A Harvestworks 30th Anniversary Event
Audio/Visual: A New Generation of Installation Artists
EXHIBITION May 12 – June 2, 2007 Tues. – Sat. Noon – 6PM
An LMCC Swing Space project at 38 Park Row @ City Hall. Space donated by Time Equities.
NYEAF’s opening event, Audio/Visual: A New Generation of Installation Artists features six installations by a new generation of digital artists who explore the poetics of sound and image/light through electronic media.
Featured artists and works include Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s El Espectáculo, Olen Hsu’s Drift (II), Hisao Ihara’s The Collapsing Wall and Holding On (with Jenny Hyde), LoVid and Douglas Repetto’s Cross Current Resonance Transducer, Terry Nauheim’s Rotating (in Four Movements), Rashaad Newsome’s The Conductor, and Phoenix Perry’s Honey.
Exhibition Details:
El Espectáculo or Starstruck is a three-channel video using video footage from oft-videotaped celebrity trials and daytime talk shows. Excerpted images of celebrities from collected news footage and images of audience members from daytime talk shows enter the video stage like marionettes, continuously “performing” their gestures from the original footage. Their mutual interaction stylistically echoes the angular repetitive gestures often found in Modern Dance; they “dance” singly, in pairs, and finally in patterns referencing a chorus line and Busby Berkeley’s film extravaganzas. An original soundtrack sampled and composed from Broadway musicals and fans screaming the stars names is synchronized with the movements of the characters suggesting a choreographed dance within the tableau.
“By re-choreographing the celebrities’ banal walks to and from their court appearances, I am interested in calling attention to the media circus and the scrutiny that surrounds these stars and the public obsessed with them.” – K.A.S.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a photographer and video artist. She has exhibited internationally in group and solo shows including: Momenta Art, NY, Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY, Jessica Murray Projects, NY, The Center for Book Arts, NY, Vox Populi, PA, Bronx Museum of Art, NY, Kunstahalle Exnergasse, Austria, Le Centre pour L’image Contemporaine, Switzerland and others. Numerous artist residencies include: Harvestworks, NY, Smack Mellon fellowship and studio award NY, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, NY, MacDowell Artist Colony, NH, Institute of Electronic Arts, Alfred University, NY, Woodstock Center for Photography, NY. She has received grants from NALAC, the Urban Arts Initiative, the Puffin Foundation and others. Currently she is preparing for a solo exhibition at the Grossman Gallery, Lafayette College, PA and making a new video commissioned by artist Chris Doyle to be exhibited at the Alrdrich Museum of Art, Real Art Ways and Artspace in CT.
Olen Hsu’s sculpture and sound installation Drift (II) (2007) charts the prehistory of the digital network, situating itself in the era of the gramophone. Using porcelain, paper, latex paint, lacquer, tape, aluminum, wood and string, Hsu’s delicate apparatuses emit a sound composition created with numerical oceanographic data of the past 200 years, suggesting fragments of a fictional and outmoded ‘laboratory’ that filters, translates, and re-reads the past as musical representation.
Olen Hsu constructs installations in porcelain, paper and algorithmically composed sound, converging new media, tactile forms and works for acoustic instruments. He received his BA in Art History and Music from Yale University, a BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation brought him to New York where he participated in the AIM Program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center Artist-in-Residence Program for New Music. Hsu is the recipient of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Program, and a Turbulence Commission from New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. His recent work has been shown at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the InterSpace New Media Arts Center in Sofia, Bulgaria, James Nicholson Gallery in New York, Ampersand International Arts in San Francisco, and Turbulence.org.
The Collapsing Wall is a video installation consisting of a series of war document moving images from over the course of the 20th century. The work is a small scale version of the 30 foot high original (pictured here) video projection installation.
Originally from Tokyo, Hisao Ihara lives in New York City. His work explores the intricate overlay of time and visual perception within immersive video environments. He holds a BFA from the Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA from Alfred University. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and Harvestworks Residency program.
Holding On is a collaborative site specific video performance/installation between Jenny Hyde and Hisao Ihara.
Jenny Hyde is a new media artist from both the west coast and the east coast of the United States. Her work explores questions about physical experiences, environment and the things we have or don’t have control over. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Cross Current Resonance Transducer stems from cross-pollination and collaboration between LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) and Douglas Repetto. It builds on the collaborators’ varied backgrounds including Hinkis’ background in visual art and interactions between the body and technology, Lapidus’ training in neuroscience and electronic music, and Repetto’s experience with microprocessors, sensors, and robotics.
Cross Current Resonance Transducer addresses the processes of interpretation and evaluation that are inherent in human attempts to understand natural phenomena. Inspired by the story of the pulsar’s discovery, we are building a system for monitoring, manipulating, and interpreting natural signals including electromagnetic radiation, wind patterns, ambient temperature gradients, and barometric pressure modulations. Our interest is not so much in presenting the phenomena themselves, but rather in exploring the often flawed but revealing interpretations of those phenomena that ultimately lead to greater human understanding and scientific progress.
