Alex Hawthorn
Alex Hawthorn, Class of 2004 (b. 1986), is an artist and composer based in LA and New York. After graduating from The Haverford School in 2004, he received a BFA in theater from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and remained working in New York City as a sound designer in theater for over 10 years. He relocated to Los Angeles in 2019 and began an MFA at CalArts in 2020, combining the Music School's Composition and Experimental Sound Practices program with the Art School’s Art and Technology program, with a concentration in Integrated Media. His work utilizes experimental sound design and composition with elements of photography, videography, and other forms of digital media to interrogate notions of archive, memory, and time. As an associate artist with Theater Mitu, he explores non-traditional forms of narrative expression to both condense and elasticize the narrative format into that of a meditative form. His theatrical work has garnered him an Obie award, LA Ovation Awards, and has been heard across North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
See more of Scott's work at www.AlexHawthorn.com and IG: @AFHawthorn
"Haverford College Soundwalk” - In the Fall of 2020, I found myself back in my childhood home on the Haverford College campus. I would take a ritual walk around the Nature Trail every morning before diving back into my work, finishing up my first semester of an MFA program at CalArts. I began to make field records on these walks, and writing down my memories of my childhood on this college campus: how much had changed, how much had stayed the same. How was my experience of the campus now a factor of my own growth versus the growth of the campus? Haverford College Soundwalk is a stacking of the past onto the present, a sonified linkage between the campus as it is and how it was.
"Vacancy I (Los Angeles, 2015)" - I began the Vacancy Project in 2014, during a stay at the Okura Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. It began during some extreme jet-lag as an attempt to capture the alienation I felt being so far from home and familiarity, but over the years, it has morphed into an investigation of hotel rooms as transient spaces and their inherent banality. I capture myself as a hauntological echo in these spaces, these atemporal environments, designed to be reborn anew every day, one indistinguishable from the next.