Reviewing

BENDERS AND CODERS

R. Luke Dubois, Matthew Ostrowski, Tristan Perich

BubblyFish, Nies-DeVega-Tammen, Peter Blasser, John Morton, MoFoPro

BENDERS AND CODERS
April 18-23, 2006, 15 Nassau Street, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s public venue

Harvestworks presented “Benders and Coders” a mini- performance series inside of the 2006 Bent Festival that highlighted music and art that uses electronic circuit bending and programming computer code to create new compositional and improvisational performance works.

“Benders and Coders” continues Harvestworks’ presentations of work made for new instruments, designed, programmed and built by contemporary composers, and focuses on two approaches to instrument design. “Benders” are artists who are modifying the circuitry of battery-powered children’s toys to create strange, new, and unintended sounds for creative purposes.

“Coders” are composers who are working in a culture of “live coding” where the performer is modifing active code and programming the music while on the concert stage. This culture been made possible by “SuperCollider”  and “ChucK”, Concurrent, On-the-fly Audio Programming, originated by Perry Cook and Ge Wang.

R. Luke Dubois with Matthew Ostrowski and Tristan Perich
Tuesday April 18th
CT_BT_GRAFFITI | Mausoleum_3 by Petko Dourmana

The interactive work proposes to virtually rebuild the lost physical space of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, that used to be the most remarkable public symbol during the Communistic period in Bulgaria, inside the visual and physical space of the entrance at 15 Nassau, New York. Using Bluetooth technology embedded in many mobile communication devices, visitors who have this functionality on their mobile phones are automatically invited to activate it and will receive a series of visual and audio fragments which recreate the space of the former Mausoleum.

BubblyFish
Wednesday April 19th
Haeyoung Kim AKA BubblyFish performed two works for game boy “Too Cute To Kill” and “The Tongue” followed by “Pick It Up” a circuit bending work using a telephone pickup to amplify the magnetic field of various electronic devices and looped by the Kaos pad. Andrew Bucksbarg VJ’d the performance.

Nies-DeVega-Tammen
Thursday April 20th
Die Schrauber is an ongoing collaboration between Hans Tammen, Joker Nies & Mario DeVega involving live sound processing, circuit bending and glitch sampling.

Peter Blasser
Friday April 21th
Peter and the audience will be led thru some abstract world sounds by his din datin dudero.

Peter Edwards
Saturday April 22nd

John Morton / MoFoPro: Dafna Naphtali, Benton C-Bainbridge and Alex Waterman
Sunday April 23rd
John Morton performed “Solo Works for Music Boxes.” MoFoPro performed using hardware and software system that is a melange of hi and lo technologies both bleeding edge and obsolete.

BENT 2006 was produced in association with the Harvestworks Benders and Coders concert series. The Benders and Coders Music Series was supported by The New York State Council on the Arts, and mediaThe foundation. BENT 2006 was presented in part with funds provided by The Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation. The festival is also presented in part with funds provided by Periscope Entertainment, a Los Angeles based film and television company that prides itself on supporting independent thought and innovative creation.

LOWER MANHATTAN CULTURAL COUNCIL (LMCC) Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is the leading voice for arts and culture in downtown New York City, producing cultural events and promoting the arts through grants, services, advocacy, and cultural development programs. 15 Nassau is Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s new temporary programming venue that will bring together artists, arts organizations and audiences in the unique context of Lower Manhattan. http://www.lmcc.net

“WHO’S IN CONTROL?”  New Interfaces for Artistic Expression
February 24,25,26, 2006, Eyebeam 540 West 21st Street, New York City
Presented in association with 3-Legged Dog Media and Theater Group presented
Sponsored by the NY State Council on the Arts and Tekserve, New York’s Largest Independent Apple Store and Service Facility

This symposium invited artists, composers, directors and programmers from all over the world to explore issues surrounding artistic control, authorship, changing states and computer interfaces by theater, dance, cinema, sound and visual artists. This is a continuation of Harvestworks’ ongoing series of conferences which bring the artists’ experimental work to a larger public.

“Puppets, Virtual Robots and Remote Control”
Friday February 24th
The Great Small Works Theater Company presented a low tech reinvention of Toy Theater, Luke DuBois presented real-time manipulation of sound and image, LoVid performrf with Sync Armonica, a video resynthesis instrument and  Remko Scha and Arthur Elsenaar performed with Huge Harry, a speech synthesis machine.

Symposium
Saturday, February 25th, 1:00 pm
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, from the MIT Media Lab gave the keynote speech followed by a discussion by leading theater directors including Kevin Cunningham, Director of Three Legged Dog Theater Company, Sha Xin Wei – Director of the Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, and Liz LeCompte. Director of The Wooster Group.

