Reviewing

Instrument For Unseen Letters

Rebecca Adorno

Instrument For Unseen Letters | Audio Palimpsest
Friday – Sunday, Oct 22 – 24 , 2010 at Harvestworks
In Rebecca Adorno’s Instrument for Unsent Letters, letters from strangers are collected through a blog where people write entries dedicated to someone in an anonymous way. They are then published in the form of audio clips as part of the installation. The random-automatized plucking of custom-made string instruments, by servomotors, controls the play back of the narrations.

SoHo Night: Art by Phillip Stearn
Thursday-Saturday, Oct 14-16, 2010 at Harvestworks
Harvestworks is pleased to present interdisciplinary artist Phillip Stearns as part of Soho Night, an evening of extended exhibition viewing and special programs by the not-for-profit arts organizations in Soho.

Emotion and Probabilistics in Music with Max/MSP/Jitter
Wednesday, Oct 13, 2010 at Harvestworks
When working with electronic music, one is often confronted with the need to make minute continuos variation that do not interfere too much with the basic sound and feel of the music. One way is to create all the details by hand, or to generate constrained randomness by means of markov chains or neural networks.

Plogue Bidule and The Concrete Sound System
Monday, Oct 11, 2010 at Harvestworks
Primus Luta first gravitated to the modular audio environment Plogue Bidule through his Heads project which sought to bridge electronic music production with head based jazz. This exploration led to the creation of a series of DSP instruments in Bidule which exploited the environments flexibility for both sound generation and modular control.

Song of Deborah – Little Charlie Festival
Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at Harvestworks
As Harvestworks participation in the Little Charlie Festival, VOICE AND ELECTRONICS – workshop in vocal music with electronics led by Charlie Morrow and Dafna Naphtali developing Charlie’s solo voice work, The Song of Deborah, from the Book of Judges. The piece will be presented with Harvestworks’ surround sound system. The text is translated from old Hebrew by Harris Lenowitz and Jerome Rothenberg.

Soundhack’s Tom Erbe presents new audio tools for Max/MSP and Pd
Monday, September 20, 2010 at Harvestworks
Tom Erbe, creator of the legendary audio tool SoundHack, will be presenting a collection of free Max and PD externals that he has developed over the past year. In this talk he will be demonstrating many tricks and techniques for using these externals.

Symbiosis: Between Technology, Humans, and Art
Saturday, August 28, 2010 at Harvestworks
A group show exploring interactive digital technology and its applications in contemporary art.  Curated by the interns at Harvestworks, this group presentation will feature interactive video installations, sound art and performance.

Listen In with Ricardo Arias, Nate Wooley, Hans Tammen
Friday July 23, 2010 at Harvestworks
Improviser and composer Ricardo Arias joined Nate Wooley on trumpet and Hans Tammen on endangered guitar in a musical performance utilizing his balloon kit, a number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc.

New Instruments for Improvisation and Experimental Approaches
June 28, 2010 HERE Art Center 2 pm – 10 pm
In a day-long series of presentations, talks and performances, artists Laetitia Sonami, Dafna Naphtali, Matthew Ostrowski and Hans Tammen will discuss how their practice as improvisers, sound artists and experimental musicians lead to inventing their own tools, and how these inventions in turn influenced their musical performance techniques.

Sofia Paraskeva (Rainbow Resonance) and Caroline Chen (Unsettled)
Monday June 14, 2010 at Harvestworks
Artist Caroline Chen presented Unsettled, a multi-channel composition using 5.1 surround sound and Sofia Paraskeva opened her installation Rainbow Resonance, a computer vision installation that generates colors and musical sounds of the equivalent sound frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum according to the motion of the participator.

Digital Materialism and its Ramifications in Arts Practice with Jon Meyer
Monday June 7, 2010 at Harvestworks
Artist Jon Meyer examined the relationship between hand and tool in art and described the relationship between coding and sketching.

Listen In with David Morneau and David Hindman
Friday March 12, 2010 at Harvestworks
Harvestworks Artist In Residence alumni Composer David Morneau discussed and demonstrated his approach to music visualization and sound artist David Hindman presented a set of custom software tools designed for use in instrument-controlled computer applications.

