Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center announces The Process – an art and tech exhibition for the 2023 Art and Technology Program on Governors Island. Opening on June 30th with artworks exploring sonic holography, psychoacoustics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, neural networks and robotics by an intergenerational group of artists using technology as a creative medium. All events are free.
Location: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Open to the public: 11 am to 5 pm on Fri, Sat and Sun.
Meet the Artist Day: Saturday July 8, 2023, Saturday September 23, 2023 and Saturday October 21, 2023
Artists included Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons with Zach Layton, Stephanie Rothenberg and Suzanne Thorpe, Michelle Jaffe, David Reeder and Phil Edelstein, Marta Grasso and Kevin Ramsay, Efraín Rozas, Amelia Marzec, Ursula Endlicher, Woody Sullender, Emmett Palaima, Elico Suzuki, Bob Bielecki and David Behrman.
OPENING SEPTEMBER 1, 2023
Stephanie Rothenberg and Suzanne Thorpe Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling (Version 1) is a multimedia installation focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that senses safe settlement habitats through sound. Artist Presentation on September 23rd @ 2 pm and 4 pm.
Michelle Jaffe, David Reeder and Phil Edelstein LocaleS3 is a project that explores sound perception with multiple spatial and kinetic interactions like movements, locations, directions, and integrates virtual/physical sound objects. Multiple hardware/software explorations will be included in the project in collaboration with the NousDigital NousSonic system to localize the audience. Conversation with the artists on Saturday October 21, 2023 at 2:30 pm.
Marta Grasso and Kevin Ramsay Karkinos is a sound installation that encompasses eleven terracotta sculptures, six exciters, and six solenoids. In this immersive project, the sculptures are brought to life by the exciters and solenoids are employed to produce rhythmic tapping sounds reminiscent of an MRI machine. Open from October 20 – October 29, 2023
Efraín Rozas Myth and Prosthesis I: Do Robots Have Culture? Eight robotic “percussionists” improvising simultaneously, as in Latin American rhythmic improvisation. Part of the series “Myth and Prosthesis”. “Myth” being the cultural ideals that inform the creation of technology. Prostheses are the merging of bodies with technology. Open from September 1 – October 15, 2023
Amelia Marzec East Meets West. A virtual reality piece that is a walking simulator filled with impotent paper-doll tanks. It was inspired by the game, “World of Tanks,” a shooter which depicts historically accurate battles in Eastern Europe. However, East Meets West simply lets you explore the landscape, which is nonetheless littered with ghosts of the past. Open from September 1 – October 15, 2023
Ongoing Artist Exhibition Works
Ursula Endlicher: Custom HTML Plant Tags (and Input Field reversal #3) is a digital image series accessible through an Augmented Reality experience by scanning the bark of trees, reading their structure as “natural” QR code. Visitors, with their cellphone and AR app in hand, take a stroll around the island to treasure hunt digital files “embedded” within natural trees. Walks & Talks by Ursula: Saturdays at 2:30 and 4:30
Woody Sullender: Duo Mezzo (Inversion) is a site-specific installation and virtual music performance, utlizing Unreal Engine to create a digital replica of the space, projecting it within the physical room. Through motion tracking, the visitors’ presence is doubled into the virtual space, allowing them to experience a banjo music performance with Sullender’s own avatar as both a real and virtual audience.
Emmett Palaima: Cathedral-64 is an immersive audio installation and instrument where 64 individually controlled speakers create a three-dimensional sound experience, allowing for ongoing compositional experimentation. The piece focuses on exploring the musical and psychoacoustic possibilities within the space.
Part One Art Works
Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons with Zach Layton: All That is Seen and Unseen is an interdisciplinary installation opera that delves into the effects of technology on human consequences, confronting the erosion of truth and trust in our society. It explores machines learning by creating a real-time performative neural network, imagining a quasi-supernatural invasion of malfunctioning intelligent machines, blurring reality and endangering everyone. CLOSING ON AUGUST 27, 2023.
