Performances at 3LD Art and Technology Center
SENSORS & GESTURES SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2007.
North American premier of the SSS trio (Cecile Babiole, Laurent Dailleau and Atau Tanaka) performing visual music with sensors and gestures, the audio-visual electronic trio Fair Use (Luke DuBois, Matthew Ostrowski and Zach Layton), multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Miguel Frasconi will perform with Zachary Seldess, and a new video work by American composer, saxophonist, Henry Threadgill.
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S.S.S. (Sensors_Sonics_Sights) is comprised of Cécile Babiole, Laurent Dailleau and Atau Tanaka; is a trio performing visual music with sensors and gestures, in a laptop performance with the intensity of bodies in movement. They create a work that goes beyond media, using sensors that capture gesture and corporeal movement and sound and sight into digital data.
Ultrasound sensors measure the distance between the performer’s hands and her machine, allowing her to articulate 3D imagery, navigating in color, scale, texture. The Theremin, historical electronic instrument invented in 1919, an oscillator, responds to perturbations of electrostatic fields based on the distance of the hands and body to the instrument. The BioMuse places gel electrodes on the performer’s forearms, analyzing EMG biosignals. Muscle tension through concentrated movement allows the musician to sculpt sound synthesis. They are equally at home performing in galleries or underground spaces, in arts centers or research laboratories.
Originally a video maker, 3D animation designer and director, Cécile Babiole turned to the creation of dynamic environments and live real time processed sounds and images. Recent installations and performances combine ironically high and low technologies, linking on-and off-line perceptions. Whether in public space (in the street, in buses) or private space (galleries or concert venues), her work is simultaneously humorous and inventive, an ironic glance into technology and behavioural codes. Awards received : Imagina, Images du futur, Ars Electronica, Festival de l’Audiovisuel Museographique, The Locarno Festival, SCAM Prize, Villa Medicis Hors les Murs Grant, Transmediale Festival Berlin, Stuttgart FilmWinter and Expanded Media Festival.
Laurent Dailleau is the sole French virtuoso of the Theremin, active on the international scenes of electroacoustic and improvised music in festivals like Musique Action, with releases on Sonoris, 33revpermi, 23five. Trained as a classical organ player, he began playing theremin in the 1990s. Dailleau has composed music for the theater, and worked with French choreographer Michel Schweizer in the late 1980s. Two of his works were commissioned by the French ministry of culture (the most recent being a piece for orchestra premiered in 2000).
Atau Tanaka bridges cultures of east and west, of technology and music. He creates music with sensors and networks – a composer who is performer, a performer who is instrument builder, finding the voice in interactive technology. Atau is best known for his performances with the BioMuse – a sensor system that turns his body into a musical instrument. Muscle tension is captured and modulates digital signal processes in the computer. Concentrated gestures, not unsimilar to Tai-chi, create pulsing organic electronic sounds. Atau’s work has beern recognized by the Ars Electronica, the Cyberstar award, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology. He has CD releases on solo, group, and compilation recordings on labels such as Subrosa, Bip-hop, Caipirinha Music, Touch/Ash, Sonoris, Sirr-ecords, and others.
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FAIR USE (Luke DuBois, Matthew Ostrowski and Zach Layton):
Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and is the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, performer, and installation artist working primarily with electronics and sound. He studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. He has performed at the Melbourne Festival, the Audio Art festival in Krakow, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, New Music America, the Festival Musiques Innovatrices in France, Stroom in Switzerland, PS 1, Wien Modern, and many other venues worldwide. Ostrowski has received fellowships from STEIM in Amsterdam, the Media Alliance in New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and many others. He appears on over a dozen recordings. He presently develops custom software for musicians and installations.
Zach Layton is a New York based composer and artist interested in biofeedback techniques, psychoacoustics, perception and generative algorithms. Zach’s work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and has been exhibited at the International Congress for Performance Art in Berlin, Neue Berliner Initiative, and many other venues in New York and Europe. He also is the curator of Brooklyn’s monthly experimental music series “darmstadt: classics of the avant garde” which features leading composers and improvisers from around New York City. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation and the Jerome Foundation and is a student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
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Out of Edges: gesturally controlled surround sound matrix. Composed and performed by Miguel Frasconi (Buchla Lightning MIDI Controller) with MazMSP programming by Zachary Seldess.
Miguel Frasconi uses glass objects, electronics, keyboards, and “de-evolved” instruments to create music that sounds from a uniquely imagined tradition. His recent collaborations include new works with choreographer Alonzo King, electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, the new music ensemble Gamelan Son of Lion, and the composers collective Ne(x)tworks.
Zachary Seldess is a composer, programmer and teacher living in Brooklyn. He is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the Graduate Center CUNY under composers Amnon Wolman and Morton Subotnick. Zachary currently works at Harvestworks as a resident Engineer and at Brooklyn College CUNY as adjunct faculty where he teaches music history and theory. Recent programming projects include work with Jane Rigler on Manhattan New Music Project’s “Music Cre8tor” (a sensor/software music-creating interface for developmentally challenged children).
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Henry Threadgill is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader who has been a seminal figure in the vanguard of contemporary instrumental music since the early 1970s. He has created a body of music that includes more than 150 recorded works that, while firmly rooted in America’s Great Black Music tradition, often integrate forms and instruments historically associated with chamber or orchestral music. Awards include: Best Composer honors in Downbeat’s International Jazz Critic’s Poll in 1991, 1990, 1989 and 1988, when he placed in 11 categories and had two albums nominated as Record of the Year. Threadgill’s music has been performed by some of the most acclaimed and adventurous instrumental ensembles of the past two decades: the trio Air, which emerged from the core membership of Chicago’s visionary cooperative, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), to become one of the most influential bands of the 1970s and early 1980s; the resourceful seven piece Sextet he formed in the early 1980s and led through the advent of the 1990s; such specialty units as X-75, his 20 piece Society Situation Dance Band and his Marching Band; and his current group, Very Very Circus. He has also received diverse commissions ranging from music for small ensembles such as the Roscoe Mitchell and Rova Saxophone Quartets, to larger works for the American Jazz Orchestra Salute to Harold Arlen, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra.
About NYEAF: The New York Electronic Art Festival is produced by Harvestworks, the New York University Music Technology Program, and LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, with support from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the Columbia University Computer Music Center, Roulette, Electronic Music Foundation, 3LD Art and Technology Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Institute of Electronic Art. Additional support is from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, mediaThe foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space @ 38 Park Row, the Experimental TV Center Presentation Program, Cycling 74, Tekserve and Newmark Knight Frank. NYEAF is a Harvestworks 30th Anniversary Event.
“Harvestworks brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the digital arts and makes them available to artists, curators, and collectors.”
About Harvestworks: Harvestworks is a nonprofit Digital Media Arts Center that provides resources for artists to learn digital tools and exhibit experimental work created with digital technologies. www.harvestworks.org