CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Borrowing its title from a guitar technique by which the instrument is tuned to be strummed with “open,” that is unfretted, strings, this exhibition presents three consecutive, changing installations in sound. Bringing together a group of artists from different disciplinary backgrounds, each project originates with a performance in the exhibition space, which is followed by the presentation of audio or video recordings or objects used in the live event.

Sound and performance are both inherently about time and change. Crossing the boundaries between performing and visual arts, they are in many ways antithetical to conventional gallery display. Open Tunings seeks to provide an experimental platform to explore substituting different modes in which those ephemeral forms can inhabit the exhibition space. The three artists, or artist collaborations, present works conceived for the show, variously examining the relationships between architectural space and spatial sound, presence and absence, liveness and recording, improvisation and script.

David Grubbs and Eli Keszler open the exhibition series with their collaboration One and One Less, a spoken word and percussion performance-installation. Recorded excerpts from Grubbs’s text One Poem trigger a range of mechanical strikes within seven custom-made, sculptural sound boxes mounted on the wall. Each box contains an elaborate mechanism of motors and speakers built by Keszler, which acoustically filters the voice, creating a constantly changing composition—equally verbal and percussive—that resonates throughout the exhibition space.

Brendan Fowler, who has made sculptural wall pieces consisting of several mounted photographs “crashed” together in a kind of performative act, gives one of his trademark vocal performances. Pitched between speech and song, and veering from semi-autobiographical confessional to deadpan social commentary, Fowler plays sparse electronic tracks composed on a Roland SP-404 sampler alongside. Over the course of the subsequent exhibition, the sampler plays back varying combinations of his scores in an attempt, as he says, to develop “a version of my performances without being there.” Fowler’s live performance takes place Thursday, November 6, at 6pm.

Swiss and American artist Hannah Weinberger makes sound sculptures using freely accessible sound samples gathered from the web, sourced in sound libraries, or recordings from social gatherings such as art openings. In the past, her laptop performances have assembled groups of non-professional performers playing open-source software on their computers according to her loose directions. This new work builds on her interest in auditory and visual modes of perception, sound and memory, by combining different objects and materials and activating them in a performative and participatory context. A live performance of Weinberger’s work takes place on Thursday, December 11, at 6pm.