Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is currently Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany. Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka.
Arnold Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his “Orchestra of Excited Strings”. His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars in New York, Jim O’Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzadik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Choose and Black Truffel. Dreyblatt has taught music workshops resulting in performed compositions with musicians at The Music Gallery (Toronto), MIT (Boston), Serralves Foundation (Porto) and many others. He has performed with and without his ensemble at the Whitney Museum (New York), Maerz Music Festival (Berlin), Angelica Festival (Bologna), The Lab (San Francisco), Jazz House (Copenhagen) and countless other festivals and concert venues in Europe and in North America.
Dreyblatt’s visual artworks create complex textual and spatial visualizations for memory. These projects, which reflect on such themes as recollection and the archive, include permanent installations, digital room projections, dynamic textual objects and multi-layered lenticular text panels. His artistic practice of the last 20 years has ranged from large staged multi-day performances (“The Memory Projects”, 1995-2001), involved installations (such as “From the Archives”, 1999; “The Wunderblock”, 2000; “Turntable History”, 2009) and lenticular wall works (such as “Ephemeris Epigraphica”, 2006 and “Writing Cage”, 2012) as well as interactive artistic research projects such as the recent “Performing the Black Mountain Archive” (2015) at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art.
Burst
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
7’02” loop
Uranus
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
11’22” loop
Fluctuations
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
6’48” loop
Carbon
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
10’36” loop
Lapse
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
8’34” loop
Baby Essentials
1974-1976
Analog Video
Mono
6’08” loop
Screen Memory
2018
Full HD Video
Silent
28’36”
A String When Sounded Makes Many Sounds at Once
1982
8mm
9’24”