Harvestworks

2020 Artists in Residence

Awarded Artists:

Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist of new media. Through feminism and materialism, she explores gender, race, class, and labor in contemporary digital culture. She is known for projects that mix low and high technologies to create hybrid forms that are by turns humorous and sensuous.

Behar is a 2023 Creative Capital Awardee in Technology. Her artwork is exhibited throughout North America and Europe and held in private collections. Beall Center for Art+Technology presented her major solo exhibition Ack! Knowledge! Work! Pera Museum presented Data’s Entry | Veri Girişi, a survey exhibition and catalog documenting eight years of work. Additional solo exhibitions include Shelf Life, a site-specific installation at Trinity College, Backups, appearing at Framingham State University and E-Waste, premiering with catalog at University of Kentucky and traveling to Boston Cyberarts Gallery. Her robotic installation, Anonymous Autonomous, received work-in-progress solo exhibitions at Robert Morris University and University of Michigan. She collaborates with Marianne M. Kim as DISORIENTALISM.

Associated project: Sensor Sensibility

“Sensor Sensibility,” by Katherine Behar, depicts nonhuman intimacies between technologies and landscapes as digital sensors “get to know” the environments they monitor. Six screens show different barren sites, eerily devoid of human life, where a sensor (a silver geometric shape) makes its way purposefully through its home terrain. The videos are filmed by aerial drone. Eventually, the lonely roving sensor and the watchful flying drone begin cultivating a “sensor sensibility” based on nonhuman companionship.

Jocelyn Ho

Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves exploring the relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary, collaborative performance projects, including the sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground in which she performed works created by fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers in an interactive, multimedia piano recital. Her latest project Women’s Labor that interrogates domesticity through sound installation and performance has won the IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, Hellman Fellowship, Harvestwork residency, and UCLA Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music, and has been featured at Governors Island, New Music Gathering, Design Museum of Chicago, ISEA, NIME, Alliance of Women in Media Arts and Technology Conference, CCRMA at Stanford, and UCLA Art|Sci Gallery.

As pianist and composer, Ho is a Steinway Artist. She has performed and had her works premiered at Radio France, the Sydney Opera House, Berlin’s Radialsystem V, the Melbourne Recital Centre, New York Symphony Space, Spectrum NYC, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Spotify’s NYC Headquarters, NSW Parliament House, Victorian Governor’s House, the Boston Isabella Gardner Museum, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival.

She is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.

Associated project: Women’s Labor

Women’s Labor is a feminist project that repurposes old domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these domestic-tool-turned instruments are explored in public installations, community workshops, commissioned new compositions, and concert performance. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle. At Harvestworks, the project creators will embark on their second instrument, the Rotary Dryer Rack.

Margaret Schedel

With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. Her diverse creative output spans the interactive multimedia operas, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. A Professor in the Department of Music, at Stony Brook University she currently serves as the Chair of the Art Department and teaches computer music at Peabody Conservatory.

Associated project: Women’s Labor

Women’s Labor is a feminist project that repurposes old domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these domestic-tool-turned instruments are explored in public installations, community workshops, commissioned new compositions, and concert performance. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle. At Harvestworks, the project creators will embark on their second instrument, the Rotary Dryer Rack.

Bob Bellerue

Bob Bellerue is a sound artist, experimental musician, sound/video curator, and creative technician based in Ridgewood NY. Over the last 30+ years he has been involved in creating and presenting a wide range of sonic activities – noise, sound art, experimental music, junk metal percussion, Balinese gamelan, soundtracks for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, and sound / video installations. Bob’s sound work is focused on multidimensional feedback systems, using amplified instruments, objects, recordings, and spaces, in combination with electronics and software written in the Supercollider audio synthesis programming language.

