Harvestworks announces the recipients of the 2013 Creativity + Technology = Enterprise Program.
Creativity + Technology = Enterprise is a partnership project between Harvestworks, a cultural arts organization and The Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation (ITAC), a nonprofit consulting organization that helps early-stage technology firms launch innovative products in NYC. This project will create a bridge between new technological tools and products being created by artists at Harvestworks and a marketplace looking for novel links to digital media, video and music. Funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The review panelists were Franklin Madison, President Gaia Ventures, LLC, Alinda Franks, ITAC partner, Marya Triandafellos, consultant for brand transformation and digital strategy, Toni Dove, intermedia artist, Carol Parkinson, Harvestworks’ Director and Hans Tammen Harvestworks’ Deputy Director.
Marco Donnarumma & Heidi Boisvert
Marco Donnarumma and Heidi Boisvert will be working on [radical] Signs of Life, which is a multi-disciplinary, interactive dance performance that externalizes the inner working of the mind’s non-hierarchical distribution of thought. Music is generated from dancers’ muscles and blood flow via biophysical sensors that capture sound waves from performers’ muscular tissue. The corporeal data triggers complex neural patterns to be projected onto multiple screens as 3D imagery. As the audience interacts with the images, they enter into dialogue with the dancers.
Based in London, new media and sonic artist, performer and teacher, Marco Donnarumma is weaving a thread around biomedia research, musical and theatrical performance, participatory practices and subversive coding, all while looking at the collision of critical creativity with humanized technologies. He has performed and spoken in 40 countries, taught over 30 workshops in the past two years and has held multiple residencies. Marco is a PhD student for the Embodied Audio Visual Interaction (EAVI) Research Group at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Heidi Boisvert is a new media artist, game designer, experimental filmmaker, writer and educator. She designed the first 3D social change game, ICED I Can End Deportation, about unfair U.S. immigration policies, and most recently, America 2049, an alternative reality game on Facebook about pluralism. Heidi founded and serves as the CEO & Creative Director of the futurePerfect lab, a boutique creative agency that works with non-profits to develop imaginative and playful applications of integrated media and emerging technology. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Electronic Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Juraj Kojs
Juraj Kojs will be working on a composition and performance of an original Wearable Haptic Interface (WHI) designed by Stefano Trento. The interface will enable tactile sensations actuated on the performers’ skin to be used in A-Touch, De-touch, an interactive multimedia composition. WHI will be designed as a grid of actuators remotely controlled by a custom-made iPad application. Three performer-audience member pairs will compete in a game in which recognizing shapes from the skin sensations leads to music making. We will later develop WHI applications for education, rehabilitation and gaming. Juraj Kojs is a Slovakian composer, performer, multimedia artist, producer and researcher that has received numerous awards, commissions, and his research articles have appeared in reputable journals. Kojs is the director of Foundation for Music Technologies (FETA) in Miami, FL and is currently a full time faculty at Miami International University of Art and Design. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies from University of Virginia.
Jeff Thompson
Jeff Thompson will create Experiments in Haptic and Non-Visual Games, which explores videogames that discard visual displays for vibration, smell, and sound feedback to create unique games and interaction. Built for mobile devices and custom electronics, these games focus on non-visual interaction and the new kinds of games that result. Primarily “art games”, the resulting games and technologies may have applications in mainstream videogame design as well as user experience design for mobile devices and accessible computing for disabled persons. Jeff Thompson received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from Rutgers University. He is currently Assistant Professor of New Genres and Digital Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he is also artist-in-residence at the Holland Computing Center. He has performed and exhibited his work internationally, is an active curator, and his visual and written projects have been published.
Matthew Tennie
Matthew Tennie will be creating Flight 18, an interactive science education installation that would allow users to experience the solar system by flying a virtual spaceship. By using the video game engine Unity3D, this will allow us to make a large 3D model of the solar system wherein users could explore different locations without restriction. The current model keeps true the size and distance ratios of the planets and sun which show the incredible scale of our solar system with a surround projection field of view of over 250 degrees. Matthew Tennie has designed video and sound at many places in New York City and served as the Associate Video Designer for the currently running Blue Man Group North American Tour. He holds a Master’s Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
Mathew Ostrowski & Luke Dubois
Under the name “Fair Use”, Matthew Ostrowski & Luke DuBois will be creating a live performance work entitled ‘1973’. This ensemble piece for video and electronics will be based on audiovisual media materials from the year 1973. These assets are manipulated, combined, juxtaposed, and quoted by the performers to create an evening-length anti-narrative of a year in history. Using cutting-edge data-mining and interactive performance technology in collaboration with electric instrumental performance, the work aspires to bring to the stage the cultural representations of the year 1973 in all of its historical contradictions.
