To hear a selection from “Something Like Fireworks” go here.

The work of Stephen Vitiello includes collaborations with composers and visual artists. Most well-known for his World Trade Center Recordings, in which he created a sonic portrait of one of the towers through the use of contact microphones, Vitiello’s recent work links sound with light and color to create an enveloping physical experience.

A synesthetic exhibition lavishly brimming with resonant frequencies of sound and light! The Amazing Acoustaphotophonogrammitron is a group show featuring work by makers who find themselves somewhere between visual artist and musician.

Curated by MCLA Gallery 51 Gallery Manager, Ven Voisey, The Amazing Acoustaphotophonagrammitron features the work of local and national artists: Joshua Churchill (CA), Paul de Jong (NY), Lesley Flanigan (NY), Christy Georg (MA), Mark Mulherrin (MA), Ed Osborn (RI), Tristan Perich (NY), Ven Voisey (MA) and Nick Zammuto (VT).

“This show is about overlap and influence of the different senses.” says Voisey, “ Included are artists whose processes seamlessly move through mediums and whose works are simultaneously audio and visual instruments.”

On Thursday February 25, at 7:30 pm, an evening of in-gallery performances by several of the exhibition participants, including Paul de Jong, Lesley Flanigan, Tristan Perich, and Ven Voisey (aka Cabinets). For more info and to buy tickets, please visit www.mcla.edu/presents.

The Amazing Acoustaphotophonogrammitron is on exhibit through March 21, 2010.

MCLA Gallery 51, at 51 Main Street in North Adams, is open every day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call (413) 664-8718, or go to www.mcla.edu/Gallery51. MCLA Gallery 51 is a program of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=273029714520&index=1

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ODDLY ALIVE
Please join us for the opening reception of Oddly Alive at the Arts
Center for the Capital Region in Troy, NY, Friday, January 29, 2010,
from 5 to 9pm. The exhibition will run through March 19.

Oddly Alive is curated by Lauren Wolk and features work by:
Rachel Abrams
Graham Caldwell
Marianne Fourie
Sabrina Gschwandtner
Mayumi Ishino
Sky Kim
Ven Voisey

Uniting the artists of Oddly Alive is their rejection of the inertness
of materials. Instead, each explores his or her medium’s capacity to
conjure life. Three of the artists put their material into a state of
action: Sabrina Gschwandtner explores the behavior of string in
response to the light and fan of a slide projector; Ven Voisey’s
suspended apparatus has a cacophonous response to approaching viewers;
Mayumi Ishino performance at the opening yields portraits on mirrors,
which she then smashed and left on display. The works of the other
four artists teem with the sheer quality of life: Graham Caldwell’s
glass sculptures reference a fierce mouth, a complex system of veins,
or the serenity of Spanish moss; Marianne Fourie’s vibratory
photomontages describe the passing of time, rather than a preserving a
single moment; Rachel Abrams’s idiosyncratic sculptures result from
her studies of ecosystems, sea life and myriad biological forms;
finally, Sky Kim’s paintings and drawings feature a seriality of
circles and curves, alluding to the texture of skin, muscle tissue,
cells, and the dramatic energy of seeds about to sprout.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=264341268260&index=1

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And continuing for the next couple days:

@ Index Art Center
Index presents:
Rock Dreams: Artist Made Songs
Curated by Steven Dressler

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=208963595905

Artists:
Authority Office
Daniel Brophy
CAPTURE
Stephen Chopek
Chris George
Sarah Granett
Jodie Mack
Erica Magrey
Rebecca Major
Frankie Martin
Rachel Mason
Mirror Mirror
Michelle Mumoli
Luk Paard
Kelly Pinho
Flash Prezlowski
Theresa Rivezzo
Eddy Savage
Amanda Thackray
Ven Voisey
Ellen Whitney
Zev and the Mantis

INDEX
585 Broad Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.indexartcenter.org
index.gallery@gmail.com
201-218-9725

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Share Prize: Orchestra Meccanica Marinette plays Nag Hammadi :: November 3 and 5, 2009 at 6:00 p.m. :: Regional Museum of Natural Science at via Giolitti 36, Torino.

