2017 Sponsored Projects

Awarded Artists:

Victoria Vesna

VICTORIA VESNA, Ph.D., is an artist and professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and the founder/director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Trained as a painter at the University of Belgrade, her work now resides at the intersection of disciplines and technologies, focusing on experimental creative research. Her installations explore how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation. (Ph.D., CAiiA-STAR, University of Wales, 2000).

Victoria’s work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nanoscientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists, enriching her students’ learning experience. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows and delivered over 100 invited talks in the past decade. She serves as the North American editor of the AI & Society journal (Springer Verlag, UK). Her publications include “Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow” (Minnesota Press, 2007) and “Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts” (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy, Intellect Ltd, 2011). Currently, she is co-curating the exhibition “Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Arts in Times of Climate Disruption” and working on a new book, “Vibrations Matter: Art & Science of Listening” (Routledge Press, forthcoming fall 2024).

Associated project: Bird Song Diamond

Bird Song Diamond is an interactive installation based on long-term research (2011- present) allowing multifaceted, interdisciplinary perspectives — uniquely connecting the nodes of evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, spatial sound, mechatronic art and interactive technologies. The diamond as a crystal lattice of connected nodes reflects the commitment of each node to its disciplinary rigor held together in balance through shared interests. The sound art installation is an effort to include multiple new facets of the larger public — from children to art lovers and from academics to theoreticians.

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: Crossing the Lagrangian Point

Continuing his decade-long work with large ensembles using electronics, Tammen’s “Crossing the Lagrangian Point” uses performers who create sound, light and visuals at the same time, in that multiple threads come together in one unifying whole. The piece is a large 60-minute sonic and visual multi-movement piece for several light and sound artists, and is part of Tammen’s ongoing Dark Circuits Orchestra concept. It unites contemporary visual and musical styles and techniques, bridges the cultural gap between many historically divergent practices, and is the logical next step in Tammen’s work with large electronic ensembles. This project was sponsored by Harvestworks with funds by the New York State Council on the Arts.

David Simons

David Simons composes music for theater, dance, film, installations, and concert ensembles. His unusual collection of sounds from self-built and non-European instruments combines with digital sampling technologies to create a unique pan-cultural music. He has devised his own method of using the Theremin as a Midi controller. David has researched and performed music from many of the world’s cultures, and furthered his music studies in Bali, Bangkok and Seoul. As a founding member of the FUTURE PRIMITIVE ENSEMBLE his pieces were heard live on radio and in concert throughout the U.S. He has also performed on tour in Java, Bali, Korea, Japan, Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, Cuba and Hawaii.

Associated project: Movement Activated Sound in Liminal Space

“Movement Activated Sound in Liminal Space” is an interactive system which uses Theremin and webcam as controllers that change channels of a radio by the performers’ proximity and speed of movement, by using customized SDR (software defined radio) to access local and international broadcasts. This project was commissioned by Harvestworks with funding from the New York State […]

Christina Campanella

CHRISTINA CAMPANELLA (Composer, Sound Artist) works with music and sound across artistic disciplines. Her pieces for theater, film, concert and installation have been shown throughout the U.S. and Europe (EMPAC, Museum at MIT, HERE, Harvestworks/NY Electronic Art Festival, Fylkingen, Stockholm, Simultan, Romania, and Noorderzon, the Netherlands), including Red Fly/Blue Bottle (co-created with writer Stephanie Fleischmann). She has also been an actor/vocalist in downtown theater and independent film since 1998, played keyboards with various New York bands, and is a frequent collaborator of composer/sound artist Joe Diebes (WOW, botch, i/o). In 2018, Christina will perform in Diebes’ opera oyster at Roulette in Brooklyn. She is a recipient of three NYSCA Individual Artist Commissions in Film, Media, and New Technologies and support from LMCC, Mid-Atlantic Arts, American Music Center, Whitman College and NYS Music Fund. Website: http://xtinasworld.com

Associated project: Find Me

FIND ME is a multi speaker sound installation and performance-without-performers that explores the phenomena of getting lost and finding one’s way. A mesmeric, immersive environment created by composer/performer Christina Campanella and writer/sound designer Jim Dawson, FIND ME is composed of sonic ephemera in which field recordings, music and industrial drones swell into electro-symphonic motifs. The audience moves through and around invisible walls of sound deployed via a 12:1 multitiered system of speakers that emanates sound from all sides and above. FIND ME uses the potential of sound spatialization to manipulate the internal mapping sense that shapes our perception of where we are.

Joseph Morris

Joseph Morris is a media artist known to make emotive machines. His work is occupied with the affectual space of somatic relationships between our bodies and physical space. He is immersed in the creation of machines that resemble the body through the gesture of breathing. His work engages with ephemerality, perception, movement, space, and time to generate subjectivity, and through that action creates a sensorial relationship with gestural presence. His New Works Residency project is a solar wind chime, which is a data sonification system that pulls real time data from the ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) satellite. This sonification system will interpret the solar wind data live, and use it to synthesize dimensional sound in an open sound and video installation.

Associated project: Solar Particle Wind Chime

The Solar Particle Wind Chime is a data sonification system made from hand blown glass that retrieves solar wind data from the NASA ACE Satellite located at Lagrange Point L1, between Earth and the sun, at a distance of 1.5 million KM from Earth. Solar particle and wind flare data is streamed from The Space Weather Prediction Center in real-time, and the sounds you hear are affected by the stream of energetic particles coming from the sun.