The Harvestworks Artist-in-Residence Program is pleased to announce our 2015 recipients. The recipients are commissioned to create a new work in the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) Lab. The applications were reviewed by composer Miya Masaoka, media artist Art Jones and technologist Daniel Belquer with support from Harvestworks Director and New York Electronic Art Festival Producer Carol Parkinson.
Maxwell Abeles: MAKS
Maxwell Abeles started the creative company MAKS. As the company has evolved it has now become a form of guerrilla theatre. They put special emphasis on creating multimedia systems which are then used in rituals and performances in public squares across the boroughs of New York. “Theatre is the defining end point,” says Maxwell. His residency with Harvestworks will result in a performance system incorporating animatronic masks, instruments, sensors, voltage controlled canvases, and electronic controllers.
Lea Bertucci in collaboration with MV Carbon and Tommy Martinez
Quadraphonic Cello –
An instrument, multichannel installation and platform for audio-visual composition, the Quadraphonic Cello re-imagines a classical cello as a vehicle for surround sound and video. The strings of the instrument will be removed and replaced with piezo electric wire. When the cellist bows, plucks or taps this wire, four discrete signals are produced and routed to a multichannel array of speakers. With development though Harvestworks, this instrument will become a three dimensional musical apparatus tailored to multi-channel composition and the sculpting of sonorous space.
Lea Bertucci is a sound artist and composer whose work bridges performance, installation and multichannel activations of acoustic space. As an instrumentalist, she focuses on an electro-acoustic preparation of the Bass Clarinet that utilizes speaker feedback as an extension of the instrument. In recent years, her projects have expanded to site-specific improvisation, compositions for electronics and instruments, multichannel sound installations and music concrete collage. M.V. Carbon is a Brooklyn based composer and sound artist who is recognized for her non-traditional approach to music. Thomas Martinez is an artist and engineer at Harvestworks.
Sougwen Chung: Melapoeia
Sougwen Chung is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores transitional edges. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance, informing her multi-faceted approach to experiential art. Her installations involve multiple layers of light on intricate structures, taking a variety of media and transforming it into spatial experiences. Melapoeia is an immersive interactive installation which exists in virtual and physical reality. VR headsets are situated in various parts of a vertiginous structure, each offering a different audiovisual experience of the piece. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in North America, Europe and Asia. Recent venues include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva, Switzerland MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, and 319 Scholes in Brooklyn, New York.
Viv Corringham: Shadow-walks
Viv Corringham is a British vocalist, sound artist and composer, now living in New York, who has worked internationally since the early 1980s. She is interested in exploring people’s special relationship with familiar places and how that links to personal history, memory and association. The experiences and materials gathered on these walks find their way into sound installations, recordings and concert pieces. She aims to experiment new ways of presenting her ongoing, international project “Shadow-walks,” which has so far occurred in 18 places in the USA, Canada, Asia and Europe. Using technologies to make the work more immersive and allow the audience more participation in selecting sounds are her concerns during her residency at Harvestworks.
Annie Gosfield
Annie Gosfield is a composer whose work combines notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds. During her New Works Residency she will create a large-scale spatialized work inspired by the processes, perceptions, and sounds of jammed radio signals. Fragments of the original rare recordings will be used, from abstract timbres to text-based transmissions. She will also reference the jamming process by digitally altering the sounds of acoustic instruments, with elements shifting in a sound field where music, noise, and pure signal meld and collide. The end result will be displayed in NYC and Prague. Active as a writer and teacher, she is a regular contributor to the New York Times series “The Score,” and has been the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and a visiting artist at Cal Arts.
Joseph Morris
Joseph Morris is a media artist known to make emotive machines. His work is occupied with the affectual space of somatic relationships between our bodies and physical space. He is immersed in the creation of machines that resemble the body through the gesture of breathing. His work engages with ephemerality, perception, movement, space, and time to generate subjectivity, and through that action creates a sensorial relationship with gestural presence. His New Works Residency project is a solar wind chime, which is a data sonification system that pulls real time data from the ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) satellite. This sonification system will interpret the solar wind data live, and use it to synthesize dimensional sound in an open sound and video installation.