The orchestra consists of robot drummers that play steel drums “live”, under the direction of a performer. The interactive rhythms of the OMM sound out the movement, work and machinery of Turin industry. The subtext moves along the lines of the “Nag Hammadi”, the third-century A.D. Gnostic text, before plunging into contemporary mythologies through pieces inspired by the works of Ballard and Burroughs, exploring the relationship between, and the fusion of, human and machine.

The theme of Share 2009 is Market Forces. The Share Festival in 2009 showcases works about complexity. “Market Forces” responds to the crucial contemporary concerns which affect us all. These works explore what happens when we connect things together into systems and set these systems into motion - questions of chaos and value, meaning and randomness, politics and economics. These unstable abstractions have a concrete effect on our daily lives.

Share Festival will also be featuring the international collective for synesthetic media, : Optofonica”, created by Maurizio Martinucci aka Tez, who lives and works in Amsterdam. Among the numerous artists working with the collective, the Festival will be presenting Tez, with his performance “pv868″, “Martis Fennis” and Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand with their work “10000 peacock feathers in foaming acid”, a performance using a soap film and laser. The /OSC (Optofonica Surround Cinema)/ will also be a feature of the night.

Club To Club will be presenting: Jon Hopkins, composer, pianist and self-taught recording technician. Hopkins shows no disdain to working with the most diverse artistic forms – adding to his movie soundtracks is his recent score for Entity, the latest production by choreographer
Wayne McGregor; Teho Teardo is an Italian composer and musician. After having released a fourth album with Meathead and having worked with Mick Harris (Scorn, Napalm Death) and Lydia Lunch, Teardo now composes music scores for film and television.

For more information: http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=941&lang=en

2009 is the centenary of the publication of The Plan of Chicago. The Synesthetic Plan of Chicago: A Multi-Sensory Journey Through Chicago and Its Neighborhoods corresponds with the celebration of this historic event. An interactive installation at the Chicago Cultural Center Visitor Information Center (77 E. Randolph Street), The Synesthetic Plan of Chicago is part of the citywide summer tourism initiative, Explore Chicago: Take A Neighborhood Vacation (June 1–September 30). More than 40 artists and organizations have joined in creating this exploration of Chicago through the five senses.

Visitors and locals can experience Chicago imagery, sounds, fragrances, flavors and textures captured in miniature neighborhood scenes such as a mapping of the tastes and recipes of Chinatown, and an exploration of East Garfield Park candy. SPC’s participating artists and organizations have designed installation pieces which invite people to interact with the sensory “artifacts” of Chicago in creative and imaginative ways, and to think about synesthetic connections with things that relate to Chicago. The Synesthetic Plan of Chicago is commissioned by the City of Chicago, and it is co-curated by Annie Heckman and Dan Godston.

Explore Chicago: Take A Neighborhood Vacation showcases the city’s famous enclaves through over 100 insider events and activities including this special exhibition. Presented in collaboration with Chicago cultural and neighborhood organizations, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago Office of Tourism and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Bureau of Tourism.

This year the main focus of the workshop is on perceptual processes. The project title — Halbinseln der Wahrnehmung/ Peninsulae of Perception — is a reference to a diary written by a person afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. The diary has been proposed as research libretto for investigations into differing perceptual channels and psycho-social research on autism, synaesthesia, music composition and real-time performance. The acoustic-musical dimension of the 2009 laboratory is complemented by research into design or wearable audiophonics and acousmatic architectures and sound perceptions.

