BOOK: Camille Norment-Plexus, Dia Art Foundation

Throughout her career, Camille Norment has probed what she terms “cultural psychoacoustics,” defined as the investigation of sociocultural phenomena through sound and music—specifically instances of sonic and social dissonance. In particular, she explores three tones: the bell, feedback, and the sine wave.  political resistance. Building on the titular exhibition at Dia Chelsea, the book Camille Norment: Plexus”, with 120 pages and 15 color illustrations, is the first US publication on the artist, unpacks those sonic phenomena, which together resonate with discrete yet overlapping ideas of time, spirituality, and the drone (bell); the decentralization of power, political struggles, and cybernetics (feedback); and purity and transcendence (sine wave). The book translates Norment’s sonic sensibility into print form. In addition to a conversation between Plexus curator Kelly Kivland and the artist herself, the volume features contributions from curators and scholars Legacy Russell and David Toop, as well as a poem extracted by Norment from a conversation she conducted with Fred Moten.-Dimitris Lempesis