Elico Suzuki: Birds don’t have Borders explores the transmission and migration between humans, birds, and intangible media. The installation combines player toy pianos, played with a score generated by bird flock videos captured during Suzuki’s travels, while light sensors capture bird shadows and convert them into keystrokes, mimicking an old transmission system. CLOSING AUGUST 20, 2023
Bob Bielecki and David Behrman: Spindrifter utilizes Bielecki’s innovative 48-channel microphone and multichannel playback system to capture detailed acoustic properties of natural environments and create an immersive audio experience. Combined with Behrman’s music passages, the installation envelops visitors in a natural sound environment, evoking the sensation of being outdoors. CLOSING AUGUST 20
Artist Presentations
Saturday August 19, 2023 from 1-4 pm. “What is the Shape of Water?” A cross-species meditation by Lisa Moren with Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff.
Saturday August 19, 2023 from 1 – 4 Women’s Labor: Rheostat Rotary Rack OUTDOORS. A mid-20th century umbrella-style rotary dryer embedded with a rotary encoder and potentiometers, performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand or by wind.
Saturday September 9, 2023. UnStumm – conversation of moving image and sound featuring Seth Cluett. UnStumm (https://unstumm.com/) is a project for real-time film and music (Echtzeitfilm) for cross-disciplinary and cross cultural collaboration between visual artists and musicians from Germany and other countries.
Saturday October 28, 2023. Computational Performace, AI and Viola by the Harvestworks technical interns Malu Laet and Ti Wen Hsu, with AI generated visuals by Yuting Tao.
Bios of the artists
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. She has exhibited internationally in venues and festivals and has participated in residencies including Harvestworks, Workspace/LMCC and Eyebeam in NYC, and ZK/U in Berlin. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Professor in the Department of Art at University at Buffalo SUNY where she co-directs the Platform Social Design Lab, an interdisciplinary design studio collaborating with local social justice organizations.
Suzanne Thorpe is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. She interweaves critical listening practices with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft immersive sound engagements and creative research sites that question circulations of power within human and nonhuman systems. As an electroacoustic flutist and sound artist she’s performed and exhibited internationally, has a large discography, with releases on Columbia Records, Beggars Banquet, Geffin and V2. Thorpe has received residencies and awards from the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in technology, a Gold Record from the Recording Industry Association of Americas, as well as grants from the MAP Fund, NYSCA, New Music USA and Harvestworks.
Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons (AutomaticRelease) are Brooklyn based, interdisciplinary artists who make multimedia performances, installations, films and interactive video scores for live performance. Shaun and Lauren’s projects have been seen in NYC, nationally, and internationally and they have received numerous awards including grants, fellowships and residencies from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, LMCC, Jerome Foundation, Harvestworks, Asian Cultural Council, Signal Culture, Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation. www.automaticrelease.org
Zach Layton is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, curator, and educator working collaboratively across genres and disciplines. His work has explored musical approaches to biofeedback and brainwave signal, transcriptions of insect rhythms for string orchestra, sonification of internet data, multichannel sound installations, and photographic representation of sonic vibration.
Elico Suzuki is an interdisciplinary sound artist based in Tokyo, Japan. She is also active as an improviser and composer under the name “suzueri”. She graduated from Musashino Art University and IAMAS in Japan, and is an adjunct lecturer at Musashino Art University Imaging Arts and Sciences, and the University of Tokyo. She is currently in New York as a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council 2022 NY. She has presented her work nationally and internationally, including at Experimental Intermedia (US), ISSUE Project Room (US), Goethe Institute Boston (US), NTT InterCommunication Center (Japan), LUFF Festival (Switzerland), Audiograft Festival (England), Festival Tsonami (Chile), and others. https://suzueri.org
Ursula Endlicher is a new media and interdisciplinary artist working with interactive media and the Internet since the early 1990s. She investigates structural components and interfaces of digital and “natural” networks and creates works in contrasting formats including net art, AR, installation, performance, environmental works, and dinners – often a combination thereof. In her works humans and more-than-humans, machines and nature, are inspired by each other’s behavior – often in humorous ways – and create new forms and “worlds” in between.
