The Harvestworks Artist in Residence Program is pleased to announce our 2008 recipients. The recipients are commissioned to create a new work in the Harvestworks Digital Media Facility. The applications were reviewed by Zach Layton (composer, curator and new media artist), Liz Slagus (Director of Educatiuon and Public Programming at Eyebeam), and Kenseth Armstead (digital media artist and sculpturist).
New Works Residencies
Shauna Moulton
Shauna Moulton’s work examines bodily and spiritual anxieties and their relationship to popular culture, self-help goods and functionless cosnumer objects. Using feedback and interactive video to double the protagonists presence, she will add an improvisational quality and confuse the relationship between live object and mediated object. The piece will be shown at PDX film festival in Oregon.
Derek Frantz
Derek Frantz’s residency will see an evolution of his experiments with human conductivity. He works with an interactive console at which the user wears conductive gloves or slippers to interact with light circuits which are routed to a webcam. A vast amount of pixels are processed by his special geometry localization programs, which then translate into visual brightness chains and musical sample sequences. Derek graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz.
Christine Sugrue
Using mirrors of various size and orientation, Christine Sugrue’s installation passes and fragments a digital projection through a space. Algorhitmically generated forms will be able to move through space in two and three dimensions as the projection area is fragmented through the space, splitting into smaller unique moments. Spatialized sound will also amplify the experience. Christine was an artist in residence at Hangar, Barcelona, Eyebeam, NYC, and ars electronica, Linz.
Laure Drogul
A knitting needle working symphony. Approxomately forty knitter-performers knit in unison creating a singular knit object-environment. The knitters needles will be equipped with mini pick-up microphones, and the knitters will be networked to send in these sounds via internet. The sound is then recorded, played and mixed in a live installation: a virtual knitting circle-score as immersive audio-video environment. Laure recently received the Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize.
Sawako Kato
A 5.1 surrond sound journey through two megalopolises, NYC and Tokyo. Field recordings and recordings representing the artist’s personal memories are amplified, mixed, layered, processed and mutated with digital signal techniques. “A journey resonating between tiny breaths and large cities.” Sawako’s works appeared on over 30 CDs, and has recently received a commission from the Jerome Foundation.
Shelley Hirsch
Shelley Hirsch will complete “Kaddish for Him and Her”, a 5.1 surround sound choral piece in memory of the artists late parents. The listener is immersed in a field of moving voices: a Greek chorus of the artists parents and sisters, family voices from prerecorded interviews, and the voices of Hirsch, spoken and sung. These are multitracked, spatialized and processed to create an experience of place. The piece will be presented at various places in the US and Europe. Shelley recently received the Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize in Music.
Jane Rigler
A new composition for two flutes and electronics that deals with the dreams, tendencies and cycles of the human physical and spiritual existence. She is researching Butoh techniques and considering how the slower, sharper, precise gestures of this form may inform and inspire flutists who interact simultaneously with electronics. She received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, and was a resident at Art Omi and Create@iEar.
Bill Hsu
Using timbral characteristics such as brightness, pitch/noise, roughness, and inharmonicity, Bill Hsu is able to track contours of timbral variation over a musical gesture, and use these contours to synthesize responses. In collaboration with saxophonist John Butcher, they will develop new pieces that leverage the functionality of this system. Bill is currently Associate professor at San Francisco State University.
William Cusick
William Cusick will create a surround sound score to a psychological horror story of an American business man whose life inexplicably begins to mirror a series of Japanese ghost stories. The piece, tentatively titled “Americana Kamikaze”, will develop first as a video installation during the residency and the story will be told in English with sequences in Japanese.
Jessica Ann Peavy
The Fatback Series explores spaces and contexts of food in the African American tradition and the effects of food on the African American female psychology and physiology. Using multiple synchronized soundtracks the simulation of conversations among characters in each channel, Jessica will develop an interactive new media work about food in the viewers community. She recently received a Smack Mellon Artist In Residency, and a grant from the Franklin Furnace Foundation.
Joseph Delappe
Delappe combines video imagery of minituare dioramas depicting the aftermath of Iraq roadside bombings with images streamed from American traffic surveillance cams. He will use the residency to further expand his explorations on kinetic sculptural installation, computer control, interactivity and live content on the internet. Working with electronic and New Media since 1983, his works have been showed in the U.S. and abroad.
Eunjung Hwang
Future Creatures is a series of experimental animations, which explore the architectural complexity of cryptic images from the world of dreams and the subconscious, in an extensive scale. The final project will be presented with single or multiple video projections with surround sound.
Alternates
The following artists were chosen as alternates: Maya Suess, Joe Diebes, and Brian Block.
Educational Scholarships
The following artists were awarded educational scholarships: Penelope Umbrico, Andy Deck, Mary-Beth Gregg, Phillys Bulkin-Lehrer, Paul Amitai, and Gisburg.
2008 Van Lier Residency Recipients
Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center has selected Jeff Thompson and Laura Vitale to receive the Van Lier studio residencies for digital art in 2008. The one-year fellowship is funded through a special grant from the New York Community Trust. The Van Lier grants target young, New York-based artists with financial need and from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the electronic arts. The residencies help advance Van Lier fellows professional, post-college development and promote diversity, equity and access in the arts.
Laura Vitale
Laura Vitale is a sound artist working in the tradition of radio drama, inspired by fiction, poetry, electronic music and field recording. Vitale will use her fellowship to realize dramatic radio adaptations. Recording a number of actors and singers and musicians, Vitale will experiment with transforming written voice into an audible voice, creating a new sound sculpture. Vitale is living and working in New York and has performed her radio work in collaboration with Thalia Field and Rick Moody, premiering at the Poetry Project in 2007.
Jeff Thompson
Jeff Thompson is a multimedia artist including sculpture, video, music and performance. He is living and working in New York. Thompson will use his fellowship to realize a series of systematically evolving sculptural and sound pieces using Max/MSP and Jitter. Utilizing natural sounds derived from the growth of plants, the position of butterflies in an aviary and chirping crickets, he will digitally process the sound into data and re-feed the sound back into the space creating and ever evolving loop. Thompson has received his MFA at Rutgers University and has completed the Harvestworks Max/MSP Certification Program. He has collections in US and Ireland and has lectured in Dallas. His work has received a VanDerlip Travel award and has received several artist-in-residencies. He has performed and exhibited his work in Italy, US, Argentina, Poland and Palestine.
The one-year Van Lier fellowships cover travel and living expenses and include access to training, studio space and production facilities at Harvestworks. Van Lier fellows can take advantage of Harvestworks broad-based education program to acquire new skills and work with our staff of engineers, artists and multimedia designers in creating new compositions. Once completed, the compositions will be performed as part of Harvestworks Listen In concert series and included in our on-line catalogue. Fellows also receive important career development support through our mentoring and peer-contact programs.
Harvestworks is a not-for-profit arts organization founded in 1977 to cultivate artistic talent using digital technologies. While originally focused on electronic music and audio production, Harvestworks now offers video and multimedia studios and technical assistance, providing an on-site environment where artists learn new technologies, create art and exhibit new works in an integrated way.
Funding for Harvestworks is provided by The New York State Council on the Arts (a public agency), The National Endowment for the Arts, The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The New York Arts Recovery Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, The Aaron Copland Fund, The Jerome Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The JP Morgan Chase Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the Greenwall Foundation.