Join us for an online celebration of Jess Rowland’s new release, Telepresents, featuring designer Aimee Norwich, coming to a computer screen near you. This short but sweet virtual event includes excerpts from Telepresents and a Q&A with Harvestworks director Carol Parkinson, Jess, and Aimee. Telepresents is a one-of-a-kind digital VHS tape you can plug into your computer. How does it work, you may ask? Tune in and Aimee Norwich will show you and guide you through her process!
December 5 2020, Saturday 7pm
LOCATION: Harvestworks YOUTUBE channel
This streaming event will introduce viewers to Jess Rowland’s new release Telepresents, a digital VHS tape which is both physical art object and a form of media. Telepresents explores the computer screen as a musical instrument. Ittweaks telepresence as an anarchic act: Cloud computing, video conferencing, and text-to-speech are all misappropriated in the creation of an alternative to our ever-consuming screen-world vortex. The work is comprised of three video and sound works by Jess Rowland crafted and compiled together for the first time from works originally performed live over the past few years in art venues and music spaces.
This release is also a unique one-of-a-kind VHS tape which acts like a USB drive you can plug into your computer, the world’s first VHS-USB. As such, in addition to the video files of Jess’ sound pieces, Telepresents is also an old-school physical art object designed by Aimee Norwich. During the online release celebration, you will get to see not only excerpts from Jess Rowland’s Telepresents, but also a special introduction from Aimee Norwich about her most fantabulous invention.
Aimee and Jess teamed up for this project out of a mutual passion for bringing music back into a physical, living breathing form, while at the same time, being true to the times we are in and leaning into a critique of our ever-more-digital future.
Expect the proceedings to be short and sweet and lively!
Bios
Jess Rowland Sound Artist, Musician, Composer, Author. Jess’ work explores the relationship between technologies, popular culture and other absurdities, investigating “the weirdness of reality and how we all deal with it”
Aimee Norwich is a musician, inventor, filmmaker, instrument builder, and visual artist. Aimee’s formal music education is in jazz and classical electric bass, audio production, and room acoustics. Much of the technology she uses in the recording studio, is gear that she builds, such as tube microphones, preamps, and various gadgets.
PRESS QUOTES
“Rowland frames from a punk-like attitude, very basic, anarchic and experimental miniatures of unpolished beauty.” – Vital Weekly
“Think of a hyper maniacal Captain Beefheart for the Internet information age, spiced with reverberating themes and an undulating soundstage that is wacky, crazily entertaining and shrewdly enacted from start to finish.”
Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz in a review for Rowland’s last release, Spambots
“Rowland has some highly creative ideas about the use of the piano, both in terms of actual musical content and in the unusual shape of sound, and a fresh ability to see the use of one of music’s oldest and most traditional instruments in a new and startling way.” – RKF, The One True Dead Angel
https://www.jessrowlandstudio.com/
- COLLABORATOR: Aimee Norwich – VHS-USB design and concept
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE
“Reveal Party — Sound Installation by Jess Rowland”, Lewis Center for the Arts (2019). [link: https://vimeo.com/378895987].