Listen In with David Watson
March 6 at Harvestworks
Harvestworks was pleased to present composer David Watson who is exploring and expanding the boundaries of the Highland Bagpipe instrument.  This work was produced in part through the Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program.

SoHo Night with Saya Woolfalk and Briggan Krauss
Thursday March 4, 2010 at Harvestworks
Harvestworks presented visual artist Saya Woolfalk and sound artist Briggan Krauss as part of Soho Night, an evening of extended exhibition viewing and special programs by the not-for-profit arts organizations in Soho.  These works were produced in part through the Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program.

Masterclass and Presentation by Lucky Dragons
Wednesday February 24, 2010 at Harvestworks
Harvestworks was pleased to present multi-media artist Luke Fischbeck of Los Angeles-based collective Lucky Dragons.

Listen In with Rosa Sanchez and Alain Baumann
Tuesday February 23, 2010 at Harvestworks
Barcelona-based artistic platform Konic thtr discussed their project A {d’aigua}, a short piece for a dancer, a performer and a musician, composing an audiovisual environment in real time.

Jenny Vogel / Caroline Chen & Caroline Bergonzi
January 7 at Harvestworks
As part of our Listen In series,  multi-media artists Jenny Vogel, Caroline Chen, and Caroline Bergonzi presented recent works developted while enrolled in Harvestworks’ Certificate Program.

Hui-Yu Su / Tomomi Adachi
January 11 at Harvestworks
Su will show his recent video series The Fabled Shoots based on TV culture and discuss his recent series of still photos titled Wish You Were Here. Together these works are exploring the idea of “Self-shooting generation” in Taiwan or maybe the whole world, an idea which represent a new point of view about self-conscious. Adachi will talk about his self-made instruments and original interfaces. Also he will present a performance with them..

Primus Luta

First gravitated to the modular audio environment Plogue Bidule through his Heads project which sought to bridge electronic music production with head based jazz. This exploration led to the creation of a series of DSP instruments in Bidule which exploited the environments flexibility for both sound generation and modular control.

Charlie Morrow

Led the workshop in vocal music with electronics developing Charlie’s solo voice work, The Song of Deborah, from the Book of Judges.

Tom Erbe

Creator of the legendary audio tool SoundHack, will be presenting a collection of free Max and PD externals that he has developed over the past year.

Laetitia Sonami

Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer and researcher. Sonami’s
sound performances, live‐film collaborations and sound installations focus on issues
of presence and participation. She has devised new gestural controllers for
performance and applies new technologies and appropriated media to achieve an
expression of immediacy through sound, place and objects. Best known for her unique
instrument, the elbow-length lady’s glove, she currently performs on her new
instrument, the Spring Spyre which is based on the application of neural networks to
real-time audio synthesis. Upcoming projects include the completion of a composition
in collaboration with Zeena Parkins as well as a live-film with SUE-C, the fourth in
their series. Sonami has received numerous awards among which the Herb Alpert Awards
in the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Awards.

Caroline Chen

Caroline Chen is a classical trained musician and electronic music composer. Her works explore the effect of spatial and temporal arrangement on one’s listening experience. There are constant aural stimulus in our daily life, in particular in new york city, sound of broken glasses, siren, subway noise, or sound in the nature– the sound of the ocean, or walking in the park, the sound of breathing, leaves rustling, and so on. “At times, I record these sounds, at times, I use the pre-recorded samples. I take and manipulate them generating new sounds which one may not recognize its sonic source, thus, giving a listener a different aural experience. I also integrate these new sounds with video that I create. I scan and render 2D paintings into 3D animated digital images that transform over time. Projecting sounds in space along with projecting these 3D images in motion on a large screen create an unique visual-aural experience.

Jon Meyer

Examined the relationship between hand and tool in art and described the relationship between coding and sketching.