The workshop brings together artists, scientists and researchers from different backgrounds committed to sharing their experiences and catalyzing multidisciplinary science-art collaborations. Special guests in residence at the summer lab are Stefan Scheib and Katharina Bihler from the Liquid Penguin Ensemble, an experimental music-theatre group that gained wide recognition through their award-winning radio music dramas. Their latest production, “Bout du Monde,” has just been selected radio drama of the month (June 2009) by the German Academy of the Performing Arts. Previously, “GRAS WACHSEN HÖREN - das biolingua Institut wir 100 Jahre alt” was awarded the prize for best german radio drama and the ARD Online Award in 2008. Their music theatre performance “Eurydike hinter den Grenzen” (2007) was shown at festivals in Luxembourg, Düsseldorf, Saarbrücken and other venues.

The laboratory is organized by theatre director and media artist Johannes Birringer who founded the Interaktionslabor in 2003 and currently holds a professorship in digital performance at Brunel University, London. “We have had many inquiries this year, as our subject combines research into media arts and psychology,” Birringer says, “and the lab also has a continuing commitment to challenging our assumptions about space and perceptual constructions. We look forward to the participants from Latin America, Great Britain, France and Switzerland who will join artists and educators from the region.” The lab ensemble plans to create a sonic installation in the 10KV, a former electric plant on the campus of the mine. The Interaktionslabor, which went on tour last summer to Belo Horizonte, Brasil, has become increasingly well known for its unique peripheral location, its independent, autonomous status, and the transcultural partnteships it has helped to build over the years.

The lab ensemble plans to create a sonic installation in the 10KV, a former electric plant on the campus of the mine. The Interaktionslabor, which went on tour last summer to Belo Horizonte, Brasil, has become increasingly well known for its unique peripheral location, its independent, autonomous status, and the transcultural partnerships it has helped to build over the years.
The activities are open to visitors, and information about the proceedings and the research process can be found here.

Produced in partnership with Roulette’s Mixology Festival, Gestures and Responsive Media consists of three concert programs focusing on modern experiments in performance technology. Central to this series is the exciting way that live performers are exploring the use of gesture to control computers and building technological environments for free, improvisatory play. From Pamela Z’s gesture-based vocal experiments to Sha Xin Wei’s phenomenological experiments with movement and media, the presenting artists not only expand the boundaries of traditional performance and instrumentation, but also humanize electronics through creative means.

May 14 - Pamela Z / Elliott Sharp

>Pamela Z will perform work for voice, electronics, and interactive video including Suitcase Suite, being developed as part of her work-in-progress Baggage Allowance. Elliot Sharp will present new works as part of his ongoing Tectonics project. Tectonics is the name under which Sharp performs his solo electro acoustic music. The live concerts are performed on his 8-string guitar bass, a laptop computer running a variety of applications, hardware processors, plus various electronically modified horns.

May 15 - Zach Layton / Sha Xin Wei

Zach Layton will perform new works exploring synaesthesia, geometric forms, minimal surfaces, kinetic visual patterns and sonic gestures. Sha Xin Wei, with Clarinda Mac Low, will present, Ouija, an open workshop/seminar experiment with dancers in responsive media. Ouija is a phenomenological experiment about gesture, intention and collective vs. individual agency. It uses the forms of a contemporary dance and movement art workshop to explore the medium of movement and media.

May 16 - Sawako / Bill Hsu & James Fei

Sawako, with a bit of help from technology, will improvise with underwater recordings from around NYC and Hawaii, as well as with actual water. Aqua Field is Sawako’s recent ongoing project related to water and the ocean. Bill Hsu and James Fei will perform a suite of pieces for alto saxophone and electronics. Hsu’s software extracts timbral and gestural information from the real-time saxophone performance, and uses this information to guide its behavior. The pieces will explore a range of system behavior, from completely autonomous improvisation to full manual control.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Pamela Z is a composer/performer who makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, samples, and gesture activated MIDI controllers. She has also composed scores for dance, film, and new music chamber ensembles. She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award, the ASCAP Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention and the NEA/JUSFC Fellowship.

