2006 New Works + VanLier Residencies

“Spook” is a multimedia installation project based on the true story of the double agent and slave, James Armistead Lafayette, who gave our insurgent forefathers freedom from the tyranny of the British Empire during the American Revolutionary War. The installation will orchestrate the media and Armstead’ research around James’ activities and story. Kenseth attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and in 2003 received the Artist in the Marketplace award from the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Elise Baldwin

Baldwin’s “intermedia” work often pivots around junctions between humankind and the natural world. The live multi-channeled intermedia piece combines the video and audio recordings from the Salton Sea, a saltwater lake formed in a prehistoric basin on the border between Arizona and California, and questions whether original and archival sources reinforces conceptual integrity or collapses/conflates temporal contexts. She has recently performed in the “Edgetone” Music Festival in San Francisco, “Signal Flow” at Mills College, and the CEAIT Festival at CalArts.

Christy Matson

“Digital Synesthesia,” is an interactive installation that employs hand weaving with interactive sound elements to create a new form of media sculpture. Matson’s new series consists of hand-woven cloth and copper wire that conducts electricity. Viewers will be invited to interact with the work by touching the cloth to activate and hear sounds. She currently is instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

“El Espectaculo” is a three-screen projection that explores gestures, postures, and actions removed from their original spatial context and transposed onto a Broadway stage. The original soundtrack is comprised of sampled Broadway musicals and synchronized with the movements of the characters to suggest a choreographed dance. The work demonstrates how recycled images can become vessels by which new narratives can be inferred. The work will be shown at the Jessica Murray Projects, Brooklyn, in Spring 2006.

Leesa and Nicole Abahuni

The “untitled” interactive installation features a non-verbal communicative instrument developed with the people of the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabagh, neighboring Armenia. The works offer the sense of giving something back to forgotten peoples and propose using aural, visual, and tactile modalities to move languages of sensation beyond memory and time. Also known as The Turbo Twins, the Abahuni’s have shown their work at the the Tate Modern and Institute of Contemporary Art, London,   Eyebeam Atelier, the Kitchen, and at the DUMBO Arts Under the Bridge Festival.

Robert Madler

“Continuum” utilizes five surround speakers with each speaker bouncing its content between speakers, or all speakers sounding in stereo unison. The result is a push and pull between fragmentation and unity and a flux of consonant and dissonant space and rhythms in which the sound is balanced or intentionally unbalanced regardless of the listener’s position in relation to the speakers.  Robert recently received a Masters of Music from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH and is currently living in New York City.

Leopanar Witlarge

“Architecture of Sound Spaces” is an audio surround experience using bell chime sounds as the main sound source. The chimes are electronically processed and positioned in moving and stationary patterns in space. Various sound objects — including glass, wood, and steel — are also processed and added to the mix. The work is an element in a live improvisation performance by the composer on Taiwanese Horn, with projections of architectural drawings and images. Leopanar was born in Guyana and recently  performed in the Harvestworks DVDVDVDA Festival of surround sound and visual works.

Douglas Henderson

“The Nature of the 102nd Thing” is a multi-channel work weaving collaged field recordings of rainfall, glass, wood and railway sounds into the textures of computer synthesized sound. Abstract visual images are sculpted in sound, and the nature of the composition develops from the dictates of a kind of sonic holography. The work will be an invisible but palpable piece of kinetic sculpture and will be presented at Diapason Gallery, NYC, and at the Technischen Universitat Berlin Electronic Music Studio.

Miguel Frasconi

The work in “Air” will consist of two layers: a pre-recorded surround sound audio installation and a live site-specific performance event. It will utilize mono and stereo recordings of instrumentalists and vocalists to fill out the textual soundscape and compositional settings.  Miguel is an award-winning composer and performer of new and exploratory world music. He currently lives in New York City.

“The Writing Machine” is an interactive website that combines meteorological sensor arrays, an interface incorporating a dynamic set of changing environmental conditions and human interactions with several real-time simulations. It uses meteorological sensors in Banff, Alberta, Canada, and Kansas City to alter and cycle a series of 5 to 20 pages of text that are presented as orthographic projections. Mr. Clancy is a Professor and chair of Photography, New Media and Printmaking Departments at Kansas City Art Institute.

In “Honey” Perry’s immersive sculpture employs interaction between sound and light to explore disturbances in an emergent ecology of hexagonal forms. Honey places the user in a situation where they can see the impact they have on the growth of an emergent ecology. It also questions the way that nature uses ideal forms to generate a wide variety of possible shape variations in any single system, based on different disturbances to that particular system. Phoenix Perry lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her works have been screened at Lincoln Center, NYC, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Austin Museum of Digital Art, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.