Associated project: Auroboros

Auroboros is an interactive sound installation and performance system. Vocal and instrumental recordings will be made by performers and audience members, and played back via a Supercollider patch. The sound is diffused through traditional speakers and homemade speaker objects made out of resonant materials with transducers attached to them. Live effects processing and feedback lend organic and chaotic energies to the swirling chorus.

Case Jernigan

Case Jernigan draws, makes paper art and animated films. Fascinated by light up toys, 1980’s Japanese animation, and retro video games, Case imbues his characters with an unsettling charm. He grew up by the sea in Charleston, SC, and he’s a sucker for nostalgia, iconic sports heroes, monsters and mythology. He’s screened short films in festivals like The Sante Fe Film Festival and #11MM Berlin. A Screen Australia grant winner, he’s currently collaborating with Closer Productions to craft a series of animated shorts about soccer fans. He studied painting at William & Mary and the New York Studio School.

Associated project: Monument

Case Jernigan will create MONUMENT, an exploratory narrative video game about insomnia and anxiety. MONUMENT will be a 2D game located in a cut-paper world, built on differences between the conservative community in Charleston, South Carolina of his youth, and the Brooklyn of his present. The 2-D game will be broken into chapters with different approaches to gameplay, all involving the interaction between generative nature of tones, sounds, voices, and singing clips. These interactions will trigger as the primary character moves in and interacts with the cut paper world. The piece will be made with stop-motion animation and compiled and coded in gamemaker.

Matthew Blessing

Matthew Blessing is a composer, guitarist, and music technologist. Due to graduate this summer with a Doctorate in Experimental Music and Digital Media from Louisiana State University, Blessing’s research explores new human-computer interfaces focusing on musical expression. His present work involves the design and digital fabrication of embedded instruments. These instruments run on an embedded Linux CPU, such as the Raspberry Pi, connected to a variety of interactive sensors, amplifiers, and audio drivers.

Associated project: Women’s Labor

Women’s Labor is a feminist project that repurposes old domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these domestic-tool-turned instruments are explored in public installations, community workshops, commissioned new compositions, and concert performance. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle. At Harvestworks, the project creators will embark on their second instrument, the Rotary Dryer Rack.

Matthew Goodheart

Matthew Goodheart is a composer, improviser, sound artist, and educator who has developed a wide body of work that explores the relationships between performer, instrument, and listener. His diverse creations range from large-scale microtonal compositions to open improvisations to immersive sound installations – all unified by the analytic techniques and performative methodologies he has developed to bring forth the unique and subtle acoustic properties of individual musical instruments. Goodheart’s approach results in a “generative foundation” for exploring issues of sound in relation to physicality, perception, technology, and cultural ritual. A life-long teacher, he is the Assistant Professor of Music Composition in the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic University.

Associated project: but in things

“but in things” is an immersive sound installation exploring issues of embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiment. The work features transducer activated instruments and objects placed throughout the given space. As audience members wearing bone-conducting headphones enter, sound emerges both from the instruments and through headphones, responding to their movements and evolving as they progress. The work will be programmed in Max.

Valérie Hallier

Valérie Hallier’s multiple-media work consists of series and installations that portray a contemporary character while exploring the dynamics between the natural, the human and the technological realms. -“Hallier’s work follows an integrative continuum that utilizes technology as tool and object, generating an exquisite tension between the humanistic and mechanistic sense of Being.” J.Escalona.

Hallier’s early multimedia work has received prizes at ACM Siggraph (FL), SCAN Arts Symposium (PA), Ars Electronica in Finland and Anima Mundi in Brazil. She has shown her work internationally, in the US with most recently a solo show at NARS Foundation this past February 2020, at BRIC Arts Media, MediaNoche gallery and CAS Arts Center in New York. In Europe, solo shows venues include the ESAM in Caen, France and Nadiana Idriss gallery in Berlin, Germany. Group shows in the US include Trestle gallery, A.I.R. gallery, BRIC, Brooklyn Council for the Arts and Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn, SVA Flatiron gallery and Tribes galleries in Manhattan, The Housatonic Museum (CT).

