The Harvestworks New Works Program is pleased to announce our 2020 recipients. The recipients create a new work in the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) Lab. The applications were reviewed by filmmaker and multimedia artist Art Jones, sound artist, musician, and composer Jess Rowland and composer and curator of the Musical Ecologies Series Dan Joseph.
Bob Bellerue: Auroboros
Auroboros is an interactive sound installation and performance system. Vocal and instrumental recordings will be made by performers and audience members, and played back via a Supercollider patch. The sound is diffused through traditional speakers and homemade speaker objects made out of resonant materials with transducers attached to them. Live effects processing and feedback lend organic and chaotic energies to the swirling chorus.
Bob Bellerue is a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 30 years, he has been involved in a wide range of experimental and extreme sonic activities – noise art, experimental/abstract music, junk metal percussion ensembles, Balinese gamelan, sound scores for dance/theater/video/performance art, and sound/video installations. His electronic sound work is focused on resonant feedback systems, using amplified instruments/objects/spaces/circuits in combination with electronics and Supercollider programming. http://bobbellerue.net
Case Jernigan: MONUMENT
Case Jernigan will create MONUMENT, an exploratory narrative video game about insomnia and anxiety. MONUMENT will be a 2D game located in a cut-paper world, built on differences between the conservative community in Charleston, South Carolina of his youth, and the Brooklyn of his present. The 2-D game will be broken into chapters with different approaches to gameplay, all involving the interaction between generative nature of tones, sounds, voices, and singing clips. These interactions will trigger as the primary character moves in and interacts with the cut paper world. The piece will be made with stop-motion animation and compiled and coded in gamemaker.
Case Jernigan draws, makes paper art and animated films. Fascinated by light up toys, 1980’s Japanese animation, and retro video games, Case imbues his characters with an unsettling charm. He grew up by the sea in Charleston, SC, and he’s a sucker for nostalgia, iconic sports heroes, monsters and mythology. He’s screened short films in festivals like The Sante Fe Film Festival and #11MM Berlin. A Screen Australia grant winner, he’s currently collaborating with Closer Productions to craft a series of animated shorts about soccer fans. He studied painting at William & Mary and the New York Studio School. http://www.casepaint.com/
Jocelyn Ho , Margaret Schedel & Matthew Blessing: Women’s Labor
Women’s Labor is a feminist project that repurposes old domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these domestic-tool-turned instruments are explored in public installations, community workshops, commissioned new compositions, and concert performance. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle. At Harvestworks, the project creators will embark on their second instrument, the Rotary Dryer Rack.
Jocelyn Ho-artistic director, performer, composer
Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves the exploration of the relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as the rethinking of the classical music genre through multimedia technologies and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary projects involving collaborators from vastly different fields. Ho’s compositions include multi-disciplinary collaborations as composer and sound artist with software developers and visual artists. Ho is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.
Margaret Schedel- composer, UX designer
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. She is a joint author of Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on the aesthetics of sonification. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data. 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.
Matthew Blessing- technical director
Matthew Blessing is a composer, guitarist, and music technologist. Due to graduate this summer with a Doctorate in Experimental Music and Digital Media from Louisiana State University, Blessing’s research explores new human-computer interfaces focusing on musical expression. His present work involves the design and digital fabrication of embedded instruments. These instruments run on an embedded Linux CPU, such as the Raspberry Pi, connected to a variety of interactive sensors, amplifiers, and audio drivers. http://www.jocelynho.com/
Matthew Goodheart: but in things
“but in things” is an immersive sound installation exploring issues of embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiment. The work features transducer activated instruments and objects placed throughout the given space. As audience members wearing bone-conducting headphones enter, sound emerges both from the instruments and through headphones, responding to their movements and evolving as they progress. The work will be programmed in Max.
