2018 Sponsored Projects

Matthew Ostrowski

A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, performer, and installation artist working primarily with electronics and sound. He studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. He has shared the stage with everyone from John Zorn and David Behrman to a trio of Elvis impersonators. He has been the technical advisor for the Macarthur fellowship-winning choreographer Elizabeth Streb and presently develops custom software for musicians and installations.

He has performed from Australia to California, including the Melbourne Festival, the Audio Art festival in Krakow, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, New Music America, the Festival Musiques Innovatrices in France, Stroom in Switzerland, PS 1, Wien Modern, and many other venues worldwide. Ostrowski has received fellowships from STEIM in Amsterdam, the Media Alliance in New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and many others.

Associated project: SummerLand

Summerland is an audio installation based on a choir of 24 computer-controlled antique telegraph sounders. Algorithms coordinate the sounders to generate pitches, moving clouds of sound, and even attempted voice emulation, all from masses of simple clicks. This project was made with support from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) via Harvestworks.

Dafna Naphtali

Dafna Naphtali is an electronic-musician and vocalist who composes and performs experimental and interactive electroacoustic music, creating projects over the past 20+ years with live sound-processing of voice and other instruments, multi-channel audio, and musical robots. These performative “instruments” are all built on her programming in Max/MSP. Dafna also creates audio augmented-reality soundwalk compositions/apps for the U-GRUVE AR platform. All her projects draw on her eclectic musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music.

Associated project: Walkie Talkie Dream Garden

Walkie Talkie Dream Garden is an interactive sound-walk composition for the Williamsburg waterfront, heard via a free iOS/Android app with U-Gruve Audio Augmented-Reality by Richard Rodkin. Geo-tagged audio recorded on-site and electroacoustic vignettes, are triggered/altered by GPS locations of listeners. From the former Domino Sugar factory to Bushwick inlet, Kent Avenue extending into the East River, from piers and passing ferries, large structures become oversized virtual instruments, combine with overheard sounds, and participants shape their own music/sound experience as they walk, run, or ride.

Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff is an artist and filmmaker. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. Her current work addresses the relationship between American fascism in the 1930’s and its resurgence today. Both thematically and formally Beloff draws timelines between past and present helping us to imagine a future against the grain of reactionary ideology. She aims to make radical art that educates, entertains, and provokes discussion. Most importantly, as her work attests, she believes protest should be vibrant, humorous and colorful, a carnival of resistance to light the way in dark times.

Associated project: The Tramp’s New World

A feature length film currently in post production (2019), inspired by a film scenario that James Agee wrote for Charlie Chaplin in 1948. Although Agee’s film was never realized it is a fascinating thought experimental about how a utopian community could form in the ruins of New York. This essay film will explore what this could mean for us today.