Andrew Paul Keiper

This work is a collaborative installation by Andrew Paul Keiper and Kei Ito. Ito's grandfather was in Hiroshima at the time of the atomic bomb attack, and went on to become an anti-nuclear activist. Keiper's grandfather was an engineer who contributed to the Manhattan Project. This work, Ash Lexicon-Silverplate was installed in the 2016 Young Blood exhibition at Maryland Art Place, in Baltimore, MD and more recently was shown as part of the 2018 FotoFocus Biennial, at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery in Yellow Springs, OH and as part of Andrew and Kei’s exhibition Archives Aflame, at the Southeastern center for Contemporary Art. The film canisters, 108 in number, are filled with ash from a burnt Japanese dictionary, identical to the one owned by Ito's grandfather, which was burned in the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The audio considers the Silverplate series of B-29 bombers used in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the Enola Gay and Bockscar, and imagines the lost recording made of the Hiroshima bombing run made on a reel-to-reel wire recorder.

This two-channel sound based work contemplates the scientific and political career of Niels Bohr. A Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, Bohr's work was essential to the the growing understanding of atomic structure in the pre-war world, as well as the development of the atomic bomb during WWII. While Bohr was a part of both the British nuclear weapons program and later the Manhattan Project itself, he was a strong proponent of openness and sharing of information as part of a regime of arms control. He was prescient in understanding the arms race that would result from the secret development of the bomb.

This work was exhibited as part of the 2016 Sondheim Artscape Semi-finalist Exhibition.

This 5-channel sound-based work was prompted by the life of my grandfather, Lovell Cardenas. An engineer, Lovell helped to develop the first nuclear weaponry during World War II as an employee of the Manhattan Project. He was secretive about his work, as he was about much else in his life – Lovell was a leftist working within the military industrial complex, and maintained romantic liaisons outside his marriage.

 Manhattan Project seeks to evoke the creation of the atomic bomb from the perspective of an engineer, enmeshed in the defining political conflicts of his era. The droning of calutrons used to enrich uranium and the 44.4 second long free fall of the bomb find their place alongside propaganda, crooner Perry Como, and the Internationale in the soundscape of the piece.

This installation was shown in spring 2016 as my MFA thesis exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Overture (Hollow Earth) is an 11 minute long sound-based work. It was composed by playing out a manipulated recording of radio static  through a speaker in an ordinary room, and recording the pronounced effect of the room's acoustics on the original audio. The original and four recordings made in this room are mixed together in an otherworldly, vast sounding composition.

This piece was exhibited in the 2016 MICA Graduate 1st Year Juried Exhibition in installation form. The sound played out from studio speakers, in a tableaux that emphasizes the constructed nature of the piece, and puts the listener in the position of an audio engineer.