Matthew Goodheart is a composer, improviser, sound artist, and educator who has developed a wide body of work that explores the relationships between performer, instrument, and listener. His diverse creations range from large-scale microtonal compositions to open improvisations to immersive sound installations – all unified by the analytic techniques and performative methodologies he has developed to bring forth the unique and subtle acoustic properties of individual musical instruments. Goodheart’s approach results in a “generative foundation” for exploring issues of sound in relation to physicality, perception, technology, and cultural ritual. A life-long teacher, he is the Assistant Professor of Music Composition in the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic University. http://matthewgoodheart.com/
Valérie Hallier’s: Scream Now
Inspired by the French Medieval “crieur public”, the full Scream Now project combines an app and a screaming booth. The artwork takes a fundamental yet repressed human expression such as a scream and offers a sanctuary to scream out in public spaces while generating a transformative experience for the user. Each scream generates a visualization seen outside from an LED screen wrapped around the booth, and eventually visible on the user’s smartphones via the app.
Valérie Hallier’s multiple-media work consists of series and installations that portray a contemporary character while exploring the dynamics between the natural, the human and the technological realms. -“Hallier’s work follows an integrative continuum that utilizes technology as tool and object, generating an exquisite tension between the humanistic and mechanistic sense of Being.” J.Escalona.
Hallier’s early multimedia work has received prizes at ACM Siggraph (FL), SCAN Arts Symposium (PA), Ars Electronica in Finland and Anima Mundi in Brazil. She has shown her work internationally, in the US with most recently a solo show at NARS Foundation this past February 2020, at BRIC Arts Media, MediaNoche gallery and CAS Arts Center in New York. In Europe, solo shows venues include the ESAM in Caen, France and Nadiana Idriss gallery in Berlin, Germany. Group shows in the US include Trestle gallery, A.I.R. gallery, BRIC, Brooklyn Council for the Arts and Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn, SVA Flatiron gallery and Tribes galleries in Manhattan, The Housatonic Museum (CT).
Hallier worked on a commission for the Drawing Center (NYC) and was selected for BRIC’s first edition Biennial in Brooklyn. Residencies include LMCC Swing Space artist residency on Governor Island, Pioneer Works, NARS Foundation, Trestle Art Space and currently Harvestworks New work residency in NYC. http://www.valeriehallier.com
Victoria Manganiello: Untitled
Victoria Manganiello will create a large-scale textile installation made up of soft speakers using embroidered conductive thread and magnets. She uses textiles as a material to the stories of people throughout history (who were often women, indigenous peoples and others outside the paradigm) who have been computing long before the modern computer. The sounds and stories of ancient technologies will emerge directly from the cloth asking a viewer to consider what is a textile? what is a sound? and what is technology?
Victoria Manganiello is a textile artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Named as one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30, Victoria has received multiple internationally recognized grants and residency appointments and has exhibited her work at established museums throughout the USA and internationally. Exploring the intersections between materiality, technology, geography and storytelling, Victoria’s installation work, abstract paintings, and kinetic sculptures are made meticulously with hand-woven textiles using hand-spun yarn and hand-mixed natural and synthetic color dyes alongside mechanical alternatives and modern technologies. She is currently a professor of Textiles at NYU and Parson’s the New School. https://www.victoriamanganiello.com/
Charlotte Mundy: Light as a Feather
Charlotte Mundy will create an 8-channel sound installation called ‘Light as a Feather.’ The sounds in ‘Light as a Feather’ will be created through her original vocal improvisations. The composition will be in 3 movements, each around 10 min. long and paired with a physical element (light, wind or scent), controlled via max patch. ‘Light as a Feather’ will be presented at the Harvestworks House on Governor’s Island in summer 2020.
Soprano Charlotte Mundy specializes in music that is new, daring and sublime. She has been called a “daredevil with an unbreakable spine” (SF Classical Voice). An active improviser and composer, Mundy’s original music has been performed on the Resonant Bodies and Chance and Circumstance Festival. She was composer and dramaturg of the shadow play/dance ‘What Grows on Trees,’ which has been presented on the Higher Ground Festival and the Periapsis Music and Dance series. As a founding member of “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care if You Listen), TAK ensemble, Mundy performs at venues such as the Library of Congress, Stanford University and Miller Theater. http://www.charlottemundy.com/
Surabhi Saraf: Awoke & the Awokened
Surabhi Saraf will create two new sound works as part of her on-going research-based project called Awoke & the Awokened. The first work will be a 3D soundscape in VR, to create a unique sound of Awoke: a mythical artificial emotional intelligence. The second work will expand the narrative of the Awokened [believers of Awoke] through a 30 min multi-channel performance ritual, which will draw directly from her collaborative research project Centre for Emotional Materiality.
