours, when you feel the gravity without the programming.
Ben: Design, sound, and image are architecture: they define a space, and how it influences our psyche. Because INTERCOMM is so new, it has no connotations. No one’s been there, so we could turn it into whatever we wanted. For us, that meant something reminiscent of a temple or a monastery.
Siber: Living here in New York, it really can feel so secular. Religious affiliations are declining across the country, and Christian evangelism and Jewish supremacy are ruling the roost. Shutting down “antisemitism” has become the tip of the spear. Said as a Jew!
Ben: I’m also Jewish. Free Palestine.
Siber: Free Palestine. With that in mind, where’s that left your view of institutions?
Ben: I’m of the belief that we should build our own institutions. We shouldn’t rely on these traditional structures that make you bend the knee. There are a few places and galleries I love, like Blade Study — where Virginia, Johan, and I met — or Pioneer Works. DIY venues like LSD, Trans Pecos. Woodbine across the street.
Siber: You imagined a metropolis within the realm of your Shards of Axel album as ex wiish. Does the institution of dollar pizza exist there?
Ben: Absolutely. Yes. That’d definitely exist. That metropolis is a reflection of our own. A mirrored New York.
Siber: There’s a big gap, visually, between Shards of Axel — which you co-imagined with Laser Days — and H.D. Reliquary exhibited irl, but I was wondering if these projects have shared DNA that made the creation of this installation feel more approachable?
Ben: Laser Days and I co-own a laser together. The three of us learned how to use it, and a lot of those techniques are shared across the two projects — including the scanning and outlining of objects. It’s difficult to combine projections and lasers because of latency between them. You have to send the projection through TouchDesigner software to map it, and our laser’s cheap-ish, so the more data you send, the glitchier it looks. This one’s $2,500. The next level is $20K or $30K — but that’s if you’re in a stadium, scanning the audience.
Siber: When I first walked past the curtains, for a moment, I just assumed the laser scans were part of the projection. Realizing it’s a separate machine, doing its own dance, added another level of fascination.
Ben: In this situation, less is more. You can go really maximalist with a laser projection and I think it looks bad. Using it for a grid, numbers, measurements, occasional outlines — it keeps it fresh even in its repetition. When you see too much happening, it can get boring. I think that goes for a lot of video work. Minimalism feels interesting to me, musically and visually, when there’s enough change to keep you guessing. The laser’s following the 3D projection, and that 3D projection’s generated by a Python script that Johan and I worked on together, so it’s never going to be the exact same experience in the room.
Siber: Where are you sourcing the 3D objects?
Ben: Lots of archival databases that I scoured for hours to find. You’ll happen upon a database of amphibians, or botanical gardens. It’s incredible someone had the time to scan each, one by one, and preserve them. There’s an open-source medical software called ImageJ that lets you view MRI and bacteria scans.
Siber: Frog scans.
Ben: Lots of frog scans. Cactus fruits. I was importing image stacks — which are thousands of pictures of the same object — then using this medical software to render them in 3D, then animating those objects into motion, which is what doctors do to show a patient their brain. We’d take 2D image scans from one X-Y angle and render it into a Y-Z angle. Imagine a scan of a battery from left to right, versus top to bottom. The screen at the back of the room displays the movement of all of these individual scans at once.
Siber: These objects are like the children of the reliquary. Do you have a favorite?
Ben: It might be the one that doesn’t exist. Someone used a microscopic X-ray CT scanner to take pictures of atoms moving through metal, which we were able to animate and visualize as something that feels alive.
Siber: An example of intervention.
Ben: A lot of this is gatekept for research purposes by universities, companies, and hospitals. Bringing it outside of that context for people to view is really important, because it’s amazing to see. The technology’s really expensive. I can’t get my hands on one unless I go to a university and pay them $200/hour. Which I want to do, by the way. [Laughs]
Siber: What was your path to these sources?
Ben: I was thinking a lot about archives when I was writing the album because I had all of these recordings on my hard drive of improvisational sessions with different musicians. I’d take little pieces and reconfigure them into new melodies and sounds, and that became H.D. Reliquary. The way they splinter, fragment, and change felt related to archival scans, databases. Data itself isn’t boring, but it’s dry. A bunch of numbers on a drive. We all have these personal, even sacred, relics. They’ve become our reliquaries, which were once used to contain hair or teeth, or religious objects. You can parse through them and invent something new.
