The Harvestworks New Works is pleased to announce our 2024 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 Seth Cluett, Composer, Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program, Victoria Vesna, Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and Harvestworks Executive Director Carol Parkinson.
Pat Badani: BichEden
Pat Badani will develop a multi-channel audiovisual triptych, using 3D animation to respond to bio-ecological urgencies in coral reef, rainforest, and alpine region ecosystems. Through this continuation of the BichEden project, Pat will use this immersive installation to highlight the beauty of endangered species within these regions, and to instigate a sense of collective ecological responsibility by exploring the consequences of their decline (and eventual loss) in the ongoing climate crisis. Pat’s collaborators on this project include software engineer and artpoet.io co-founder Mariel Martinez, as well as evolutionary biologist Dr. Gabrielle Beans, who is acting as a scientific advisor to the BichEden project.
Pat has presented her work in over 15 countries. She has been an educator at Illinois State University and Columbia College Chicago, and has served on the ISEA International Board of Directors since 2017. https://patbadani.net/
Bill Fontana: Silent Echoes
Composer and media artist Bill Fontana will present Silent Echoes: Castle Williams – a site specific, multi-channel sound installation at Castle Williams on Governors Island. This installation will be a continuation of the ongoing Silent Echoes project, which employs a network of vibration sensors that collect and transmit harmonic echoes within the silenced bells of the Notre Dame cathedral amidst its repair. Silent Echoes has previously been transmitted to IRCAM in France and to the ice caves of Dachstein, duetting with the sounds of the melting glacier.
Bill has explored sound as sculptural medium in his work since the early ‘70s. His sound sculptures and radio projects have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and numerous institutions internationally. http://www.resoundings.org/
Jillian McDonald: Total Eclipse and the Heart
Canadian artist Jillian McDonald will present Total Eclipse and the Heart, an immersive sound design and multi-channel video piece. This piece combines captured footage with AI-developed visual scenes, to convey feelings of connection, solitude, and horror, featuring the natural world (the tides, the night, the landscapes, and the moon) as characters in the story – a theme within Jillian’s work. Total Eclipse and the Heart will also feature a soundscape constructed using AI audio, drums, and radio.
Jillian is an educator at Pace University, and has presented work across the United States and Canada. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Canadian Art. http://jillianmcdonald.net/
Zeena Parkins
Electro-acoustic composer, improviser, and harpist Zeena Parkins will be creating a machine-learning-based instrument to create sonic discourse between the acoustic harp and a computer, with the computer listening and responding to the performer’s sounds in real-time and acting as a collaborative partner. Zeena will be working in collaboration with multimedia artist and composer Matthew Ostrowski, who will be the DICY2 programmer of this instrument. Zeena will also record a new piece using her developed instrument, which will be mixed and mastered by sound artist and engineer Paul Geluso.
Zeena’s work has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, among many other institutions internationally. She has won three Bessie awards, and was granted an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 2022. https://zeenaparkins.com/
Ellen Pearlman: LILM, an AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin
To create LILM, an AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin, Ellen Pearlman will use the Stable Diffusion AI model to render cinematic representations of generational trauma, with a soundscape powered by EMG patches sensing the movement of human facial muscles. Ellen employs Large Language Models (LLMs) in her work to explore the effect that traumatic memory has on inherited rDNA structures in diasporic populations. Through this process, Ellen also highlights the ways in which AI can distort and meld epigenetic memory. Part One of LILM was completed in Warsaw, Poland.
Ellen was the director and co-founder of ThoughtWorks Arts, and is a Visiting Research Scholar at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She has been a Research Fellow at MIT, Senior Research Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia and a Contributing Editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. https://epmexico.wixsite.com/ellenpearlman
Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan: Plasticity
Plasticity will be an audiovisual installation exploring the shifting role of microplastics, and how they are becoming an “uninvited collaborator” in the natural world. In this research and performance project, Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan will reveal the microplastics found in samples of human tears during grieving moments. The collaborative installation will use overlaid imagery of the collected samples via microscopic imagery and microlenses. This visual world will then act as a graphic score for the sonic environment, a live Ambisonics performance. This installation explores queer ecologies and the entanglement between human and more-than-human entities.
