Date: Monday June 28, 2010

2pm - 10pm

Harvestworks event taking place at:

HERE

145 6th Ave.,

New York, NY 10013

(Enter on Dominick, 1 block south of Spring)

New instruments for Improvisation and experimental approaches, an investigation into contemporary sound art and experimental music using custom made electronic instruments, will consider the methods and intentions of 4 artists building new instruments and specialized interfaces. In a day-long series of presentations, talks and performances these artists 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.

Schedule of Activities

2pm - 4:40pm: PRESENTATIONS

• Dafna Naphtali: Algorithmic mutations, morse code, polyrhythmic and audio-based triggering, and gestural controllers.

• Matthew Ostrowski: A glove-controlled performance system using physics-based parameter control

• Hans Tammen: The Endangered Guitar - an interactive hybrid instrument

• Laetitia Sonami: The Lady's Glove - controlling sounds, mechanical devices, and lights in real-time

5pm - 6pm: PANEL

The Moebius Strip. The artists will discuss how musical thinking and technical realizations progressively influencing one another, like a mobius strip...

8pm - 10pm: SOLO PERFORMANCES

Dafna Naphtali (Mahashefa), Matthew Ostrowski (Congeries 2), Hans Tammen (Endangered Guitar), Laetitia Sonami (A Historical Moment on a line between A and B), followed by a quartet performance.

Composer, performer, and sound installation artist Laetitia Sonami combines text, music and found sounds from the world, in compositions which have been described as "performance novels". Her signature instrument, the Lady's Glove, tracks the slightest motion of her fingers, hand and arms: through its use, Sonami can create performances where those tiny movements shape the music and environment.

Sonami's sound installations combine audio and kinetic elements embedded in ubiquitous objects such as light bulbs, rubber gloves, bags, and more recently toilet plungers ("Sounds of War").

Sonami has been performing in numerous festivals across the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and China, among which the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz, the Bourges Music Festival in France, the Sonambiente Festival in Berlin, the Interlink festival in Japan, Ban-on-a-Can, the Kitchen and Other Minds, S.F.

Currently, Sonami is touring "I.C.You" a live cinema performance in collaboration with Sue Costabile, and "The Appearance of Silence (the Invention of Perspective)", a solo performance with the lady's glove.

Awards include the Alpert Award in the Arts (2002), Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Award (2000), the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2000), and a Creative Work Fund award (2000) for a collaboration with Nick Bertoni and the Tinkers Workshop ("BAGS").

Born in France, Sonami moved to the United States in 1975 and lives in Oakland, California. She is guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute, Milton Avery MFA program at Bard College and Mills College, Oakland. Aside from a few CD compilations, she has yet to commit to record her sound pieces or document her performances...

Dafna Naphtali has been a Max teacher and programmer at Harvestworks since 1995. She earned a degree in Music Technology at NYU.  She was Chief Engineer of the NYU Music Technology Studios until 1998, and has taught Max there as an adjunct instructor since 1996. Naphtali is also an academic advisor for both undergraduate and graduate students in NYU's Music Technology program. She was a programmer for two years for many artists and her own projects at multi-channel sound gallery Engine 27. As a composer, writing custom Max/MSP programs since 1992 has enabled her to perform and compose using her laptop-based noise/audio processing “instrument” to alter the sound of her singing, vocalisms, personalized recordings as well as the sound of any musician playing with her. She has received a NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts in 2001,  and commissions and awards from New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, Experimental TV Center, American Composers Forum,  Brecht Forum, and has held residencies at STEIM (Holland), Music OMI and iEAR at Rensselaer  Polytechnical  Institute.

Dafna Naphtali will perform Mahashefa, a work for live audio processing and voice.  The composition is a new solo work within “Mechanique(s) solo”, a collection of open form compositions using algorithmic mutations, Morse code, polyrhythmic and audio-based triggering, and gestural controllers in combination with acoustic and the electronic instruments.  Her compositional influences include music concrete, free jazz and European improvised music, as well as the contemporary classical and all manner of non-Western musics.

Dafna Naphtali uses her laptop-based noise/audio processing “instrument” to alter the sound of her multi-octave singing, vocalisms, personalized recordings, at times a curious accompaniment to her voice.  She considers all sounds fair game for her unique electronic mutations and expression.

Dafna’s live processing system explores the various ways in which her idiosyncratic combination of electronic equipment allows for a wide variety of new compositional textures and sounds.  She will demonstrate and create custom patches for live audio processing, effects and tracking various events, such as pitch tracking, envelope following, using audio as a control source for synthesis or to trigger samples.