Hallier worked on a commission for the Drawing Center (NYC) and was selected for BRIC’s first edition Biennial in Brooklyn. Residencies include LMCC Swing Space artist residency on Governor Island, Pioneer Works, NARS Foundation, Trestle Art Space and currently Harvestworks New work residency in NYC.  http://www.valeriehallier.com

Associated project: Scream Now

Inspired by the French Medieval “crieur public”, the full Scream Now project combines an app and a screaming booth. The artwork takes a fundamental yet repressed human expression such as a scream and offers a sanctuary to scream out in public spaces while generating a transformative experience for the user. Each scream generates a visualization seen outside from an LED screen wrapped around the booth, and eventually visible on the user’s smartphones via the app.

Victoria Manganiello

Victoria Manganiello is a textile artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Named as one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30, Victoria has received multiple internationally recognized grants and residency appointments and has exhibited her work at established museums throughout the USA and internationally. Exploring the intersections between materiality, technology, geography and storytelling, Victoria’s installation work, abstract paintings, and kinetic sculptures are made meticulously with hand-woven textiles using hand-spun yarn and hand-mixed natural and synthetic color dyes alongside mechanical alternatives and modern technologies. She is currently a professor of Textiles at NYU and Parson’s the New School.

Associated project: Untitled

Victoria Manganiello will create a large-scale textile installation made up of soft speakers using embroidered conductive thread and magnets. She uses textiles as a material to the stories of people throughout history (who were often women, indigenous peoples and others outside the paradigm) who have been computing long before the modern computer. The sounds and stories of ancient technologies will emerge directly from the cloth asking a viewer to consider what is a textile? what is a sound? and what is technology?

Charlotte Mundy

Soprano Charlotte Mundy specializes in music that is new, daring and sublime. She has been called a “daredevil with an unbreakable spine” (SF Classical Voice). An active improviser and composer, Mundy’s original music has been performed on the Resonant Bodies and Chance and Circumstance Festival. She was composer and dramaturg of the shadow play/dance ‘What Grows on Trees,’ which has been presented on the Higher Ground Festival and the Periapsis Music and Dance series. As a founding member of “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care if You Listen), TAK ensemble, Mundy performs at venues such as the Library of Congress, Stanford University and Miller Theater.

Associated project: Light as a Feather

Charlotte Mundy will create an 8-channel sound installation called ‘Light as a Feather.’ The sounds in ‘Light as a Feather’ will be created through her original vocal improvisations. The composition will be in 3 movements, each around 10 min. long and paired with a physical element (light, wind or scent), controlled via max patch. ‘Light as a Feather’ will be presented at the Harvestworks House on Governor’s Island in summer 2020.

Surabhi Saraf

Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology using embodiment as a tool and the body as a site for transformation. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY.

She has had solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser Gallery, in Los Angeles, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai and Hosfelt gallery in San Francisco. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, Greece, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival (Bologna), and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Her videos have been shown at TIMES SQUARE, New York, Blanton Museum, Austin, the Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Out Sydney & Mumbai, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Art Practical, and KQED Arts. Surabhi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Associated project: Awoke & Awokened: Alaap

Awoke & Awokened: Alaap is an installation of experimental music, video, and sculpture by Surabhi Saraf. Weaving together the alchemical materiality of modern-day tech alongside the ancient technologies of earth, atmosphere, heat, and pressure, Saraf presents a speculative mythology of AI. The work unfolds as a series of encounters with Awoke — a mythical artificial emotional intelligence — and its believers. 