Panel Discussion
Saturday, February 25th, 4 – 6 pm
A panel discussion on sound art and music moderated by Jamie Allen and Gideon D’Arcangelo featuring artists Ben Rubin of EAR Studio, composer Jane Rigler from Relay~NYC and Dutch media artists Remko Scha and Arthur Elsenaar.

“Movement, Machines and Media Mutability”
Saturday, February 25th,  8:30 pm
Performances by composer and MacArthur Fellow George Lewis with turntablist Marina Rosenfeld; choreographer Beliz Demircioglu with sound artist Jamie Allen; and video artist Janene Higgins with composer Ikue Mori.

Panel Discussion
Sunday February 26th, 1:00 pm
A panel discussion on installation art and artist’s interfaces moderated by media curator Christina Yang with artists Zoe Beloff, Scott Snibbe and Julia Heyward.

Panel Discussion
Sunday February 26th, 4 -6 pm
A second panel covering authoring tools was moderated by composer Dafna Naftali with presentations by Troika Ranch, Stephan Moore/Benton C. Bainbridge and Luke DuBois.

“Custom Interface Systems”
Sunday February 26th, 8:30pm
The panel was followed by short performances of custom interface systems by Zachary Lieberman, Scott Fitzgerald, Leesa and Nicole Abahuni and Keiko Uenishi.

BubblyFish

Haeyoung Kim AKA BubblyFish performed two works for game boy “Too Cute To Kill” and “The Tongue” followed by “Pick It Up” a circuit bending work using a telephone pickup to amplify the magnetic field of various electronic devices and looped by the Kaos pad. Andrew Bucksbarg VJ’d the performance.

Nies-DeVega-Tammen

Die Schrauber is an ongoing collaboration between Hans Tammen, Joker Nies & Mario DeVega involving live sound processing, circuit bending and glitch sampling.

Peter Blasser

Baltimore based sound artist Peter Blasser makes electronic sound instruments based on androgynous nodes. He has explored the notion of “inner surface” in electronic sound production resulting in the creation of several large-scale electronic instruments that can produce sound on an exposed interior surface. One of his last instruments, 52 modules integrated into a large canvas roll, is a complex system of patches equipped with connectors that make it possible to produce sounds by directly touching the surface.

Peter Edwards

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Benton C-Bainbridge

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Alex Waterman

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Chris Csikszentmihalyi

from the MIT Media Lab gave the keynote speech followed by a discussion by leading theater directors including Kevin Cunningham, Director of Three Legged Dog Theater Company, Sha Xin Wei – Director of the Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, and Liz LeCompte. Director of The Wooster Group.

Thomas Ankersmit

Performed a solo concert using a Serge modular synthesizer, computers, analogue tape decks, saxophone, and a set of highly directional loudspeakers.

Gideon D’Arcangelo

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George Lewis

George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at
Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert
Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and
trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer and
interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia
installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is
documented on more than 130 recordings. His oral history is archived in Yale
University’s collection of “Major Figures in American Music,” and his published
articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have
appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. His widely acclaimed
book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
(University of Chicago Press, 2008) is a 2009 winner of the American Book Award.

Marina Rosenfeld

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York. Her work
has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale
performance works; installation; video projection; photography; and hybrid forms
drawing on these. In recent years, her work has been widely commissioned by
institutions in Europe and North America, including the Whitney Museum (Whitney
Biennials 2002 and 2008); Stedelijk Museum; Tate Modern; The Kitchen, Creative Time,
Artists Space and the Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco; and festivals
including the Holland Festival, Donaueschinge, Ars Electronica, Wien Modern,
Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, and Los Angeles’ Center for
Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, among many others. She has created
scores for the Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn dance companies and has
collaborated with artists including George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Lee
Ranaldo, DJ Olive, and Anthony Coleman, among many others. Rosenfeld recordings can
be found on Charhizma Softl Music, Room 40 and Innova. She’s been a member of the
faculty at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts in New York since 2003,
and co-chair of its program in Music/Sound since 2007. Rosenfeld is currently Artist
in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where her new work P.A. will be
presented as part of Performa 09, on November 21-22. More information at
www.marinarosenfeld.com.

Beliz Demircioglu

choreographer

Janene Higgins

Janene Higgins is an American media artist whose work focuses on print,
motion design, and video art. Her videos and digital media have been described as
“abstract narratives: undefinable journeys filled with sudden layerings and
allurings.” Her videoart began as a direct offshoot of her work in motion design,
incorporating collage, text, and image-layering into a time-based artform. Her work
in video includes single channel pieces, installation, live video performance, and
projection design for theater. 