MATTHEW OSTROWSKI has been working with electronics since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, music theater, and audio installations, with a continuing interest in density of microevents, rapid change, and using technology to stretch the bounds of perception and experience. He has also worked extensively as  an improvisor, having played with such luminaries as Anthony Coleman, Andrea Parkins, Nicolas Collins, John Butcher, o.blaat, Paul Loewens, Ikue Mori, Anne Wellmer, David Linton, Charles Cohen, Alfred Zimmerlin, and a host of others. His work appears on over a dozen recordings. His work has been seen on four continents, including the Wien Modern Festival, the Kraków Audio Art Festival, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, PS 1 and The Kitchen in New York , the Melbourne Festival, and Unyazi, the first festival of electronic music on the African continent. He has received a NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts in 2001, awards from the Media Alliance, Arts International and many others, and was a nominee for the prestigious Alpert Award in 2006.

Matthew will create a new work, "Congeries 2", a work for glove-controlled live electronics.  This new work uses physics-based algorithmic response systems, driven by improvisational decisions.

Matthew has developed his performance system based around the P5 glove, a commercially available video game controller. This device is connected to a Max/MSP program of his own design, which uses principles of physical modeling to control musical parameters. By manipulating virtual objects in a multidimensional parameter space, his instrument brings some of the nonlinear behaviors of physical objects into the electronic domain.

Hans Tammen creates music that has been described as an alien world of  bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating sounds, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions and quiet atmospheres through means of his modified "Endangered Guitar", interactive software programming, stereo and multichannel sound systems - and, as a critic observed, with "...fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet". Signal To Noise called his works "...a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage", All Music Guide recommended him: "...clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s."

He received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) in the category Digital/Electronic Arts in 2009 for the Endangered Guitar, and commissions and awards from New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), American Composer's Forum / Jerome Foundation, and Foundation For Contemporary Arts.

Hans Tammen's Endangered Guitar is a hybrid between a guitar and a computer, designed to interact with the resonant frequencies of the room. His instrument constantly records his sounds, and the information from the analysis of these sounds and the playing determines a wide variety of processes. With a wide array of mechanical preparations for guitar, processed with his own custom software and with an unusual take on guitar-based control, he produces sounds that seem chaotic on the surface, with a forest of apparently separate details, interlinked underneath, woven together as a maze of infinite complexity. His performances take off from two or more contrasting moods or states of being - tense, but quiet microscopic sound detail or complex and visceral blasts of energy. Small but controlled variations are introduced persistently, some take on a new musical life on their own, others die out at a very early stage of their existence. The random drift moves the piece slowly into new directions, investigating complex stages of tranquility and agitation.

About Harvestworks – www.harvestworks.org

Harvestworks is a nonprofit Digital Media Arts Center that provides resources for artists to learn digital tools and exhibit experimental work created with digital technologies. This program is made possible with funds from New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, the Meet The Composer's Cary New Music Performance Fund, mediaThefoundation, the Edwards Foundation Arts Fund, the Aaron Copland Fund and the Friends of Harvestworks.

About HERE - www.here.org

This event is being presented through HEREstay, HERE’s curated rental program, which provides artists with subsidized space and equipment, as well as technical and administrative support.

Since 1993, the OBIE-winning HERE has been a premier arts organization in NYC and a leader in the field of new, hybrid performance work.  Under leadership of Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting and Producing Director Kim Whitener, HERE has served over 12,000 emerging to mid-career artists developing work that does not fit a conventional programming agenda. Work presented at HERE has garnered 14 OBIE awards, including the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, an OBIE grant for artistic achievement, three Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, three NY Innovative Theatre Awards, an Edwin Booth Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.  HERE proudly supports artists at all stages in their careers through full productions, artist residency programs, festivals and subsidized performance and rehearsal space.  Work at HERE is curated based on the strength and uniqueness of the artist’s vision. HERE’s Artist Residency Program (HARP) provides development, commissions and full production for up to 20 artists over one-to-three years. In 2005, with the support of the FJC, a foundation of donor advised funds, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the City of New York, HERE purchased its long-time home as part of a five-year “Secure HERE’s Future” campaign. With full-scale renovations to the space concluding in June 2008, thanks to generous support from the City of New York, HERE is poised to continue and expand its role as a downtown haven for the finest emerging art.  Offering a comfortable, eclectic setting for artists and audiences alike, HERE features a café and two state-of-the-art performance spaces.