Chuck Bettis

Chuck Bettis was raised in the fertile harDCore soil, nourished within Baltimore’s enigmatic avantgarde gatherings, and currently blossoming in New York’s downtown musical tribe. His unique blend of electronics and throat has led him into various collaborations with great musicians from around the globe. He has performed live collaborations with John Zorn, Fred Frith, Matmos, Yoshimio, Mephista and Afrirampo to name a few, recorded & played live with; Ikue Mori, Nautical Almanac, Berangere Maximin, Yellow Swans, Toshio Kajiwara, Jad Atoui, etc, plus a long history of punk bands he was in. Chuck also has had residencies at The Stone (NYC), INA GRM (Paris, France), Kurimanzutto Gallery (NYC) and EMS (Stockholm, Sweden).

Michael Foster

Michael Foster is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of free improvisation, noise, free jazz, graphic & video notation, performance art, and other forms of “weird” music. Foster utilizes extensive instrumental preparations, augmenting his saxophone with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples as a method of queering the instrument’s history and dynamic relationships.

In addition to his work as a performer he is also active as a curator throughout New York City, co-founding “Queer Trash,” a curatorial collective focusing on providing visibility to LGBTQIA+ performers engaged in experimental performance practices.

Miguel Frasconi

Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improviser whose instrumentarium includes glass objects, electronics, and instruments of his own design. His array of activities includes collaborations with the Balinese composer Dewa Berata on music for a large-scale shadowplay, with operatic tenor John Duykers on unique music/theater events, with the Tibetan songwriter Techung, with whom he has toured throughout India, and has worked closely with composers John Cage, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney and Jon Hassell. He was a founding member of The Glass Orchestra, the internationally renowned ensemble featuring all glass instruments (1977-86), and the sound-sculpture band Möbius Operandi (1990-95) ) and has performed as a keyboardist with the Paul Dresher Ensemble (1988-95) and the Philip Glass Ensemble (1992).

Volker Geotze

Volker Goetze is a composer and filmmaker. His time in Africa inspired him to direct a feature-documentary about the oral history, extending the work into a live-performance-documentary recounting the creation of the African harp. His trumpet-kora duo transcends geographic and musical boundaries resulting in a unique musical synthesis that fused the timeless tradition of the storyteller/griot with a modern perspective, which addresses themes of our ancient spiritual roots, and our hurried, dehumanized modern strife. This making him a specialist working and supporting oral cultures creating new narratives transmitting the culture into the 21st century.

Associated project: Wall of Forgotten Natives

Volker Goetze: “Wall of Forgotten Natives” is about Native Americans in Minnesota who struggle with indigenous homelessness and historic trauma celebrating culture and Identify as a healing force. A community of elders, from several tribes, comes together to address addiction and displacement. Having nowhere else to go, they survive by living in a makeshift encampment […]

Muyassar Kurdi

Muyassar Kurdi (b. 1989 in Chicago) is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, analog photography and film. She has toured extensively in the U.S. and throughout Europe. She currently focuses her attention to interweaving homemade electronic instruments into her vocal and dance performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through vicious noise, ritualistic chants, and meditative movements.

Associated project: Brain Works

Muyassar Kurdi: ‘Brain Works’ presents new inventions in language, sound (homemade electronics), images, movement, and performance based on the fragments of her near-death experience. Having suffered a brain injury in 2004, Muyassar taps into the idea of memory in ‘Brain Works.” Having had to relearn how to use her entire body again, to speak, and […]

Aimee Norwich

Aimee Norwich is a musician, inventor, filmmaker, instrument builder, and visual artist. Her education is in jazz and classical electric bass, audio production, room acoustics, and electronics. She plays a Hybrid Bass, Bass Kit (both her inventions), Fretless Bass, Piccolo Bass, Baritone Ukulele, and Electric Bass, along with various FX pedals. She also builds and plays odd folk instruments, such as her Tabletop One-string Bass.

Aimee’s music consists of original compositions and arrangements of songs like John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Much of the technology she uses in the recording studio and for live performances is gear that she builds, such as tube microphones, preamps, and various gadgets.

