The New York Electronic Art Festival performance series in partnership with ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present Ursula Scherrer and Michael Schumacher. The artists, who have been collaborating since the 1990s, will create a new work for ISSUE Project Room utilizing the sounds and data from SONYC, a project that “leverages the latest in machine learning technology, big data analysis, and citizen science reporting to more effectively monitor, analyze, and mitigate urban noise pollution”.
Saturday July 20, 2019 @ 8 pm
Location: ISSUE Project Room 22 Boerum Place Brooklyn NY 11201
Using as source material sound files provided by SONYC (Sounds of New York City), a multidisciplinary initiative led by researchers from New York University, Schumacher has radically FX’ed them (construction sites, AC units, engine hums, playground ambiences) to the point of a lyrical blurriness, transforming NY’s soundscape into an unpredictable intersection of fractured textures. The music seeks the overlap or intersection of trajectory and moment, where each next expectation is met by both surprise and fulfillment. A key strategy in Schumacher’s method is the juxtaposition of the result of instrumental references against the din of SONYC’s quotations – the revealing of one inside the other.
The video footage is of everyday scenes and have a constantly, subtly shifting inner rhythm that plays off the music’s. The images and the sounds correspond to each other in ever new ways; Scherrer and Schumacher have consciously striven to foreground Chion’s idea of “added value”.
Bios
Michael J. Schumacher has worked with spatialized sound, computers and electronics since the 1980s, creating multi-channel, generative “Room Pieces” presented in galleries, museums, concert halls, public and private spaces. Schumacher’s interest in the relationship of musical form and architecture led to the founding of Diapason, a gallery devoted to the presentation of sound art. His latest project is the Portable Multichannel Sound System, with which he has toured Europe twice. “Variations”, a set of pieces created for the system, is available online through Richard Garet’s Contour Editions label. Schumacher is the music director of the Liz Gerring Dance Company.
QUOTES:
Schumacher…enables sounds rather than their source to hold the attention, and his results are outstanding. – Julian Cowley, Wire
…he carefully builds interior and exterior architectures that have the potential to coincide in the mind’s ear to create awareness of space in all its variations of light and dark, opaque and translucent, smooth and rough, sinuously organic and geometrically straight. – Stefaan Van Ryssen, Leonardo Music Journal
Schumacher is the Morton Feldman of Glitchwerks. – Kenneth Goldsmith, NYPress
https://www.michaeljschumacher.com/https://soundcloud.com/michael-j-schumacherhttps://www.facebook.com/michael.j.schumacher.31
COLLABORATORS
Liz Gerring, Sally Silvers, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Andrews, John Driscoll, Cecilia Lopez,
PAST INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE
https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/michael-j-schumacher-composing-is-listening/
https://touchingextremes.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/michael-j-schumacher-variations/https://www.xlr8r.com/news/michael-j-schumacher-pushes-the-borders-of-pop-on-new-dinmachine-lphttp://clocktower.org/show/michael-schumacher-room-pieces
Ursula Scherrer
“It wasn’t about the perfection of the harmony but about the inner movement in view of the infinity outside of time. The intuitive realization of the fleeting of all reality led to look for that which was seemingly irreal.”
– free after Lengyel
The poetic quality of Ursula Scherrer’s work reminds one of moving paintings, drawing the viewer into the images, leaving them with their own stories. She transforms spaces and landscapes into serene, abstract portraits of rhythm, color and light – inner landscapes in the outside world where the images, words and actions have less to do with what we see and hear then with the feeling they leave behind. Scherrer is a Swiss artist living in New York and Berlin. Her work and collaboration with composers, choreographers, stage directors, light artists and poets has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums internationally.
Her aesthetic training began with dance, transitioned to choreography and expanded to photography, video, text, mixed media and performance art.
Her work has been shown at Ideas City Festival of the New Museum, New York, the Clocktower/New York, Chelsea Art Museum/New York, Pioneer Works/Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Roulette/Brooklyn, REDCAT, Los Angeles, LACE/Los Angeles, Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Vebikus Kunsthalle/Schaffhausen, Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival, Inference/Tunis, SeeDjerba/Tunisia, Salisbury University, SHARED.museum/Bremen, ZKM/Karlsruhe, Seoul Square/Gana Art Gallery/Korea, Organhaus/Chongqing, China, Guangzhou Live/China, artMuse/Gdansk and Bocholt, LAB/San Francisco, Würtemburgischer Kunstverein/Stuttgart, Kunstraum Walcheturm/Zürich, Raum in Bologna, Kunstraum Krems, O’artoteca/Milan, Gasometer/Liechtenstein, Espai Ubu/Barcelona, Centre d’Art La Panera/Lleida, among others.
Collaborators:Ursula Scherrer has worked with numerous composers/musicians including Marcia Bassett, Brian Chase, John Duncan, Kato Hideki, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufman, Ha-Yang Kim, Michelle Nagai and Michael J. Schumacher in the creation of video and sound installations, live performances and single-channel videos.She has collaborated with the choreographers Liz Gerring and Sally Silvers in New York and withSusanne Braun in Switzerland, doing the set design and live video for their dances.Other collaborators include the light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert, film maker Martin Zawadzki as wellas the Tunisian poet Liliya Ben Romdhane and the language poet Bruce Andrews.Together with Katherine Liberovskaya she has been organizing OptoSonic Tea, evenings dedicated to the convergence of livevisuals with live sound, for over 10 years in New York and abroad, most recently in Solothurn, Switzerland.
website: www.ursulascherrer.comfb: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005972746169
video links:Afloat: https://vimeo.com/133556412Romancing the Drone: https://vimeo.com/266970722Amourphous: https://vimeo.com/238474151inter_woven: https://vimeo.com/318859516I Know Myself And I Don’t: https://vimeo.com/117290317