Ikue Mori

Ikue Mori is a composer, improviser, and performer who began as a
drummer in the No Wave band DNA before moving on to work with drum machines and
laptops. She has collaborated with artists like Fred Frith, Ensemble Modern, and
John Zorn, and has received numerous awards, grants, and commissions for her cutting
edge work.

Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff (Film/Video) for the completion of the soundtrack for her
stereoscopic 16mm b&w film entitled Shadow Land From the Other Side. The film’s
title is taken from the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth d’Esperance, a materializing
medium who could produce full body apparitions. Zoe is a Digital Media Artist and
Filmmaker who has completed two CD-Rom’s; WHERE WHERE THERE THERE WHERE and BEYOND
as well as many films since 1987.

Scott Snibbe

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Julia Heyward

Julia Heyward began her career as a solo performance artist touring America and Europe throughout the 1970s with work that incorporated video, film, monologues and a cappella singing. She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Dafna Naphtali

Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician who composes/performs experimental, interactive electroacoustic music, drawing on a wide-ranging musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music and using her custom Max/MSP programming.  She’s performed in the US, Canada, Europe, India, Russia and the Middle East, with current projects including: “Audio Chandelier” multi-channel audio works presented in US, Berlin, and Montreal, in 2020 at Harvestworks New Works residencyGovernors Island  in collaboration with metalsmith/designer Ayala Naphtali, and in July 2023 at APO-33 in Nantes, France.  Other projects include “Robotica” (music robots and voice) ; and her Audio Augmented Reality soundwalks “Walkie Talkie Dream Angles”, and “Walkie Talkie Dream Garden” site-specific interactive compositions written for the U-GRUVE AR platform for NY’s Washington Square Park, and the waterfront areas in Williamsburg Brooklyn and Hamburg Germany.

Dafna’s has long-running projects in live sound-processing of voice and acoustic instruments, as her a performable “instrument”.  The current focus is on duos with acoustic instrumentalists –pianist Gordon Beeferman (CD “Pulsing Dot”), trombonist Jen Baker (Clip Mouth Unit), percussionist Luis Tabuenca (CD “Index of Refraction”), Chuck Bettis (electronics/throat – CD “Chatter Blip” and 2020 release “Microcosmopolitan”), saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Ras Moshe, saxophonist Edith Lettner, and a longtime duo with Hans Tammen (Buchla, endangered guitar). Performing as a singer (unplugged!), Naphtali has interpreted the music of Cage, Stockhausen (Stimmung w/choreographer Daria Fain / Magic Names vocal sextet), Eisler/Brecht (Hollywood Liederbuch), and contemporary composers Joshua Fried, Shelley Hirsch, Kitty Brazelton, JosĂ© Halac, Terry Riley (In C), Yotam Haber, Jonathan Bepler, she’s performed Spanish Civil War songs with the genre-transcending band Barbez, and organized “Voice Activated” public interventions for Make Music NY.

Troika Ranch

artist

Stephan Moore

Stephan Moore is a composer, improviser, audio artist, sound designer,
teacher, and curator based in Brooklyn and Providence. His creative work currently
manifests as electronic studio compositions, solo and group improvisations, sound
installation works, scores for collaborative performance pieces, and sound designs
for unusual circumstances. Evidence, his long-standing project with Scott Smallwood,
has performed widely and released several recordings over the past decade. He also
performs with the improvisation quartets Bumpr and Volume(n), and is a frequent
collaborator with the performance groups The Nerve Tank and a canary torsi. His
company, Isobel Audio, produces unique Hemisphere speakers. Since receiving an
Electronic Arts MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003, where he studied
with Pauline Oliveros and Curtis Bahn, he has created custom music software for a
number of composers and artists, and taught workshops and numerous college-level
courses in composition, programming, sound art and electronic music. He is the vice
president of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, and the curator and artistic
director of In The Garden of Sonic Delights at the Caramoor Center for Music and the
Arts, a 5-month exhibition of outdoor sound art across Westchester County in 2014.
From late 2004 to mid-2010, he performed over 250 concerts with the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company, serving as a touring musician, sound engineer, and music coordinator.
He is currently enrolled in the MEME Ph.D. program at Brown University.

Benton C. Bainbridge

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Zachary Lieberman

Zachary Lieberman has a simple goal: he wants you surprised. He creates artwork that uses technology in a playful and seamless way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He makes performances, installations, and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body, kinetic response and magic. See thesystemis.com and openframeworks.cc for more.

Scott Fitzgerald

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Leesa Abahuni

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Nicole Abahuni

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Keiko Uenishi

Keiko Uenishi is a sound art-i-vist, socio/environ composer, and a core
member of SHARE.nyc since 2001. Uenishi is known for her works formed through
experiments in restructuring and analyzing one’s relationship through aural
memory/perceptions in sociological, cultural, and/or psychological contexts.