Ed Bear performs Scrying, the premiere of a new 64 voice composition realized on the radioOrgan, a hand-crafted modular FM transmission system built from obsolete electronics.
Friday May 12, 2017 Doors open @ 7 pm
Tickets $15 advance, $20 at the door / $25 two-night tickets available
Venue: The Knockdown Center 52-19 Flushing Ave, Maspeth, NY 11378
Marginally legal as a “part 15” test device, the radioOrgan is 64 individual low power radio stations which can work in tandem to desperately fight for the attention of single radio receivers, completely occupy radio bands [e.g. 88 – 108 Mhz], and create non-compliant transmissions unavailable using commercial hardware. As the radioOrgan is 100% recycled, this work teases historic durational music compositions with the almost transhuman material half-life of disposable electronics and a few nice, old boomboxes.
Telescoping backwards as well as forwards in time, Scrying draws polyrhythmic and polyphonic structures from the I Ching’s hexagrams (base 64) and Babylonian sexigesimal (base 60) numeral system as a simulation of geomantic, magical, and technoromantic behaviors and belief systems, playing with the magic of radio. The most rigorous exercise of the radioOrgan’s unique FM transmission mixing and spatialization system to date, this performance is at once an experimental lecture and demonstration, a ritual of endurance, and a dramatically lit chamber work.
BIO
Ed Bear [b. 1983] is an American performing artist and engineer working with robotics, sound, video, transmission and collective improvisation. As an educator and designer committed to an open source world, he researches and practices material reuse as a civil responsibility.
Since receiving his B.S. In Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Ed Bear has provided freelance design, manufacturing and engineering services to start-ups, acclaimed artists and musicians, film and theater productions, and leading education institutions. As a research specialist at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he investigated technology-neutral, commercially viable solutions to dimming and control of emerging solid state lighting systems for multiple markets with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Alliance for Solid-State Illumination Systems and Technologies. He is currently working with littleBits, Inc. to revolutionize modular electronics.
He has toured extensively in North America and Europe as a performer and teacher, working with organizations such as The Mattress Factory, The Montreal Pop Festival, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Moogfest. In 2009 and 2010 he received National Science Foundation and other funds to study e-waste streams as educational resources, software defined radio, and energy harvesting. He is a 2017 Signal Culture Toolmaker-in-residence, a 2017 Harvestworks EARS , a 2016 Unit 11, 2015 WaveFarm, and 2012 LMCC SwingSpace artist-in-residence, 2010 free103point9 AIRtime fellow and received the 2008 Roulette Emerging Composer Commission. His music is available on Peira, Azul Discographica, Ever/Never, Roar Tapes, and several other record labels.
“Like James Chance and John Cage” – Lucy Tcherno Ivanenko, Magia Roja
“Utopian, Bear’s work is an exercise in what is possible while it remains an illustration of the impossible” – Mary Billyou, Brooklyn Rail
@exitrip – tw, ig
https://brooklynrail.org/2017/03/film/Mixed-Use-ESP-TVs-Unit-11