Senem has presented interdisciplinary work internationally, including showings at Carnegie Hall (NYC), Southbank Centre (London), and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). She has been a professor at Bennington College since 2018. https://www.senempirler.com/
Monica has exhibited video and performance work internationally, and has been a visiting artist at numerous institutions including the Institute of Electronic Arts. She has been a professor at Lehman College-CUNY since 2019. https://www.monicaduncan.net/
Senem and Monica have been collaborating as an audiovisual duo since 2017.
Amina Ross: agents of perpetual discontent
In Amina Ross’ agents of perpetual discontent, motion-captured avatars will gradually deconstruct the room surrounding them. Structural deconstruction is an ongoing theme in Amina’s work, with rooms and structures often representing emotional and societal conditions. In this piece, the “rooms” will be sites of architectural significance, specifically to feminist and queer-of-color historical timelines. This series of live simulations will be an extension upon Amina’s video works, carcass/under glass (2023) and man’s country (2021).
Amina holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where they were awarded the Fannie B. Pardee Prize in sculpture. In 2023, they were a featured artist at the Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World Mending. Their work is exhibited in numerous institutions across the United States and abroad. https://aminaross.info/
Alice Shields
Alice Shields will present an ensemble piece centered around world poetry, featuring recorded voices singing and reciting texts in ancient Greek, Hindi, Wolof, Cheyenne, and English, accompanied by a soundscape of live and recorded instruments and electronically-constructed sounds. Movement will be performed by live dancer. The piece will combine sound, dance, visuals and text, all intensified by digital manipulation. This piece will take on a video form in which all elements will be present, as well as a modified version to be performed live.
Alice holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, where she was associate director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and later director of development of the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Her music has been performed at the New York City Opera Vox Festival, Academie der Künste (Berlin), Venice Biennale, the Arangham Dance Theater (India), among others. The New York Times describes Alice’s work as “intense” and “richly scored”. http://www.aliceshields.com
Lucie Vítková: Water Vision
Lucie Vítková’s participatory electroacoustic installation and performance work, Water Vision, involves people blowing through straws into water at specific points in a pre-composed score. Six microphones collect the water sounds, which are then processed and played back over six surrounding speakers. The piece moves beyond the confines of installation technology and the utilitarian nature of PA to become something more visible, participatory, and living, implying numerous possibilities for the reality of the water resource.
Lucie’s work, which incorporates compositional, improvisational, and performative aspects, has been commissioned by the Roulette Intermedium, where they were a resident artist in 2018. They have organized the NYC Constellation Ensemble and the OPERA Ensemble. Their dissertation, Compositional Techniques of Christian Wolff and Social Aspects in Music, was published in 2021. https://www.vitkovalucie.com/
Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón: [ ]
Featuring choreography by Adrienne Westwood and electroacoustic composition from Angélica Negrón, [ ] is a performance and interactive installation, focused on telling the untold histories of femme ancestors. [ ] is centered around a sonic sculpture from which golden metal objects (“memories”) are suspended. The artists envision the sculpture as a portal into history.
Adrienne’s work has been presented widely in New York City, at CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), and elsewhere. She was a 2020-21 BRIClab artist and a 2018-19 CUNY Dance Initiative recipient. She is a 2023-24 New Jewish Culture Fellow. https://adriennewestwood.com/
Angélica has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the American Composers Orchestra, and the New York Botanical Garden, among others, and her “capacity to surprise” has been noted by the New York Times. She was the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize. https://www.angelicanegron.com/
The pair has been collaborating since 2019.