Woody Sullender is a media artist and musician based in Queens, NY. His pieces encompass a myriad of media including sculpture, video games, performance, theater, music, installation, architecture, origami, and sonic weaponry. His recent work utilizes video game space as an arena to undermine specific modernist ideologies and rituals of music reception. Previously, Sullender was recognized as a pre-eminent experimental banjo improviser.
Emmett Palaima is an artist working with electronics and esoteric processes of sound creation. His practice is conceptually rooted in the idea that technology and magic are one and the same, and that electricity is a manifestation of the divine or elemental forces underlying physical reality. In his work he seeks alternatively to celebrate the power of this force and give it worship, through the creation of devotional objects and intensely physical electronic experiences, and to analyze humanity’s relationship to this force in the context of a globalized industrial economy.
Bob Bielecki is a sound designer, specializing in the creative use of technology in the electronic arts; additional expertise as audio engineer, exhibition designer, electrical engineer, software developer, and artist/collaborator. Since the mid-1970’s Bob has collaborated with celebrated artists Laurie Anderson and La Monte Young on work that has included the creation of unique instruments and interfaces used in performance installations.
David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations as well as compositions for performance in concerts. Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966. Sonic Arts performed extensively in North America and Europe from 1966 till 1976. He was co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College from 1975 to 1980. Over a period of several decades Behrman was associated as composer / performer with the Cunningham Dance Company.
Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian musician, interdisciplinary artist and scholar. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by The New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine. He is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2023-2025 for combined arts. He was a resident at Harvestworks, The Kitchen in 2021 and recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts Arts Assistance Fund.
Amelia Marzec is a Brooklyn-based artist engaging with communications infrastructure to inform a speculative future. Her work has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, MIT, ISEA (Canada), University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland), ONCE Foundation Contemporary Art Biennial (Spain), NODE Forum for Digital Arts Biennial (Germany), and is part of the Rhizome ArtBase. She was a resident at Eyebeam, Ox-Bow, and Harvestworks; a fellow at NYSCA/NYFA, A.I.R. Gallery, and Columbia University; a visiting artist at CalArts; and nominated for the World Technology Awards for Art. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, and a BFA from Mason Gross.
Lisa Moren is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with emerging media, bio-matter, public space, AR\XR and works-on-paper. She has exhibited her work at the Chelsea Art Museum, Creative Time, and the Drawing Center in New York, the Cranbrook Art Museum and international venues including uShaka Museum (South Africa), Ars Electronica (Austria), and Akademie der Kunste (Germany), and the Artists Research Network (Australia) and has a forthcoming one-person exhibition at the Peale Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She received the National Endowment for the Arts award, is a Fulbright Scholar; a multi-year recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council and CEC Artslink International and the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship in Film and Media at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff is a marine biologist whose research is focused on dinoflagellate evolution with special emphasis on the parasitic dinoflagellates, using large scale sequencing and phylogenetic methods to describe the evolutionary history of different types of genes in dinoflagellates.
The Harvestworks Art and Technology Program is funded in part by the New York City Dept of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts, mediaThe foundation inc and Friends of Harvestworks.
ABOUT HARVESTWORKS: Founded in 1977, Harvestworks offers an environment where artists can make work inspired and achieved by electronic media. Harvestworks helps the community at large to understand, assimilate, and make creative use of new and evolving technologies. Harvestworks creates a context for the appreciation of new work, advances both the art community and the public’s agenda for the use of technology in art; and brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts by fostering collaborations across electronic media.
Program subject to change. Check the website for the latest information: Harvestworks.org