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology through multimedia works that incorporate video installations, sculptures, performances, and sound compositions. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She was the 2019 technology resident at Pioneers Works. Surabhi graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with an MFA in Art and Technology. https://surabhisaraf.net/
Artist Scholarship Awards
Chuck Bettis
During his workspace residency, Chuck Bettis will expand his skills as an improviser, as well as his sonic palette, by incorporating a multi- channel element, one which can be quickly manipulated in real-time with the use of both his voice, as well as internal sounds from patches made in Max. These external sounds would dictate how & where the sound is dispersed thru the speaker array.
Chuck Bettis was raised in the fertile harDCore soil, nourished within Baltimore’s enigmatic avantgarde gatherings, and currently blossoming in New York’s downtown musical tribe. His unique blend of electronics and throat has led him into various collaborations with great musicians from around the globe. He has performed live collaborations with John Zorn, Fred Frith, Matmos, Yoshimio, Mephista and Afrirampo to name a few, recorded & played live with; Ikue Mori, Nautical Almanac, Berangere Maximin, Yellow Swans, Toshio Kajiwara, Jad Atoui, etc, plus a long history of punk bands he was in. Chuck also has had residencies at The Stone (NYC), INA GRM (Paris, France), Kurimanzutto Gallery (NYC) and EMS (Stockholm, Sweden).
Chuck’s Website: https://chuckbettis.com/
Michael Foster
Michael Foster will write a songbook of multimedia compositions for solo amplified saxophone, electronics, and video. The pieces explore the visceral relationships between sound, video, and silence through overlapping video, text, and live sound. The sonic elements would explore breath, spit, and the fibers of saxophonic tone production, the video elements would focus on duration, editing as phraseology, and the body and movement. The pieces will be notated using graphic and traditional notation with images.
Michael Foster is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of free improvisation, noise, free jazz, graphic & video notation, performance art, and other forms of “weird” music. Foster utilizes extensive instrumental preparations, augmenting his saxophone with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples as a method of queering the instrument’s history and dynamic relationships.
In addition to his work as a performer he is also active as a curator throughout New York City, co-founding “Queer Trash,” a curatorial collective focusing on providing visibility to LGBTQIA+ performers engaged in experimental performance practices.
Michael’s Website: http://michaelfostermusic.com/
Miguel Frasconi
Miguel Frasconi will work on his voltage controlled analog electronics setup which activates an array of glass musical instruments. This will form a hybrid performance instrument of glass and electronics, which he will use to create an audio album of recordings. Miguel Frasconi started these explorations by using the KOMA Electronik’s Field Kit as an interface between a BugBrand/Buchla modular system and select glass objects.
Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improviser whose instrumentarium includes glass objects, electronics, and instruments of his own design. His array of activities includes collaborations with the Balinese composer Dewa Berata on music for a large-scale shadowplay, with operatic tenor John Duykers on unique music/theater events, with the Tibetan songwriter Techung, with whom he has toured throughout India, and has worked closely with composers John Cage, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney and Jon Hassell. He was a founding member of The Glass Orchestra, the internationally renowned ensemble featuring all glass instruments (1977-86), and the sound-sculpture band Möbius Operandi (1990-95) ) and has performed as a keyboardist with the Paul Dresher Ensemble (1988-95) and the Philip Glass Ensemble (1992).
Miguel’s Website: https://www.newmusicusa.org/profile/miguelfrasconi/
Volker Geotze: Wall of Forgotten Natives
Volker Goetze: “Wall of Forgotten Natives” is about Native Americans in Minnesota who struggle with indigenous homelessness and historic trauma celebrating culture and Identify as a healing force. A community of elders, from several tribes, comes together to address addiction and displacement. Having nowhere else to go, they survive by living in a makeshift encampment next to a highway with few possessions and their future filled with uncertainty. The project tells their stories as a community VR Dance, Poetry and Music Performance celebrating culture and Identify as a healing force.
