Melody Sumner Carnahan has six books in print and numerous works published in anthologies including the City Lights Review, the Leonardo Music Journal, At a Distance (MIT Press), Factorial (Japan), and music compilations from Zerx Records.
Carnahan has worked with artists, composers, and performers for two decades to present her writing off-the-page as live “performance novels,” soundtracks for film and video, recordings broadcast internationally, and intermedia installations. Molly Sturges and Chris Jonas commissioned words for live performance at SITE Santa Fe’s Biennial 2007. In 2005, The Out of Context ensemble, directed by Dino J. A. Deane, interpreted Carnahan’s One Inch Equals 25 Miles in performance (w/ CD from HighMayhem.org).
Carnahan received an Artist Residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in association with iconoclastic writer William Gass; KUNM’s AetherFest commissioned a half-hour audiowork, Dido’s Revenge; Morton Subotnick’s Gestures (DVD/CD-rom, Mode Records) features four of Carnahan’s stories; and Carnahan was awarded a Creative Media Arts Fellowship at ABC Radio and the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, where she produced The X, Y, Z of It: an audiowork broadcast internationally featuring the voices of Robert Ashley and Joan La Barbara. Woody Vasulka commissioned “The Maiden” for his The Brotherhood installation at NTT/ICC in Tokyo. Carnahan received an Independent Publisher Award in Audio-Fiction for her book/CD, The Time Is Now (Frog Peak/Burning Books) and has received acknowledgements from the Art Institute of Chicago, the NEA, New American Radio, NYC’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Her books are published and available at Burning Books and ReadSouthWest.
Please visit Melody Sumner Carnahan’s web site here…
Melody Sumner Carnahan “Try Being Alive in THIS World”
Elizabeth Wiseman: voice (recorded 12oct2006 by Max Friedenberg), Michael Sumner, source recordings (March 2005); J.A.Deane, sound design (realized 27feb2007); text by Melody.
Sumner Carnahan’s words on ZERZ vol. 27 are from See You In Hell, a video-audio installation in collaboration with artist Michael Sumner, along with sound designer Dino J.A. Deane and vocalist Elizabeth Wiseman, which premiered at MOV-in Gallery, College of Santa Fe, 2006. Here excerpted and redesigned for audio CD by Deane, 2007.