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ZOOM IN: OLAP

The Seals

Our collaboration with Experimental Intermedia continues with our eighth ZOOM IN: OLAP (Online Live Art Performance) community discussion forum. For this event we have invited The Seals.

Date: January 30th, 2022

Time: 3 pm New York Time (EST)

Location: online on Zoom.

FREE

The Seals, an AI-inspired electronic noise band, is the collective effort of Ria Rajan, Sophia Sun, Susie Green, Sofy Yuditskaya, Margaret Schedel, and augmented by the S.E.A.L. (Synthetic Erudition Assist Lattice), our AI counterparts that assist us in creating usable content with which to mold and shape our music and visuals. A detailed paper on our process can be read HERE. Our music came about during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns across the globe. We individually created content with which to compile songs as a Networked Ensemble. This created a bed track for our Live Performances online using various tech stacks through which we improvise while incorporating Creative AI assisted visuals. 

Cyber Seal-Mermaid” Author “Sofy Yuditskaya + VQGAN + CLIP”

Ria Rajan (Pune, India) is a visual artist exploring both analog and digital mediums of image-making, with a focus on intangible and ephemeral experiences of spaces and objects, both natural and constructed. Through the lens of locative media, performance, sculptural explorations and interventions in spaces, she creates immersive experiences and invites interaction with her work that looks at placemaking both online and offline, and centers around our constantly changing relationship with technology. Ria has been invited to participate in multiple public art projects such as Urban Avant Garde (Bangalore, IN), Investment Zone (Bangalore, IN), Figment (NY, USA), Prakalp Pune (Pune, IN), Cyberia (Pune, IN).  Along with these, her work – largely developed through residencies, has been included in festivals, showcases and exhibitions, both locally and internationally.

Sophia Sun (San Diego, CA) is a machine learning researcher and musician interested in machine creativity and digital humanities. She makes music, robots, and research concerning the cyborg nature of contemporary lives, and the relationship between machines and humans. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of California, San Diego.

Susie Green (Miami, FL) is a neuro-divergent, Cuban-American composer, sound-designer, audio/visual artist & vocalist working at the intersection of music, art & science.Following a sound engineering internship at Crescent Moon Studios, she became a signed/published singer/songwriter with Sony/FIPP. She continued work in sound-design for immersive theater, short films & studio production while undertaking postgraduate research in composition & music technology at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Exploring means by which to harness the body’s movements to shape sound, based on Rudolph Laban’s Movement Theory, she expanded theoretically incorporating concepts from quantum mechanics, human dynamics, to cosmology.

Sofy Yuditskaya (Brooklyn, NY) is a site-specific media artist and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Sofy’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s affect on consciousness.

Margaret Schedel (Stonybrook, NY) With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training, 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. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning interactive multimedia operas, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video games, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments and custom controllers. She is internationally recognized for the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media and her work in sonification of data.

About OLAP

ZOOM IN: OLAP, a collaborative initiative by Harvestworks and Experimental Intermedia, was conceived by Katherine Liberovskaya and Carol Parkinson in the winter of 2021 in response to all the proliferating on-line artistic initiatives brought on by the pandemic. Its objective continues to be to reflect on the aesthetic and technical dimensions of live streaming and to share knowledge among the participants. The meetings feature guest practitioners from different artistic fields (music, live visuals, performance, dance, theater) who speak about their approaches and experiments with online performance (sound, video, conferencing, streaming software, aesthetic and organizational approaches), followed by Q&A. The forum is also open to hearing about new ideas and projects that are in development as well as technical and/or conceptual concerns from the participants. 

As the ever-increasing online live streaming events are starting to seem more and more all the same and are holding our attention less and less, we feel that it is crucial to unpack and re-think the online presentation of live online art practices and to imagine new approaches that are far better suited for the virtual performance stage that we experience on such a variety of platforms (computers, laptops, pads, phones) that have nothing to do with the in-person venues where they would usually take place. 

Moderated by Katherine Liberovskaya of Experimental Intermedia and Harvestworks Director Carol Parkinson

Sophia Sun

Sophia Sun is a machine learning researcher and musician interested in machine creativity and digital humanities. She makes music, robots, and research concerning the cyborg nature of contemporary lives, and the relationship between machines and humans. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of California, San Diego.

Susie Green

Susie Green is a neuro-divergent, Cuban-American composer, sound-designer, audio/visual artist & vocalist working at the intersection of music, art & science.Following a sound engineering internship at Crescent Moon Studios, she became a signed/published singer/songwriter with Sony/FIPP. She continued work in sound-design for immersive theater, short films & studio production while undertaking postgraduate research in composition & music technology at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Exploring means by which to harness the body’s movements to shape sound, based on Rudolph Laban’s Movement Theory, she expanded theoretically incorporating concepts from quantum mechanics, human dynamics, to cosmology.

Ria Rajan

Ria Rajan (Pune, India) is a visual artist exploring both analog and digital mediums of image-making, with a focus on intangible and ephemeral experiences of spaces and objects, both natural and constructed. Through the lens of locative media, performance, sculptural explorations and interventions in spaces, she creates immersive experiences and invites interaction with her work that looks at placemaking both online and offline, and centers around our constantly changing relationship with technology. Ria has been invited to participate in multiple public art projects such as Urban Avant Garde (Bangalore, IN), Investment Zone (Bangalore, IN), Figment (NY, USA), Prakalp Pune (Pune, IN), Cyberia (Pune, IN). Along with these, her work – largely developed through residencies, has been included in festivals, showcases and exhibitions, both locally and internationally.

Sofy Yuditskaya


Sofy Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Sofy’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s affect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Audio-Visual Composition at NYU GSAS.

Margaret Anne Schedel

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She is a joint author of Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on the aesthetics of sonification. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and the percussion ensemble Ictus. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data. She sits on the boards of 60×60, the International Computer Music Association, and is a regional editor for Organised Sound. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a Williamsburg Gallery focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. In 2010 she co-chaired the International Computer Music Conference, and in 2011 she co-chaired the Electro-Acoustic Music Studies Network Conference. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is the Director of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.