Elliott Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer and central figure to the avant-garde experimental music scene in New York City for over thirty years. He has released over 200 recordings spanning the musical spectrum but all bearing his personal sound. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction as well as pioneering real-time computer-based improvisation with his Virtual Stance project of 1986. Sharp’s solo Tectonics program was featured at the re-opening of NYC’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center in October 1997.

Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser and new-media artist with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental culture and architecture. Based in Brooklyn, his work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns. Zach has performed and exhibited at many venues in New York, South America and Europe. Zach is also founder of Brooklyn’s monthly experimental music series, Darmstadt: classics of the avant-garde co-curated with Nick Hallett. He is co-curator of the PS1 summer warm-up music series and is one of the directors of Issue Project Room.

Sawako is a Tokyo/NYC-based sound sculptor. After beginning in video art, Sawako shifted her focus from the video camera to sound. Sawako did audio and/or live performances in Japan, USA, Lisbon, London and Canada among other countries, and has collaborated with a wide range of artists such as Taylor Deupree, Taku Sugimoto, Chika, O.blaat, Toshimaru Nakamura, Jacob Kirkegaard and Andrew Deutsch. Sawako obtained a Master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and received a B.A. from Environmental Information Department at Keio University, SFC, Japan. Born in Nagoya, Japan.

Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, Sha Xin Wei directs the Topological Media Lab, a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. Sha Xin Wei was trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures. In 1998, Sha also co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco, to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance.

BIll Hsu builds software and performs with electronics. His work mostly involves using gestural interfaces to control synthesis, and exploring systems that interact with human performers. His recent performances include concerts at NIME 2007 and MIX Festival 2007 (both New York), and Fete Quaqua 2008 (London). He teaches computer science at San Francisco State University.

James Fei (b. Taipei, Taiwan) moved to the US in 1992 to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. He has since been active as a composer, improviser and sound artist. Works by Fei have been performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, MATA Micro Orchestra and Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest. Fei teaches sound art and intermedia at Mills College.

“Artists designing software and interfaces that become the engines of their art constitute an emerging field where viewers and performers participate and collaborate with machines to produce a new sensory experience.”

Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center is a nonprofit that provides resources for artists to learn digital tools and exhibit experimental work created with digital technologies. Our programs are made possible with funds from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Jerome Foundation, media The foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, The New York State Music Fund, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, The Argosy Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, The NY Community Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation and the Friends of Harvestworks.

Roulette Intermedium is an Experimental and New Music presenting organization dedicated to the development of emerging and established artists. Since 1978, our ongoing purpose has been to provide opportunities for innovative composers, musicians, sound artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to present their work in accessible, appropriate and professional productions. Roulette hosts over 100 New Music concerts each season, with our annual spring Mixology Festival focusing on new and unusual uses of technology in music.

A captivating weekend packed with visionary new motion graphic video and live cinematic work that spans the range of moving image creative practice, from industry to art gallery. The weekend kicks off with a moving audiovisual performance by Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and Olga Mink and a reception with lush live video and music by EMPAC luminaries skfl and jenkins. Over three days from the mezzanine to the studios, from the Theater to the Café, EMPAC spaces will flicker and pulse with sound and vision courtesy of the internationally revered onedotzero digital film festival.

On Saturday night local musician and multimedia artist Jesse Stiles presents a new live score for and within Quayola’s brilliant video installation viewed on a massive screen suspended on the ceiling. Quayola will then follow with his own performance, Path to Abstraction a live synesthetic audiovisual event.

All-day screenings feature compilations of short form videos that represent the latest innovative work in moving image including music videos, character animation, experimental digital shorts and motion graphic design.

Extraordinary installations by Troika and Quayola will be installed in the EMPAC studios and mezzanine, which also includes a lounge and café.

For movie demonstrating the effect of visualizing sound waves by way of fire flames,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpovwbPGEoo

If you’re interested, see digital pyrotechnic infernoptix and a 96-inch ’screen’ that uses computer-controlled bursts of fire to create scrolling text, simple animations & freehand sketching in a 12 x 7 pixel array.

