Rebecca Warner and Laura Vitale will create a new surround sound performance and recorded work with We Are Your Friends, a collaborative, community-based choral project founded by novelist and singer/songwriter Rick Moody, sound artist Laura Vitale, members of the Brooklyn based experimental theater group, Piehole and choreographer Rebecca Warner. The work will be performed at Issue Project Room in 2011. We Are Your Friends specializes in untrained voices and extended vocal technique, electronica and space-themed music in live an unaccompanied settings.
2011/12 Artists in Residence
Awarded Artists:
Mari Kimura
Mari Kimura, hailed by The New York Times as a “virtuoso playing at the edge,” is a visionary violinist, composer, and educator renowned for merging technology with music. She pioneered “subharmonics,” a groundbreaking bowing technique that extends the violin’s range below its lowest string. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received the Fromm Commission, a residency at IRCAM, and was honored by the Carnegie Corporation as an ‘Immigrant: Pride of America,’ she is only the second Japanese national to receive this recognition, following Yoko Ono. In 2020, Kimura launched MUGIC®, a wireless motion sensor revolutionizing artistic expression, now used at leading institutions such as Harvard, UC Berkeley, Juilliard, and professional venues such as the Osaka Expo 2025, the Lincoln Center, and the Venice Biennale. Her innovation and entrepreneurial efforts earned her a Certificate of Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives. A professor at UC Irvine and longtime Juilliard faculty member, she continues to push musical boundaries through composition and improvisation. In 2025, she was honored with the SEAMUS Award for lifetime achievement in electroacoustic music.
Associated project: Eigenspace
Susie Ibarra
Susie Ibarra is a composer, percussionist and sound artist based in New Paltz, New York. She is a Yamaha, Paiste and Vic Firth Drum Artist. Ibarra is a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Fellow in support of her project, Himalayan Glacier Soundscapes, An Acoustic Story on Climate Change. She is mapping and researching sound data from source to sink along the Himalayas into the Ganges with glaciologist and geomorphologist Michele Koppes.
Andrea DeFelice
Andréa DeFelice was born in New York and currently live/works in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in sculpture/installation from Queens College, and is faculty of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Her work has shown in various forms as performances, installation, screenings, and in part of collaborative and public intervention projects.
Exhibition venues include The Austrian Cultural Forum, The Invisible Dog, The Parlour Bushwick, and Momenta Art. She’s exhibited internationally in galleries and alternative spaces including Periferic 8 Biennial for Contemporary Art: Art As Gift, in Iași, Romania; LEAP (Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance), in Berlin; It’s The Political Economy, Stupid, Contemporary Art Center in Thessaloniki, Greece; and Hotspots, at Hafnarborg in Hafnarfjördur, Iceland. She’s participated in several artist and engineering residencies in Europe and in the US, including Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in New York, and Hafnarborg: Hafnarfjördur Centre of Culture & Fine Art in Iceland.
Elizabeth Axtman
Elizabeth Axtman is a performance artist who creates works on the complexities of love, hate, and forgiveness. She received her BA from San Francisco State University in 2004 and completed her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She was also a participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing in 2006 Summer Residency Program. She has participated in exhibitions at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, The Studio Museum of Harlem, NYC, The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Kunsthalle Gwangju, Republic of Korea, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts Auckland, New Zealand, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, and The Kitchen, NYC. She has lectured at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of the African Diaspora, DePaul University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is a recipient of the Skowhegan Endowment for Scholarship Foundation, and Franklin Furnace Fund recipient in 2012. Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Art Papers, Houston Chronicle, and her video ‘American Classics’ was used as the lead image for the catalog from the much acclaimed exhibition Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women and the Moving Image Since 1970.
Associated project: pilot for The Love
Laura Vitale
Laura Vitale has been making audio works and installations from field recordings since 2002. The audio incorporates music and language into field recordings so that the disparate elements complement each other while maintaining the integrity of their individual traditions.
Vitale’s works have been projected and distributed in various cities including Chicago, New York City, and Boston. Vitale has been artist-in-residence at Harvestworks in 2008.