Volker Goetze is a composer and filmmaker. His time in Africa inspired him to direct a feature-documentary about the oral history, extending the work into a live-performance-documentary recounting the creation of the African harp. His trumpet-kora duo transcends geographic and musical boundaries resulting in a unique musical synthesis that fused the timeless tradition of the storyteller/griot with a modern perspective, which addresses themes of our ancient spiritual roots, and our hurried, dehumanized modern strife. This making him a specialist working and supporting oral cultures creating new narratives transmitting the culture into the 21st century.
Volker’s Website: https://www.volkergoetze.com/
Muyassar Kurdi: Brain Works
Muyassar Kurdi: ‘Brain Works’ presents new inventions in language, sound (homemade electronics), images, movement, and performance based on the fragments of her near-death experience. Having suffered a brain injury in 2004, Muyassar taps into the idea of memory in ‘Brain Works.” Having had to relearn how to use her entire body again, to speak, and to function normally, she had to retrain her muscles and her mind to carry out everyday movements. Brain Works’ explores visual rhythm, memory, subtlety, and gravity while honoring the futuristic and the ancient.
Muyassar Kurdi (b. 1989 in Chicago) is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, analog photography and film. She has toured extensively in the U.S. and throughout Europe. She currently focuses her attention to interweaving homemade electronic instruments into her vocal and dance performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through vicious noise, ritualistic chants, and meditative movements.
Muyassar’s Website: https://muyassarkurdi.com/
Aimee Norwich
Aimee Norwich will create an array of 2”x2” 2-way mirrored cubes with programmable 16X LED matrices that illuminate miniature wildlife and nature scenes. She will do a solo live music performance with the Ring Mod Bass (her invention) and FX pedals, and light sculptures projected using spy cameras and a video splitter switch. With light, sound, and 3D nature scenes, she aims to facilitate empathetic, sensory experiences in which we can reconnect with our bodies and our natural environment.
Aimee Norwich is a musician, inventor, filmmaker, instrument builder, and visual artist. Her education is in jazz and classical electric bass, audio production, room acoustics, and electronics. She plays a Hybrid Bass, Bass Kit (both her inventions), Fretless Bass, Piccolo Bass, Baritone Ukulele, and Electric Bass, along with various FX pedals. She also builds and plays odd folk instruments, such as her Tabletop One-string Bass.
Aimee’s music consists of original compositions and arrangements of songs like John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Much of the technology she uses in the recording studio and for live performances is gear that she builds, such as tube microphones, preamps, and various gadgets.
Aimee’s Website: https://aimeenorwich.com/
Hans Tammen: Sonic Flotsam series
Hans Tammen will create a new work for his Sonic Flotsam series, in which a resonant object is played by motors and solenoids (and the performer). Sonic Flotsam is a project that uses found objects – found in the cities he performs in – as instruments. A software (written over the last 20 years) analyzes the incoming sounds and interactively controls the electronic processing of the sounds, the spatialization on up to 64 channels of audio, and the motors and solenoids through an Arduino.
Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. Whether richly processed guitar sounds from his hybrid interactive guitar/software instrument Endangered Guitar, traditionally notated material for his Third Eye Chamber Orchestra, or graphically notated elements for the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, his music flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).
Hans’s Website: https://tammen.org/
Workspace Residents
Todd Anderson: HitchHiker
Todd Anderson will work on HitchHiker, a chrome extension for doing live performances inside other people’s web browsers. Whenever the performer goes to a new website on their computer, all of the audience members are taken to that website. The performer can then modify the content of the website, speak through text-to-speech voice, play sounds, show images and more. Todd will continue to develop Hitchhiker and design several new performances that bring together live and remote audiences.
Todd Anderson is a digital poet and web artist focused on building websites and Chrome extensions for use in live performance as both a solo performer and member of the digital performance group H0t Club. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Code + Liberal Arts at Eugene Lang College of the New School. He also helps run Babycastles, an indie-game gallery and event space, the Illuminator, a guerrilla projection collective and School for Poetic Computation, an artist-run creative tech school. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the five-years-running language + technology talk series every third Thursday at Babycastles.
