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
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
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
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
Jim Dawson
JIM DAWSON (Writer, Sound Designer) has created designs for theater, film and dance since 1994. He is a long time collaborator of The Wooster Group, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Cynthia Hopkins, Jim Findlay, and Findlay/Sandsmark, earning a Drama Desk Award, Drama Desk nomination, and Chicago’s Jeff Award for sound design. He created designs for three documentaries with filmmaker Ian Olds – Occupation: Dreamland (Independent Film Spirit Award), The Fixer: The Taking Of Ajamal Naqsbandi (Emmy nomination), Francophrenia (co-directed by James Franco) – and for the HBOAward Winning short Stefan. His work in live performance has taken him across the US, Europe, Asia and South America. Currently, he is the Associate Director of This Is The Color Described By The Time, a sound-theater work conceived by Lily Whitsitt based on Gertrude Stein (New Georges, 2018). Jim began his collaboration with Ms. Campanella in 2014. Their Lighthouse project (initiated during Christina’s A.I.R. at Harvestworks) was developed on multiple platforms: an immersive 12-channel installation with live performance (Hyphen Hub/ The Red Door in Chelsea), an expanded stereo version broadcast live to individual listeners via wireless headphones (Lighthouse 40°N, 73°W at HERE Arts Center), and as a headphone duet in an abandoned house on Governor’s Island (Harvestworks/ NYEAF 2015).
Associated project: Find Me
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.