Associated project: Surround sound performance
Jimmy Joe Roche
Jimmy Joe Roche will complete an expansion of his wearable performance instrument called the Noise Harness. We will expand the auditory capacity of the instrument through physical additions such as knobs, buttons and pressure sensitive strips to control audio. Roche’s videos have screened internationally in venues including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Incubate Arts Festival in the Netherlands, Rojo@Nova 2010 in Brazil, and Baltimore Museum of Art. Roche works as the Video Specialist at the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center andd a visiting lecturer in the JHU film and Media Department.
Associated project: Noise Harness.
Rachael Morrison
Rachael Morrison will create The Sound of Smell, a music project based on the results of an experiment conducted by smell scientist Avery Gilbert. The piece will feature twenty short musical compositions, each describing a specific odor from the original experiment. The artist is researching synesthesia and classification, as well as non-visual forms of communication. Rachael lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and received her B.A. from Bard College. Selected Exhibitions include Mobile Projections, Esopus Space, NY, NY, and The Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair at MoMA/PS1 Contemporary Art Center, LIC, NY.
Associated project: The Sound of Smell
Phillip White
Phillip White will compose a new work for the Dither electric guitar quartet that will feature custom built electronics based on a small arduino and a set of four relays that is programmed to overlay a rhythmic structure and a brutish spatialization of sound. The score will be a graphic work instructing the quartet in the manipulation of assigned parameters over time. In addition to his work with analog and digital electronics, White has written extensively for chamber ensembles and created a large body of intermedia pieces that explore meaning in information transmission. In 2008, Philip received his MFA in Electronic and Recorded Media from Mills College where he worked with Chris Brown, Hilda Parades, Helmut Lachenmann, Roscoe Mitchell and James Fei. Currently Philip is the Technical Director at ISSUE Project Room.
Associated project: new work for the Dither electric guitar quartet
David Wightman
David Wightman will create a project for Extreme Animals a collaboration with visual artist Jacob Ciocci. The new large-scale set of music and video will introduces a virtual third member and vocalist who will be visually represented through found footage from youtube and VHS tapes as well as original animation. Over the past nine years this prolific duo has released countless CD-Rs, tapes and videos and gone on self-booked DIY tours at least once a year, influencing a wide array of younger musicians, artists and video-makers with their unique combination of noise, dance music, and performance art.
Associated project: project for Extreme Animals
Haeyoung Kim
Haeyoung Kim will develop Moori, an interactive audience participatory audio-visual performance. Researching new ways of collaboration and communication between performer and audience, the artist will incorporate multiple modes of messaging on a mobile phone where users tell their stories to guided questions by the performer. User data is collected and processed to generate algorithmic audio and visuals while creating a larger narrative. This collaboration creates dialog and suggests new possibilities that can exist through the combination of algorithmic animation, audio and language. With a background in classical piano, Haeyoung Kim explores the texture of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name bubblyfish, she creates 8-bit and experimental sound works.
Associated project: Moori
Crystal Campbell
Crystal Z Campbell will research and develop Separate, But Equal: Algorithms for Empathy, a new body of work that includes audio works, new media projects, short experimental films and interactive installations that create a rupture in the historical archive of Black History through technological filters. Crystal Z Campbell explores the politics of witnessing with sound, film, sculpture, photography & installation based artworks. A former social worker, Campbell has exhibited at Project Row Houses, Exit Art, The New Children’s Museum of San Diego, Fotofest Biennial, MoCADA and Lui Velasquez in Tijuana among others. In 2003, Campbell completed the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California-San Diego in 2010. Campbell was a 2010-2011 Van Lier Studio Art Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.
Associated project: Separate, But Equal: Algorithms for Empathy.
Angie Eng
New York/Paris based multi-media artist Angie Eng will develop her live experimental video project, Chymikal which incorporates a Max-based video controller, the VideoBass, invented by artist/engineer, Michael Egger. She will customize the VideoBass to control multiple video inputs mapped onto different surfaces. Angie Eng has performed nationally and internationally and has receive awards from mediaThefoundation inc, the New York State Council on the Arts and has presented her work at the Anthology Film Archives, Eyebeam, the Conflux Festival, and the NY Video Festival.