Katherine Young: Mycorrhiza VI
Mycorrhiza VI will be the sixth installment of Katherine Young’s Mycorrhizae series. This piece has been commissioned by the NYC-based violin, horn, and piano trio Kylwyria as an interactive multichannel work incorporating live processing, predetermined sonic material, and improvisation. Mycorrhiza VI will be the first piece in the series to divert from a solo performance structure. The series derives its name from the underground fungal networks that work with the root systems of trees and other plants to symbiotically share nutrients, a process from which Katherine draws inspiration in her compositional process.
A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Katherine’s music has been commissioned by the LA Phil, Wet Ink, and others. She has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Berklee College of Music, and is currently a faculty member at Emory University. https://katherineyoung.info/
2024 Artist Scholarship and Workspace Recipients
Tom Bloxam
Tom Bloxam is a sound artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work, which includes spatial audio practices, found-sound collages, and vinyl DJing, explores the nature of the relationship between sound and environment. He will be developing an immersive, stimulus-based sound installation. https://tbloxam.wixsite.com/tom-bloxam
Emmett Palaima
Emmett Palaima is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, whose work centers on his belief that technology and magic are one and the same. He will be expanding upon his ongoing spatial audio system, Cathedral-64, for an installation on Governor’s Island in 2024. https://emmettpalaima.com/CATHEDRAL-64
Casey Tang
Casy Tang is an artist and researcher whose work explores the intersections of ecology, narrative, and sound. Casey will be developing his project To Carry the Earth, which sonifies the possibilities of embracing a geocentric worldview, instead of the typical Western egocentric frame of reference. Casey’s work has been shown internationally in China, Japan, Germany, and across the US. https://www.caseytang.com/
Xenobia Bailey
Xenobia Bailey is an artist, designer and activist based between Philadelphia, PA and New York, NY. Her crochet work has appeared in Elle Magazine, Do the Right Thing (1989), among other places. She is now experimenting with digital photo narratives and video work. Xenobia is developing a body of work includes historical research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on The Free Blacks Community in 1700s Philadelphia, and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.
The Daxophone Consort
The Daxophone Consort is Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom. The daxophone is a thin wooden strip played with a bow, which was created by the German improviser/inventor Hans Reichel in 1987. The instrument’s sound, somewhere between a cello and badger, ranges from furtive gurgles and delicate whistles to wild screams. The Consort has been active since 2015. They develop realizations of historical experimental music and baroque motets, commission new daxophone pieces from living composers, and generate new pieces based on shared improvisational grammar. At Harvestworks, The Consort will reimagine, record, and perform composer John Cage’s 1979 choral work, Hymns & Variations. http://dfiction.com/the-daxophone-consort/
Gbenga Komolafe
Gbenga Komolafe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Their research-driven work incorporates sculpture, film, sound, and site-specific installation, and draws inspiration from traditional Yoruba ritual practices as well as the work of queer and Black communities of the mid 20th century. They are developing a performance piece to re-contextualize the polyrhythmic, transcendental Yoruba practice of bata drumming, using modern drum sequencers to combine tradition with modernity. https://gbenga.xy
Katherine Liberovskaya
Katherine Liberovskaya is an experimental video and intermedia artist. Her performance and installation work, which explores the intersection of the moving image with sound and music, has been exhibited internationally. She will be developing Hammettlogue, an experimental opera project for video and voice composed by herself alongside her frequent collaborator, the late composer Phill Niblock. The opera is a “minimalist homage” to the sparse works of writer Dashiell Hammett.
The Mz. Icar Collective
Mz. Icar (“racIzM” spelled backwards) is an anonymous art collective and activist group predominantly comprised of Black women. The collective includes illustrators, photographers, designers, prop stylists, street srtists, and collage artist, all of whom share the goal to, through their work, uproot conventional and outdated constructs of gender and race. As part of their projection-mapping and AI driven project, Diaphanous, will be an immersive installation called Ile Omi:Waterland, which will evoke an underwater community cultivated by the descendants of African souls who were forcibly taken from their homes and subjected to trans-Atlantic voyages. http://www.mzicar.com