Serena Reed/Krewe Coumbite: Black Sound Band
Krewe Coumbite is a sonic instrument of study in Black diaspora folk ecology and vernacular rhythms. Reed’s work focuses specifically on vernacular resonance of Black cultural musings expressed in: chants, cultural sayings/proverbs, naming, lullabies, and rituals such as public transit, service work, and neighborhood gathering. Currently in production with turbulence.org to create a remix station & sound map for Krewe, Reed will produce a digital sound sampling library for programming electronic algorithms through their residency with Harvestworks.
Jane Rigler and Elizabeth Hoffman
The Transparence of Lady R is an immersive work for flute, electronics, space, sound and images, based on the “Tales of Genji” in which the spatialized audio is a 3-dimensional sculptural counterpart of the flutist’s sonic and physical gestures. Two live elements – flutist- performer and computer-performer – coordinate closely. In this piece Jane Rigler is the flutist-performer and Elizabeth Hoffman is the computer-performer. Both Rigler and Hoffman will engage in the sound design for this work — a collaboration in which the interaction involves music, physical gestures, electronics and video interacting to form a cohesive mono-drama.
Flutist, composer and educator, Jane Rigler has performed nationally and internationally as and has been granted numerous awards and residencies nation-wide for her compositions that center on community building, stretching the boundaries of musical performance and audience interaction. Rigler’s works range from solo acoustic pieces to multi-disciplinary interactive electronic ensemble works. Composer Elizabeth Hoffman is the recipient of recognition from Bourges and Prix Ars Electronica for her electroacoustic music, and has collaborated on real-time mixed media works with numerous artists including Ivan Goff, Margaret Lancaster, Marianne Gythfeldt, and the Washington Square Contemporary Music players.
Michael Schumacher and Nisi Jacobs: AVM
Michael Schumacher is currently music director of the Liz Gerring Dance Company, Vice-president of TonalMotion Inc., a not-for-profit arts organization founded in 2003 and a collaborator of the AVM Project. The Audio Visual Matrix (AVM) is an interdisciplinary performance system that enables fast and flexible interconnections of audio and video data streams to modulate content. This work will bind the elements of an immersive, interdisciplinary performance involving musicians and video artists. With this system, elements (instruments, cameras and computers) will “modulate” each others content, creating a web of resonances and associations that will engage listeners in a unique and powerful way. Nisi Jacobs is a New York-based video artist who has had work exhibited in film/video festivals in Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, UK, San Francisco, New York, and Tribeca Film Festival (2003).
Jill Taffet
Jill Taffet is a moving image artist who creates media installations, video projection and public art projects. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and a MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. During her residency at Harvestworks she will create a site-specific immersive multi-channel video projection that uses camera and eye tracking to trigger the movement of animation elements and sounds. Biosensors will collect biometric data from the spectator and individualize the experience with generative art elements based on blood pressure and pulse rate.
Michael Theodore and David Shively: Ring
Ring is an evening length hybrid work that is equal parts performance and kinetic sound art installation. The work features a unique blend of live electronics with acoustic objects as feedback-driven “speakers” (skins, metals, and woods), and large arrays of motors controlled in realtime, with armatures that sweep across various sculptural sonic objects. Michael Theodore is a composer, improviser, and practicing visual artist, who studied at the Yale School of Music and UCSD. He is currently Associate Professor of Music Composition and Technology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Director of the ATLAS Center for Media, Arts and Performance. Theodore’s technology–informed work with sound, visual media or both has been presented across the nation and the world. David Shively performs concert and installation works in media ranging from Hungarian cimbalom to percussion to analog electronics and feedback systems.
Bohyun Yoon
Bohyun Yoon is from Korea and currently living in Richmond Virginia. He is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. His residency project involves art making with glass and digital audio systems. Inspired by the idea of sound from clear glass, he will create avenues for this glass to become a sonic instrument. He plans to use different materials like multi channel audio system, contact microphone and amplifiers as his projects Glass Helmet (2004), Glass Tube (2012), and Glassorganism (2013). The sound of glass caused through physical alterations or vibrations has always fascinated him, and this led him to experiment with making glass more visible through sound.
Educational Scholarships
Educational scholarships were awarded to Sabrina Barrios, Mandy Mandelstein, Mandy Morrison, Jan Mun, Zachary André