David Morneau

David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a “shining beacon” of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output includes Love Songs, an album of hybrid pop/art songs that combine Shakespeare’s Sonnets with contemporary poetry (described in NM421 as “elegantly rendered”), 60×365, a year-long podcast project for which he composed a new one-minute piece every day (labeled “impressive” by NPR’s All Things Considered), and Broken Memory, an album of noisy drones and beats extracted from a vintage Nintendo Gameboy. A review on Grindthieves International exclaims that Broken Memory “absolutely wrecks shop…. For that, David Morneau wins.”

David Hindman

David Hindman will discuss his Harvestworks Residency project, the
Public Guitar-Controlled Video Game Competition. He will focus on the guitar as an
H.I. device and the implementation of the video game PONG using Max/Msp/Jitter. A
brief performance of guitar-controlled PONG will include collaborator Evan Drummond
as the ensemble Modal Kombat. Hindman is an interactive artist and designer working
in music, video games, and interface design. At NYU’s ITP he designed and developed
systems for controlling video games with musical instruments. David is a contributor
to the New Instruments for Musical Expression Conference (NIME) and recently was a
guest speaker at the 2007 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

David Watson

David Watson (born 1960) Originally from New Zealand, David Watson is
an experimental musician who has lived in New York since 1987. He generally performs
as a guitarist, or as a highland bagpiper. Watson has a long-standing project with
Lee Ranaldo, he has recorded with Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Chris Mann, John
Zorn and many others. He has released work on XI, Avant, Tzadik, Braille, Doctor
Jim’s, Le Station Radar, FMR, Three Lobed, Circulasione, Grapefruit and the Cafe Oto
label. He has scored music for dance (recently for Moriah Evans), for films (Martin
Lucas “Hiroshima Bound”,) directed music-theater (“The Inquisitive Musician” at The
Stedlijk Museum) and has an ongoing project using the procession tradition. Watson
also curates the experimental music series WOrK ØØ.

Saya Woolfalk

New York City-based visual artist Saya Woolfalk will digitize and
animate a series of her drawings and produce a sound component to create a
ten-minute animation called The Land of the Pleasure Machines. Described as a
fictional future constructed for the investigation of human possibilities and
impossibilities, this new animation will be presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem
in November 2009. Saya Woolfalk is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has exhibited
at the Bronx Museum, the Moti Hasson Gallery (NYC), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
and others.

Briggan Krauss

New York City-based saxophonist, composer and sound artist, Briggan
Krauss will create a 5.1 surround sound composition entitled Tesseract. Inspired by
the geometrical shape, the tesseract, the intent of this work is to create music
based on the experience of perceiving individual auditory events as shapes that
interact and evolve in a kind of kinetic, mutable work of sculpture. The completed
work will be performed and exhibited in New York City and will be reproduced for
distribution as a DVD. Briggan Krauss is well known in the NY Creative Music
community where he has worked with Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Medeski, Martin, and
Wood, Anthony Coleman, Steven Bernstein’s Sex Mob and others.

Luke Fischbeck

Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Luke Fischbeck will complete a
surround-sound audio mix to serve both as an element in the collaborative multimedia
performance (with director Peter Flaherty), entitled Soul Leaves Her Body, and to be
presented as a standalone surround-sound audio piece. Described as an
integrated-media performance synthesizing theater, dance, live video and music, the
completed work will be presented during the 2009-2010 season of the HERE Arts Center
in New York City. Luke Fischbeck is primarily know as a member of the performance
group Lucky Dragons which has appeared internationally at the Whitney Museum of
American Art, The Kitchen the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Schirn Kunsthalle
(Frankfurt), and others.

Rosa Sanchez

Discussed their project A {d’aigua}, a short piece for a dancer, a performer, and a musician, composing an audiovisual environment in real time.

Jenny Vogel

Multi-media artist presented recent works developed while enrolled in Harvestworks’ Certificate Program.

Caroline Bergonzi

Multi-media artist presented recent works developed while enrolled in Harvestworks’ Certificate Program.

Hui-Yu Su

Showed his recent video series The Fabled Shoots based on TV culture and discussed his recent series of still photos titled Wish You Were Here.

Tomomi Adachi

Talked about his self-made instruments and presented a performance with them.