CCRT has received an individual artist grant from NYSCA through the Experimental Television Center and a grant for Arts and Humanities from the Greenwall Foundation with support from Harvestworks.
Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City with his wife, writer Amy Benson; two cute/bad cats, Pokey and Sneezy; and many plants.
LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. They combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of their work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. They are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.
Rotating (in Four Movements), (2006, 11’52”) is a multi-channel audio/single video channel installation built from recorded and processed sound fragments of hand-cast record negatives* and their corresponding recorded drawings. The work deconstructs original music recordings through reproducing, inverting, fragmenting, layering, and reordering. The video is composed of 260 rotating drawings shot aerially with a DV camera. Terry recently exhibited her work at Sculpture Center in NYC and will collaborate with the Library for American Broadcasting, Univeristy of Maryland on the new work.
*Record Negatives: A record negative is a rubber disc hand-cast from an original LP record. As a negative, its original spiral inscription is inverted. Its grooves produce familiar, yet ambiguous, musical remnants among pops and scratches.
Terry Nauheim explores sound and visual relationships through digital media, drawing, and installation. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Bronx Museum of Arts; the Drawing Room, London; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Musée Art Contemporain Lyon; and the Sculpture Center, Long Island City. She was a recipient of Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual “New Genre” Artist award and an Artist-in-Residence at Harvestworks. Ms. Nauheim has an MFA from University of Maryland and a BFA from Washington University. In addition to producing her work, she teaches computer arts at New York Institute of Technology and New York University. She currently lives and works in New York.
The Conductor is a 2:31 min. digital video loop made up of footage from various hip-hop videos, digitally enhanced and re-edited to track the motion of the hands of the artists. The audio consists of sounds collected from top 10 hip-hop songs. These sounds are then put together to make the quintessential hip-hop track. The track is then weaved in and out of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The seeming fluidity of the image belies the painstaking nature of the production process: over 5000 individual video frames have been enlarged and repositioned to create the moving image.
Rashaad Newsome was born in New Orleans, LA where he received his BA in Art History at Tulane University. After receiving his BA he moved to New York where he studied film at Film Video Arts. Rashaad’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at such creditable institutions and commercial art galleries as: K.U.E.L., Berlin, Germany; Glassbox Gallery, Paris, France; Rush Arts Gallery, NYC; Zero Station, Portland, Maine; Veletrzni Palace, Prague, Czech Republic; Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; Fiac, Paris, France; The Film Gallery, Paris, France; The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA and The New Orleans Museum of Art. In addition Rashaad has been the recipient of several awards including: The Franklin Furnace Grant for Performance Art; l’Entreprise Culturelle Artist In Residence Program; Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program and The BCAT/Rotunda Gallery Joint Multimedia Artist In Residence Program.
Honey is an interactive game exploring issues of survival, and environment. This powerful game demonstrates even the smallest creatures’ vital importance to their ecosystem as they struggle to survive in a unique, fantasy world. Perry’s immersive sculpture employs interaction between sound and light to explore disturbances in an emergent ecology of hexagonal forms. Honey places the user in a situation where they can see the impact they have on the growth of an emergent ecology. It also questions the way that nature uses ideal forms to generate a wide variety of possible shape variations in any single system, based on different disturbances to that particular system.
Presently a New York City resident, Phoenix Perry creates visual and sonic art. Her mediums include installation, video, live performance, sculpture, sound and painting. Motivated by exploring advanced structures of consciousness and modes of communication, her work frequently focuses on the intersections of the complex systems of technology, the body, language, myth, science, politics and architecture. With emphasis on the creation of conceptual, technically advanced and aesthetically developed works, she aims to present beauty while also re-examining rationality.In 1999, Phoenix was partially physically disabled by an extreme case of carpel tunnel that has uniquely shaped her relationship to technology and the body.Her works have screened internationally at venues such as The Lincoln Center, LACMA, Austin Museum of Digital Art, Santa Fe Art Institute and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her festival appearances have been wide ranging and include The New York Video Festival, The New Forms Festival, Cimatics Festival in Brussels, and the Barcelona Art Report. Also, she holds the position of Creative Director for the award wining DVD series RELINE.
“Harvestworks brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the digital arts and makes them available to artists, curators, and collectors.”
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.
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
About Swing Space and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is the leading voice for arts and culture in downtown New York City, producing cultural events and promoting the arts through grants, services, advocacy, and cultural development programs. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program is made possible by the support of the September 11th Fund. Space generously donated by Time Equities. www.lmcc.net/
AudioVisual: New Installation Art is made possible by Swing Space, a program of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, generously supported by the September 11th Fund. Space donated by Time Equities Properties.