
Serenades for Settling: Tending Osteidae
Burchfield Penney, Buffalo, NY
October 10, 2025 - March 1, 2026

Serenades for Settling (Tending Ostreidae), created by sound artist Suzanne Thorpe and media artist Stephanie Rothenberg, is an immersive, data-driven, multimedia exhibition that invites audiences into the captivating subaqueous world of an oyster habitat. With this project we contemplate the alluring life of oysters, and emphasize the surprising fact that oysters listen for safe habitats. With an emphasis on the sonic, Serenades for Settling brings attention to marine acoustic sensibilities, and amplifies potential dangers posed by human-made noise through audio composition, animated visuals and robotics, driven by marine traffic and meteorological data.
SFS will premier October 10, 2025 at the Burchfield Penney in Buffalo, NY.
Read more about this project, and the research behind it on our website here.
Time Zone Response
Oleksii Podat & Suzanne Thorpe
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025 my new collaboration with the wonderfully poignant Kyiv-based composer Oleksii Podat, Time Zone Response (Відповідь часового поясу) became available for streaming on Issue Project Room's website. This piece is part of Issue Project Room’s Distant Pairs series, which curates duos of artists who hadn’t previously worked together to create a new work. This iteration of the series paired NY-based artists with Ukrainian artists, with the support of Time Based, a Ukrainian platform that advances contemporary music and sound-centered practices.
Time Zone Response initiates an emergent call and response with the sounds and experiences of our homes, archiving a time of great uncertainty—both in Ukraine and the U.S, over the past few months. Listening with this work, you will hear place, vulnerability, obstruction, frustration, fear, heart, solace, understanding, helplessness, joy and despair, all in process: contextualized, conjoined, scrambled, mediated and remediated, unfolding. With Time Zone Response we also agitate muddled beginnings in collective listening as we contemplate our future, together.
Check it out! Available on Issue Project Room’s site.
Tending Osteidae: Serenades for Settling -V1
At Harvestworks, Governors Island, NYC
September 1 - October 29, 2023
Version 1 of our speculative oyster eco-system sensorium, Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling is up at Harvestworks Digital Media Center's exhibit "The Process - An Art Tech and Exhibition" on Governors Island in New York City. Please stop by for a visit!
The Process- An Art and Tech Exhibition
Harvestworks Building 10A, Nolan Park, Governors Island, NYC
Exhibition open until October 29, 2023
Fri-Sun 11AM-5PM
TOSS @ Tide Taxi 2022

photos by Marie Lorenz

photo by Marie Lorenz
This fall (2022) Marie Lorenz, creator of Tide Taxi, and I went on an adventure in, you guessed it, her Tide Taxi!
With Marie's help I conducted a dawn listening session at the Billion Oyster Project's Bushwick site, and gathered more research material for my project with Stephanie Rothenberg, “Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling”.
Check out Marie's post on her blog Tide and Current Taxi.
VIEWS FROM THE WATERSHED
Views from the Watershed is a podcast tour about the past, present, and future of NYC’s water supply in the Catskills region. It tells the story of the complicated relationship between the Catskills and New York City that is forged by water infrastructure. It will lead you to resonant places in the watershed where its stories can be told, through firsthand, intimate perspectives from local people on what it means to be a part of the water system. Conceived by counter-cartographer Lize Mogel featuring sound design by Suzanne Thorpe.