Siber: There’s a syncopated element on H.D. that also appears on another 29 Speedway release — Dorothy Carlos’ Ear World — that emphasizes, to me, how truly communal these experiments are. Dorothy’s also featured on your album and performed at the opening night. You have those human collaborators, and you have what you termed “imaginary players.”
Ben: That term relates to this technique I used that feeds a machine listening software the improvisational parts, specifically on the song “Greg’s Thesis.” My really close friend Kevin Eichenberger — we’re in a band called Nu Jazz together — played a bass solo. I took that and generated MIDI that comped the solo, playing chords around Kevin’s parts. Then I erased Kevin’s solo and just kept the MIDI chords. I think a lot about jazz improv and composition when I work with computers, and what that allows: these sessions that never existed. Some of the samples I used were from a recording session with Kevin playing in a string quartet for our other friend’s MFA thesis. That’s Greg.
Siber: I think there’s this common (mis)conception that generative experiments are, by default, anti-human, anti-jazz. What you’re doing is grounded in that discipline.
Ben: Jazz is a very vague term now. It’s a way of making music, a practice, as much as it is a sound. Usually, it’s between two or more people. It usually incorporates some form of improvisation. As an electronic musician, I studied jazz when I was younger, about 15, but fell off the wagon. I got brought back into it through Nu Jazz, but I’m playing modular synth. Is it still jazz? Is it? It is to some people.
Siber: And to you?
Ben: It is. Yes. I might get criticized for saying jazz doesn’t have to be this thing that’s practiced rigorously for years and years and years, but it can be an action, too. If you can be a reactive musician, you can play jazz.
Siber: What’s your AI litmus test — what makes a model “ethical,” or resource-light?
Ben: What it’s trained on. Is it trained on data you have permission to use? Did you create the model, or at least know where it comes from? Are you running the model locally, on your own device, or through the cloud, using high volumes of electricity? Most of the AI tools I used were custom, using the power my own computer draws, versus a server farm. It’s important to think about these things, because it’s a new dilemma we’re all facing as these tools are so easily accessible, and the resource requirements for many of them are removed from what we’re seeing.
Siber: At the INTERCOMM exhibit, you have this computer piece almost embalmed in a sculpture, placed within this wooden chest that Muein created. Is that the reliquary’s heart?
Ben: I think that’s fair. The organs. Processing everything. That fossil, that sculpture, is made out of resin. Like amber. We were imagining someone finding this drive in 200 years, uncovering it, seeing its files, excavated and analyzed. I wanted to expose everything as much as I could. That’s why there’s a deconstructed computer in the back, all the cables running to the speakers, 2D becoming 3D becoming the subject of a laser scan… we built a software for it.
Siber: What was that solving for?
Ben: It was taking too long to export and render from ImageJ, so Johan and I had to figure out how to render the 2D into 3D, animating that in real time, and transitioning between videos smoothly over the course of infinity. It’s really delicate. Even getting the cameras to zoom in and out without breaking everything. The software searches through these massive folders on a drive. Johan vibe-coded that one to success.
Siber: Does your software have a name?
Ben: Probably “HD Reliquary Final Final Final Final _ Final.”
[Editor’s note: Ben’s co-conspirator Johan revealed the names of two custom Reliquary softwares: “Sequence Viewer” and “Sync Server.” They work together to render a half-terabyte of data in real time at INTERCOMM and keep the timing of three different display systems — two acrylic panels and a center wall projection — in lockstep. The projected visuals and lasers each require their own code, pulling from a stack of a half-dozen hard drives.]
Siber: What other road bumps did the team encounter that became fixtures of the space?
Ben: There was a lot of testing of acrylic materials. We tried murky, black, white, then landed on the translucent acrylic panels hanging from the ceiling, which meant that the projection would appear on the panel itself and somewhere else. Duncan Davies worked on the build and had the idea of shooting projections from behind, so the images mapped to the floors. That was a happy accident.
Siber: You used the word “dissociation” to distinguish your last album, as ex wiish, from this one, which is under your own name. What shifted emotionally, mentally, to let you go from making music that feels dissociative to a more direct representation — that’s maybe also more directly confronting our world, versus a mirrored world?
Ben: I think I decided that it was time to stop hiding behind the curtain. Anonymity is a tool for worldbuilding because you can create something devoid of yourself, or even a new self. But when you shed that, you start to fear yourself less.
Experience H.D. Reliquary in INTERCOMM at 584 Woodward Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, through April 20. Ben gets paid the moment you buy his album on Catalog. Thanks for reading, watching, listening, supporting.
