New York Electronic Art Festival 2015 – A Summer Celebration of 21st-Century Art
New York, May 18, 2015 – Harvestworks is proud to announce the New York Electronic Arts Festival (NYEAF), held biennially on Governor’s Island and venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Presented in partnership with the Trust for Governors Island, The National Park Service at Governors Island, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the New York New Media Center by IFP among others. The festival is a series of concerts, workshops, and exhibitions from May 22 – July 20 centered on cutting-edge work being done at the intersection of art and technology. The festival focuses on the ways that technology can alter, expand and exhilarate our experiences through the creative energies of the artist.
Launched ten years ago, NYEAF aims to provide a discursive public context for the appreciation of cutting-edge electronic artwork, a showcase of exciting interdisciplinary work and technological virtuosity. Attendees get an overview of how technology is being used in various artistic disciplines, and have the opportunity to take part in a discussion about how these technologies will continue to shape contemporary art practice.
We spotlight works from the Harvestworks T.E.A.M. (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) lab and new works created in our local, national and international community. Check www.harvestworks.org for the latest information.
About the Festival
Since NYEAF 2013 we find ourselves in a world that is at the same time familiar and foreign. Increasingly, we see technology to be ubiquitous, indispensable, fun, terrifying, perplexing, astounding, frustrating and mysterious. Its rapid progress inspires, in each generation, a renewed desire to understand, use and develop technology in all its forms.
NYEAF 2015 was programmed with this in mind. Technology can play a role that is both daunting and exhilarating, and art is, in many ways, the most vital tool we have for realizing the true potential of our technologies. We have organized this year’s festival around the theme of Plausible Worlds, a challenge to artists to define his/her/their relationship to art and technology and, through this, explore the limits of human agency and imagination.
Harvestworks is poised at the forefront this emergence by encouraging artists to explore new technology. The artists that pass through our doors are among the most energetic and intuitive in a growing and restless field and all demonstrate the zeal for experimentation that is critical to 21st-century art-making.
From found-sound installations to site-specific concerts, the festival hopes to challenge the audience’s notion of what to expect from electronic art; artist explore subjects such as nature, urban landscapes, digital subjectivity, memory, history and politics.
Jess Rowland’s Spambot Sound Tapestries engineers a ‘face-to-face’ encounter with junk mail and digital spam transforming it into an object of beauty. Our Workshops, Panel and Project Demos at three different venues across the city invite stimulating discussion with and audience participation in projects by pioneering artists. Workshops and presentations include: Daniel Belquer – Connect Anything, a project-making workshop; Phillip Stearns – Project Demo of an HD Video Synthesizer; You-sheng Zhang (aka. Sovietronic) – Exploration of structures, changes, patterns and layers of sound; Judy Dunaway – A presentation on an artificial intelligence program for improvisational interaction with her “tenor balloon”; Liz Tolson – Wearables with conductive thread or yarn; and the New Perspectives on Sound Art II, an international panel of artists from the US and Taiwan. In late April, we issued a call projects for Virtual-Reality-based technologies, like the Oculus Rift, inviting artists to submit proposals for up to five projects to be premiered at the festival. These works will invite questions and discussion about the nature of reality, simulation and consciousness via an encounter with the rapidly-developing field of immersive environments and Virtual Reality soft- and hardware.
The pieces for this year’s NYEAF have been curated for their specific treatments of the theme of Plausible Worlds. We chose pieces that evinced an intuitive perspective on individuality, community, and technology. Through a grant from Ministry of Cultural, Taiwan (R.O.C.) and Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York, we will welcome a group of four artists from Taiwan who will be giving concerts, installing pieces and holding workshops and demos. The Taiwan section is curated by Chinese curator, Xiaoying Juliette Yuan.
Harvestworks and NYEAF have always, and will continue to, provide a forum for critical discussion of technology’s use and meaning. What role does art play in mediating between technology and the individual? These are questions that we see as central to our mission; above all else, we at Harvestworks hope to engender a stimulating conversation about these topics at this year’s festival.
“New York is an important international hub of experimental exploration of art and technology, so it is essential that the New York Electronic Art Festival bring together innovative practitioners to share their work with the public through sound and kinetic sculpture, epherema materials and electronic imagery.”– Carol Parkinson, Harvestworks Executive Director and NYEAF Producer
Partners
Produced by Harvestworks in partnership with the American Museum of the Moving Image, The Trust for Governors Island, The National Park Service at Governors Island, New York University, Hyphen Hub, ((audience)), The New York New Media Center by IFP and other partners with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, mediaThefoundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Edwards Foundation Arts Fund, New Music USA Cary Performance Fund, Jerome Foundation, the David Bermant Foundation, Ministry of Cultural, Taiwan (R.O.C.) and Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York and Friends of Harvestworks. Corporate sponsorship is provided by Cycling74. Special thanks to Jeff McGovern, Josiane Lai, Bitforms Gallery and Chris Camperchioli.
Venues: The New York Electronic Art Festival will be held at venues across New York City including the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York New Media Center by IFP, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and Building 5a5b, Fort Jay and Castle Williams on Governors Island,
About Harvestworks: Founded in 1977, Harvestworks offers an environment where artists can make work inspired by, and achieved through use of electronic media. Harvestworks helps the community at large to understand, assimilate, and make creative use of new and evolving technologies–technologies that are already at home in the lives of many. Harvestworks creates a dynamic context for the appreciation of new work and, in doing so, bolsters the art community and the public’s agenda for the use of technology in art. We are proud to bring together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts by fostering collaborations across electronic media.