Todd’s Website: https://toddwords.com/
Katherine Behar: Sensor Sensibility
“Sensor Sensibility,” by Katherine Behar, depicts nonhuman intimacies between technologies and landscapes as digital sensors “get to know” the environments they monitor. Six screens show different barren sites, eerily devoid of human life, where a sensor (a silver geometric shape) makes its way purposefully through its home terrain. The videos are filmed by aerial drone. Eventually, the lonely roving sensor and the watchful flying drone begin cultivating a “sensor sensibility” based on nonhuman companionship.
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist of new media whose works exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. She is known for projects that mix low and high technologies to create hybrid forms that are by turns humorous and sensuous. Behar has edited and authored books including Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press), And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art (punctum books; coedited with Emmy Mikelson), and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity (punctum books).
Katherine‘s Website: http://katherinebehar.com/
Dakota Gearhart: Life Touching Life
Dakota Gearhart will complete Life Touching Life, an episodic video series she is making for the internet that shares fiction and nonfiction stories of personal healing from animals, plants, and humans. Set in the non-violent future where all living beings are treated equally, this web series depicts what a non-binary and multi-species world might look like. A former marine biologist turned visual artist; Dakota celebrates the queerness of nature while offering an opposition to ingrained power structures of Western logic.
Dakota Gearhart is an artist and educator based in Queens, NY. Her work is rooted in video yet spans performance, sound, text, sculpture, collage, and room-sized multimedia installations. She uses found materials she collects at places like microbiology labs, spam folders, and industrial dumps. She bundles together her interests in perception, biology, queerness, the role of technology and intimacy, humor, and the importance of world-building to articulate more creative and less oppressive futures.
Dakota’s Website: https://www.dakotagearhart.com/
Mike Bullock
Mike Bullock is designing and building a Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) system that will be portable and flexible. Wave field synthesis (WFS) is a spatial audio technology that places virtual sound sources in real space with a high degree of precision, using anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of small speakers in a linear array. Mike will continue researching, refining, and building WFS systems, and invite composers and artists to explore the system. To the listener, the synthesized source sounds “real” no matter where the listener sits. Listeners can perceive musical instruments as if they were in the presence of real musicians, or take a walk inside a highly realistic natural environment.
Mike Bullock is a composer, improviser, visual artist, and writer based in Western Massachusetts. Bullock has been performing since the mid-90s at venues across the US and in Europe, including Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden; Instants Chavirés in Paris; Café OTO in London; Experimental Intermedia and ISSUE Project Room in New York City; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and EMPAC in Troy, NY. In June 2015, Bullock received a Performance Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Bullock is an Ambassador for The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland [KREV] and also serves as the KREV Minister of Fine Noise and Light.
Mike’s Website: http://mikebullock.com/
Sarah Weaver
Sarah Weaver will work on the “Universal Synchrony Music: TESS” is an electroacoustic telematic ensemble project in collaboration with the NASA TESS Mission exploring musical, technological, and metaphorical realizations of synchrony. Sonification of data from TESS Mission on habitable stars and planets is utilized for presence and interaction for synchrony. The project builds on “Universal Synchrony Music: Kepler/K2 Mission” (2013-2019), now utilizing TESS Mission data located closer to Earth.
Sarah Weaver, Ph.D. is a New York-based contemporary composer, conductor, technologist, educator, and researcher working internationally as a specialist in Network Arts. Network Arts utilizes the internet as an artistic medium and is also conceived as a metaphor for localized works. Weaver is Director of the Sarah Weaver Ensemble, NowNet Arts Ensemble, and NowNet Arts Inc. including the NowNet Arts Festival and NowNet Arts Conference.
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Matthew Mottel will work on Sonic Receptacles a customized battery powered multi speaker bluetooth system that receives an external audio source transmitted via bluetooth connectivity. The ‘distance’ between the speakers and source audio glitches the signal creating the effect of a multi channel system. The distance causes indeterminate distortion and becomes the ‘composer.’
LMCC Residency
Sonia Louise Davis is in the studio working on “become together freedom school,” an ongoing experimental project that builds on (and helps guide) the many years of research the artist has conducted on critical improvisation and social justice. Sonia Louise Davis is currently a workspace resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art and published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.
Funding for this program was provided in part by The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, mediaThe foundation inc and Friends of Harvestworks.