A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a pioneer in live electronic arts, having worked as a composer, performer and installation artist, exploring work with multimedia, alternative controllers, video and theater. His work has been seen or performed on six continents. He has received numerous awards, including a NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts.
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.
Arthur Elsenaar
Arthur Elsenaar will be working on a two part project, Interfacial Tendencies. First, He will create a popular music video for the US band Ok Go, in which the faces of the band members are choreographed by means of external control over their facial muscles. In the video, the members of the band will use mobile phones, making specific gestures with the phones that will allow them to manipulate each other’s facial expressions. Second, he will offer FaceTwist, his advanced electronics as a commercial product; an open source strategy to create an online community of enthusiasts. Arthur Elsenaar is an artist, electrical engineer and facial hacker. Since 1993, Elsenaar has investigated the computer-controlled human face as a site for artistic expression. He holds a Ph.D. in Art and Design from Nottingham Trent University. Currently he is a lecturer at the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, Netherlands. Elsenaars work has been shown at many internationally renowned conferences, festivals and institutes.
Paul Geluso
Paul Geluso will be developing 3D Sound Objects, a 3D speaker technology that will be created and tested by sound artists Stephen Vitiello and Steve Roden for a multi-channel sound work for Houston’s Hermann Park installed along the carriage path. The sound work combines voices and field recordings into a layered, textural, spatial composition. Paul Geluso is a New York based sound engineer and musician. Frequently collaborating with artists who use sound as a creative medium, he has composed electro-acoustic music and designed unique sound systems that have been exhibited at major art institutions and performance venues internationally. Geluso holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Music Technology and is currently on the full-time faculty at NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions. His primary area of research is in 3D audio recording techniques, processing, and playback systems.
Nora Ligorano & Marshall Reese
Ligorano/Reese will develop I AM I, a project that is a woven fiber optic mirror (12 x 36 inches). It reflects an abstract image of its subject based on personal data from custom software that tracks users activities. The fabric is active, attached to RGB LEDs, which respond to and display data in moving patterns and colors. They will design and develop the technology with a team of programmers and engineers. They manipulate images, audio and text from old media: print, television, and combine that with the new: internet and mobile telecommunications. Nearly a decade after development, their work has appeared in multiple galleries and exhibitions and have received many awards and grants.
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros will be creating the Smart Hands Free Controller (SHFC) for the iPad. Through camera activation that will allow performer to access the power of the computer, move faders and punch switches on the fly, change or activate performance processing parameters all while the hands are engaged in performing a musical instrument. This may be accomplished by recognizing face movements or some other gestural means repurposed for performance control. SHFC would be used to control EIS which processes and spatializes acoustic or electronic sound. Pauline Oliveros is acclaimed as a composer, performer and humanitarian; for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others. Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work. Oliveros has been honored with awards, grants and concerts internationally and now serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been vocal about representing the needs of individual artists, about the need for diversity and experimentation in the arts, and promoting cooperation and good will among people.
LoVid (Tali Hinkis & Kyle Lapidus) & Sean Montgomery
LoVid, the interdisciplinary art duo of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, together with Sean Montgomery, will be creating Telephone Rewired, an audiovisual installation that probes and modulates human consciousness by rhythmically modulating neuronal oscillations in the brain to impact cognition. The installation stimulates the viewers endogenous brain waveforms into beta (focused attention), theta (deep relaxation), and alpha (calm awareness). After viewers don an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor, their brain rhythms synchronize into a neurofeedback loop and they enter the era of augmented cognition.
LoVid explores aspects of the contemporary networked era that are often invisible or intangible, such as communication systems, biological signals, and spoken language. Their works have been screened and exhibited internationally and have received numerous grants and awards. Tali Hinkis holds a DNAP from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris and Kyle Lapidus received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Sean Montgomery is a new media artist, electrical and computer engineer, and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. He has created biofeedback art installations that have been shown internationally in museums and galleries. He has worked for the prototype engineering company SENSORSTAR for the past 2+ years and last year started an off-shoot group based in New York City (http://labs.sensorstar.com/). His scientific work in neuroscience has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.