Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center announces the New Waves in Art and Tech, an exhibition for our Art and Technology Program on Governors Island. A group show that opens the season with studies in human perception via artworks that explore privacy, brain-computer interfaces, climate and fungal networks, Artificial Intelligence and themes of air, flying and floating. The works use creative technology such as audio spatialization, stochastic audio, gesture interfaces, AI, biotechnology and simple motorized devices.
All events are free.
Artist Opening Saturday May 18, 2024 from 2 – 4:30 pm with a performance by Mónica de la Torre and Hans Tammen at 2:30 pm.
Location: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Open to the public from 11 am to 5 pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and by appointment.
Artists and Artworks include:
Adelle Lin and Matt Pinner Star Catcher, an immersive installation that encourages participants to engage with their environment in a playful and imaginative manner. Using projection and magical objects, the installation creates a simulated night sky that is brimming with an ethereal constellation of stars that participants can catch.
Monica de la Torre and Hans Tammen ARBORETUM is a collaboration between poet Mónica de la Torre and sound artist Hans Tammen. A series of poems written by de la Torre, inspired by the trees of Governors Island, are in turn processed and spatialized by Tammen. De la Torre considered the botanical and historical specificities of species of the island’s trees.
Tansy Xiao Here’s the Information We Collect, an interactive video installation tailored to respond selected privacy policy posted on major social media platforms. Audience members are invited to engage with the work by speaking into a microphone. LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor – the hypothetical single-cell organism from which all life on Earth descended) is a non-linear virtual environment where real-time biometric data from performers’ movements is streamed into the virtual environment to dynamically shape the visual and sonic elements of a virtual world.
Gisela Gamper Hear, There Everywhere is an immersive visual and sonic environment that observes and captures movement in nature and in the artist’s personal environment. “In my video Hear There Everywhere I play with and observe moving beads. Intrigued by the ever-changing pattern created by the beads I recorded their interplay with sound and captured a mesmerizing visual and sonic experience”.
Ahmed El Shaer AI Heaven, a two channel video installation comprising images and animated short loops where the artist collaborates with artificial intelligence to explore questions about the afterlife and how a machine imagines the metaphysical and the transcendental. All images are produced through generative technologies—the final artistic works—are fully created by machine intelligence without the artist’s interference.
Judy Dunaway AERONAUT – This immersive, site-specific installation commemorates pioneer daredevil aviator Charles K. (“Charlie”) Hamilton making the first round trip flight between New York City and Philadelphia on June 13, 1910, taking off from and returning to Governors Island. The installation features inflated latex balloons in various sound capacities, including resonators, strings, reeds and ASMR stimulators.
Bios of the Artists
Adelle Lin Yingxi is a Malaysian artist, activist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn. Their art seeks to heal and connect through joy and contemplation, aiming to advocate for women’s rights, champion climate justice, and bridge divides. Adelle holds a master’s degree in art and engineering from NYU Tandon.
Mónica de la Torre’s most recent book, Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat), centers on experimental translation. She is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine and, with Alex Balgiu, co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information). She is recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.
Sound Artist Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. He works with multichannel sound for over 20 years, focusing on the combination of the loudspeaker orchestra concept with object-based sound such as Ambisonics.
Tansy Xiao is an artist, curator and writer based in New York. Xiao creates theatrical installations with non-linear narratives that often extend beyond the fourth wall. Her work explores the immense power and inherent inadequacy of language through the assemblage of stochastic audio and recontextualized objects. She finds solace in the unknown, ludicrousness in the authorities, and absurdity in the geopolitical demarcations that separate and differentiate people.
Gisela Gamper, (b. Germany) is known for her photography and experimental video work. Since 1968, she has lived and worked in the United States. Gamper began working with photography in 1971 and since then has built a body of work that is personal and inspired by her life experiences. In 1999, Gamper began working with video and so began a long and creative collaboration with her husband, musician and composer, David Gamper. Together they created, See Hear Now, a live music and video installation that was performed and presented in New Music venues in New York and elsewhere.
Ahmed El Shaer is a contemporary artist born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1981 who currently lives and works in New York, USA. El Shaer is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of installation, photography, sound, and moving images, with a particular interest in new technologies. holds a B.F.A. from the Faculty of Art and Education and is currently a Ph.D. student at the computing and games department at Abertay University, Scotland, UK.
Judy Dunaway is primarily known for her numerous works for latex balloons as sound producers, including sculptural sonic performances, sound installations, interactive pieces and acousmatic works. She has presented these works throughout North America and Europe at many important venues, festivals, museums and galleries. She has a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and an M.A. from Wesleyan University (where she studied with Alvin Lucier). She has been teaching at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston since 2005.