The OTOLAB collective will introduce its work to the public along with Marco Mancuso (critic, curator and director of Digicult) who has long followed and promoted their multimedia production. Two audiovisual performances will follow, Circo Ipnotico and Giardini Neri (european debut).

OTOLAB was born in 2001 in Milan as an affinity group made up of musicians, djs, vjs, video artists, video makers, web designers, graphic designers and architects who embarked on a common path within electronic music and audiovisual research. OTOLAB projects evolve through laboratory, seminar and liveset activities following principles of mutual exchange and support, free dissemination of knowledge and experimentation. The production is composed of individual and collective projects where languages in use range from techno to dub to industrial, always investigating a symbiotic relationship between sounds and images. OTOLAB is a cultural association that produces livemedia, audio and audiovisual projects, installations, seminars and workshops. They have been hosted at festivals, cultural initiatives, museums, national and international galleries and have promoted self-managed cultural initiatives.

Otolab - Circo Ipnotico - Live at Sonic Acts XII from Digicult on Vimeo.

CIRCO IPNOTICO: Is an audiovisual improv live session investigating the world of perception featuring an open lineup of 5 performers. The sound is composed of dub architectures and noise through a dense mix of synths and laptops. visual: ale, fd, orgone, peppolasagna, xo00 / sound: mud, nina, tonylight; concept: otolab / total time: around 35′ / production: otolab 2007

GIARDINI NERI: “the garden as a vision of the soul” obtained through a complex, non linear storyboard. Images and sounds are mixed during the performance to re-create a nocturnal synaesthetic oniric experience in a garden. visual: mud, xo00, androsyn / sound: mud, _dies / software implementation: orgone; concept: otolab / total time: around 35′ / production: otolab 2008

thanks to: LAB laboratorioartibovisa/Angelo Colombo, Milano; Hotel Pupik Artists in Residence in der Schwarzenberg’schen Meierei in Schrattenberg, Austria; in collaboration with con Die Schachtel, Milano; and sustained by Provincia di Milano- inContemporanea la rete dell’arte.

“Rolf Julius integrates acoustic and visual coordinates in his installative, synaesthetic concepts. Far removed from elaborate electronics, he works with simple things and sounds of everyday life, an aesthetic and acoustic minimalism with the simplest use of cassettes and loudspeakers, effecting a concentrated perception…” - Rudolf Frieling

“One should bend down more often to pick up the tones lying around everywhere. In Manhattan, I saw and heard the really huge and thick and loud tones, the brown and the violet, but also the little quiet ones between the cracks in the walls, under the bridges, and among the chirping crickets on Roosevelt Island. I noticed this in 1984 during my stay at PS-1 in Queens. Now I would like to bring some of these small sounds into the gallery, sounds I picked up during many years, together with some new visual ones.” - Rolf Julius

Rolf Julius (b. 1939, Wilhelmshaven) studied art in Bremen and Berlin from 1961-69. In the mid- 70s he began experimenting with contemporary music to further elucidate his perception of the visual. In 1979 Julius started to integrate sound and noise into his creative work and initiated his own tape compositions. During 1995-96 Julius was a visiting professor at Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. He now lives and works in Berlin.

Julius has presented work at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, InSite ‘94 in San Diego, CA, Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA, PS-1 in New York, National Gallery in Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial in Niigata, Japan, Centre Pompidou in Paris, The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, and Museum of Modern Art Bremen in Germany, among other institutions.

This exhibition is a co-production with Singuhr Gallery in Berlin and has been generously supported by Charlie Morrow.

Curated by Carsten Seiffarth

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason has built on his efforts at Studio Five Beekman, a sound gallery he founded in1996. With two high-quality multi-channel sound systems Diapason’s listening environment draws a regular audience, and Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and other generous individuals. Diapason is a registered 501(c)(3) organization.