TX/RX Labs has partnered with Lawndale Art Center by offering participants in its Artist Studio Program the opportunity to use TX/RX facilities and take classes free of charge. Lawndale Studio Artist Lina Dib has been coming to TX/RX Labs since 2011 when she was working on her PhD in Anthropology. Now, as part of this unique collaboration, Lina has been able to delve deep into her explorations at the intersection of art and technology. Lina credits TX/RX as a indispensable part of her workflow. "TX/RX is a great extension to my studio. I basically consider this to be part of my studio and I go from there to here all the time."

As her tenure at Lawndale draws to a close, Lina is preparing to show some of the work she has produced during her time in the Studio Program. One of the pieces featured in her upcoming show is based on spectrograms, visual representation of sound frequency over time. "They look like landscapes. They are like soundscapes, so playing with this idea of sound as an environment. Sound really is....you're not in front of something when you are dealing with sound, you are in it. How sound creates a sense of place is a driving question in my work and now I've had fun kind of flipping that upside down and actually creating landscapes out of the actual sound." Lina used the laser cutter at TX/RX to cut the wood blocks she used for printing her spectogram prints.

Another piece in the show, which Lina has built largely at TX/RX, is a lighthouse which contains a turntable holding a highly directional speaker which will shoot sound of the sea around the gallery space. "This lighthouse creates a shore around itself. The sea is a reoccurring element in a lot of my pieces. That goes back to my PhD research thinking about memory and technology, thinking about too much information and how we carve out shores in seas of possibility, a sea of noise, a sea of information. We are always needing to curate, to select and because of that I am drawn to this idea of the sea as something almost unfathomable because it feels so infinite and then hitting a shore and carving a line that you can follow even if that line can almost seem endless."

Lina says that she finds that the highly diverse nature of people and technologies at TX/RX is well suited for her. "I am very interdisciplinary and I think always have been. I think it's a very important way to approach the world....to push the boundaries of the disciplines we draw up. We don't exist in a vacuum. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum and neither does our everyday life. All these little things we take for granted are tied to these greater social structures."

The Lawndale Artist Studio Program Exhibition featuring work by Lina Dib opens this Friday at 6:30 with an Artist Talk at 6 pm and is open to the public.