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: Sonic Flotsam

Taking off from Pauline Oliveros’ Apple Box approach, a suitcase (usually found in the city the piece is performed in) acts as the instrument. Together with its contact microphones it functions as a filter and amplifier for the sounds coaxed from its resonant body.

Todd Anderson

Todd Anderson is a digital poet and web artist focused on building websites and Chrome extensions for use in live performance as both a solo performer and member of the digital performance group H0t Club. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Code + Liberal Arts at Eugene Lang College of the New School. He also helps run Babycastles, an indie-game gallery and event space, the Illuminator, a guerrilla projection collective and School for Poetic Computation, an artist-run creative tech school. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the five-years-running language + technology talk series every third Thursday at Babycastles.

Associated project: HitchHiker

Todd Anderson will work on HitchHiker, a chrome extension for doing live performances inside other people’s web browsers. Whenever the performer goes to a new website on their computer, all of the audience members are taken to that website. The performer can then modify the content of the website, speak through text-to-speech voice, play sounds, show images and more. Todd will continue to develop Hitchhiker and design several new performances that bring together live and remote audiences.

Dakota Gearhart

Dakota Gearhart is an artist and educator based in Queens, NY. Her work is rooted in video yet spans performance, sound, text, sculpture, collage, and room-sized multimedia installations. She uses found materials she collects at places like microbiology labs, spam folders, and industrial dumps. She bundles together her interests in perception, biology, queerness, the role of technology and intimacy, humor, and the importance of world-building to articulate more creative and less oppressive futures.

Associated project: Life Touching Life

Dakota Gearhart will complete Life Touching Life, an episodic video series she is making for the internet that shares fiction and nonfiction stories of personal healing from animals, plants, and humans. Set in the non-violent future where all living beings are treated equally, this web series depicts what a non-binary and multi-species world might look like. A former marine biologist turned visual artist; Dakota celebrates the queerness of nature while offering an opposition to ingrained power structures of Western logic.

Mike Bullock

Mike Bullock is a composer, improviser, visual artist, and writer based in Western Massachusetts. Bullock has been performing since the mid-90s at venues across the US and in Europe, including Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden; Instants Chavirés in Paris; Café OTO in London; Experimental Intermedia and ISSUE Project Room in New York City; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and EMPAC in Troy, NY. In June 2015, Bullock received a Performance Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Bullock is an Ambassador for The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland [KREV] and also serves as the KREV Minister of Fine Noise and Light.

Associated project: Wave Field Synthesis system

Mike Bullock is designing and building a Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) system that will be portable and flexible. Wave field synthesis (WFS) is a spatial audio technology that places virtual sound sources in real space with a high degree of precision, using anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of small speakers in a linear array. Mike will continue researching, refining, and building WFS systems, and invite composers and artists to explore the system. To the listener, the synthesized source sounds “real” no matter where the listener sits. Listeners can perceive musical instruments as if they were in the presence of real musicians, or take a walk inside a highly realistic natural environment.

Sarah Weaver

Sarah Weaver, Ph.D. is a New York-based contemporary composer, conductor, technologist, educator, and researcher working internationally as a specialist in Network Arts. Network Arts utilizes the internet as an artistic medium and is also conceived as a metaphor for localized works. Weaver is Director of the Sarah Weaver Ensemble, NowNet Arts Ensemble, and NowNet Arts Inc. including the NowNet Arts Festival and NowNet Arts Conference.

Associated project: Universal Synchrony Music: TESS

Sarah Weaver will work on the “Universal Synchrony Music: TESS” is an electroacoustic telematic ensemble project in collaboration with the NASA TESS Mission exploring musical, technological, and metaphorical realizations of synchrony. Sonification of data from TESS Mission on habitable stars and planets is utilized for presence and interaction for synchrony. The project builds on “Universal Synchrony Music: Kepler/K2 Mission” (2013-2019), now utilizing TESS Mission data located closer to Earth.

Matthew Mottel

Sonia Louise Davis