MiniOptoSonic Tea with live sets by: Sawako (visuals and sound), Anton Marini, and Mary Ann Benedetto (live visuals) with Aerostatic (live sound) :: April 27, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue, 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

Originally born in Nagoya, Japan, Sawako is a timeline-based artist, a sound sculptor and a signal alchemist currently based in Brooklyn USA. Once through the processor named Sawako, memories in everyday life float in space vividly with a digital yet organic texture. She is interested in the soundscape, the signal scape and the media scape of digital era, and her activities are making bridge between public and private, virtual and actual world. She has 4 solo CD releases from 12k, and/OAR and Anticipate, has collaborated with a wide range of artists such as Taylor Deupree, Andrew Deutsch, Kenneth Kirschner, Taku Sugimoto Toshimaru Nakamura, Chika, O.blaat, asuna, Daisuke Miyatani, Radio Sonde, Ryan Francesconi and Jacob Kirkegaard, and has performed in Tonic, WFC, Armory Show, Issue Project Room, Roulette, Monkey Town (NYC); Send + Receive Festival, MUTEK (Canada), Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), m12 (Berlin), Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), offsite, Apple Store Sinsaibashi (Japan); OFFF Festival (Lisbon), Glade Festival, Resonance FM, ICA London (UK); and other venues in the US, Europe and Japan. Sawako obtained a Master¹s degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University¹s Tisch School of the Arts.

Anton Marini (vade) is a video performance artist, programmer and video engineer specializing realtime video systems, glitch aesthetics and visual effects. His work explores designing software environments and systems for realtime video as well as performing abstract visualizations and urban video collages. Anton Marini is a former researcher in residence at NYU’s Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and has taught at Parsons/New School Design and Technology Department. He has performed at events such as Transmediale, Ultrasound festival, BAP, Anyware, Eyewash, Rake, Share, Warper, as well as leading several workshops in new media programming environments. His work has been featured and performed in music videos airing on MTV, Comedy Central, on DVD and in venues across the globe.

Mary Ann Benedetto (outpt) is a visual artist working in a blend of traditional and digital media using photography, code, and mathematics. She teaches game development, procedural animation, and graphic design at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. She has preformed live visuals at Eyewash, Blip Festival, Pulsewave, and 8static.

Aerostatic – Based in Brooklyn, New York, Composer/Performers Terry Golob & Michele Darling AKA Aerostatic, utilize artifacts of sound generated by digital and analog processing in conjunction with a variety of interactive technologies. They compose a hybrid style of electronic music for performance, films, installations, and game environments. Their sonic aesthetic is a synthesis of formal classical elements manipulated by modern processes and the hyper-rhythmic pulse of futuristic electronics. The result evokes the intricacies of biomechanics and the integration of embedded micro technologies with existing and yet to be discovered organic entities. Aerostatic¹s music has been featured in venues, museums, festivals and performances in the United States, Argentina, England, Austria, Italy, Australia and Serbia. Their music and sound design clients include Sesame Street (Sesame Workshop), HBO, The Learning Channel, Moshi Monsters, Four Kids Entertainment and The Criterion Collection. Michele Darling is currently a professor of audio and sound design at the Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY Media Arts.

OptoSonic Tea is a regular series of meetings dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed by an informal discussion about the artists’ practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist, from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different perspectives on the present and the future.

Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer,
OptoSonic Tea is partly funded by the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.