Harvestworks

2012 Sponsored Projects

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: One

Mari Kimura teamed up with award- winning Japanese movie director Tomoyuki Kato’s creative team from Japan, Yoshito Onishi (Image Programing) and Chisako Hasegawa (Visual Producer), creating a large- scale composition for an ensemble and herself on stage. Mari uses the state-of-the-art motion sensor technology “MO” developed at IRCAM interacting with audio and video in real time.

Hans Tammen

Hans Tammen is just another worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. He 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. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).

Associated project: Apheresis

Apheresis is a large multi-movement piece for 15 performers with custom designed electronic instruments. The piece is inspired by Earle Brown’s Available Forms, uses a score that is rearranged every time it is performed, and fuses various contemporary electronic music styles and techniques.

Kathy Brew

Associated project: Beauty Behind Bars

A prison is the last place one would think to find a beauty pageant. But, in Peru sentences can be significantly reduced by prisoners’ participation in a beauty pageant for the title of Miss Primavera. Beauty Behind Bars is a documentary that explores the story of women imprisoned in Lima, Peru for trying to smuggle cocaine through the airport to other countries. Through the film we learn the destinies of these women, bound together by their prison sentence and participation in the beauty contest.

Roberto Guerra

Associated project: Beauty Behind Bars

A prison is the last place one would think to find a beauty pageant. But, in Peru sentences can be significantly reduced by prisoners’ participation in a beauty pageant for the title of Miss Primavera. Beauty Behind Bars is a documentary that explores the story of women imprisoned in Lima, Peru for trying to smuggle cocaine through the airport to other countries. Through the film we learn the destinies of these women, bound together by their prison sentence and participation in the beauty contest.

Marie Sester

Marie Sester is a French-American artist working primarily with digital technologies to create works in a variety of media and formats, most often presenting responsive media. Born in France, Marie Sester began her career as an architect after earning a Master’s Degree from the Ecole d’Architecture in Strasbourg, France. Her interests soon shifted from designing physical structures to the study of ideological ones, and of how culture, politics and technology affect our spatial awareness, our emotions and behavior.

After traveling extensively she moved to the U.S. in 2000. Marie Sester received a Creative Capital Grant in 2002. Her installations and websites earned an Honorary Mention in Interactive Art from Ars Electronica (2003), a Webby Award for Net Art (2004) and a spot on the “50 Coolest Websites” list on Time Magazine Online (2004).

Associated project: Little Box

Little Box is an interactive artwork using sensors, robotics, light and sound within a simply designed box, to express   peace and harmony. Once open, Little Box continuously detects presence. When the surrounding is agitated (for example, a person moves quickly, or several people are moving around), then Little Box pulses faster and faster, the color of the light gradually becoming red, and the sound coming faster and in louder bursts. When the surroundings calm down, Little Box resumes emitting a peaceful atmosphere.