The Casino song-cycle, composed for Dafna Naphtali as vocalist and the Toys’ Opera multimedia instrument, explores misanthropomorphized detachment and the indifferent physics that contains and integrates us even in our most dire times of xenophobic introversion. Toys’ Opera is a performable kinetic sculpture of video, audio, and serially-controlled HO trains, models, and miniature cameras. It organizes procedural and algorithmic composition into phrases and gestures spanning and integrating the media. This presentation is part of 2013 New York Electronic Art Festival.
[Jun 14 2013] Toys’ Opera: The Casino
Friday, June 14 2013 @ 7pm, and Saturday, June 15 2013 @ 7pm
Adam Kendall, Dafna Naphtali
Admission: FREE
Location:
Harvestworks – www.harvestworks.org
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleeker
The Casino song-cycle, composed for vocalist and the Toys’ Opera multimedia instrument, explores misanthropomorphized detachment and the indifferent physics that contains and integrates us even in our most dire times of xenophobic introversion.
The Toys’ Opera instrument is a performable kinetic sculpture of multi-channel video, audio, and physical-computing. It’s centered around a small universe of HO trains, models, and miniature cameras on a 5ft x 4ft stage serially-controlled via Arduino microcontrollers. The Casino adds a vocalist, text, and a software-based square-wave quartet.
The Toys’ Opera software logically and randomly organizes procedural and algorithmic composition into phrases and gestures spanning and integrating the media. The software and stage are sources for video and audio, which are interactively processed and distributed to two projectors and four audio channels.
The live, computer-processed video provides self-reactive lighting for the stage. The sounds of the stage’s serial-objects are a counterpoint to the spatialized audio.
Toys’ Opera and The Casino create an abstract narrative built by formal processes executed upon the vocalist, text, simple square-waves, and recognizable trains and models. It explores the boundaries between suggested and real worlds and the degraded foundations of both.
The Toys’ Opera instrument designed by Yoni Niv, Elad Shniderm and Adam Kendall
http://www.toysopera.org/video_images.php
Toys Opera is produced in part through the Harvestworks Artist in Residence Program.
ADAM KENDALL, COMPOSER AND TOYS’ OPERA PERFORMER
Adam Kendall is a videoist and musician living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He treats video as a medium capable of detailed, structured composition and dynamic, improvisational performances. Adam regularly performs and screens pieces solo and in various collaborations, including the multimedia project Toys’ Opera, and has presented or performed at SEAMUS 2011 (Miami, FL), ICMC 2010 (Stony Brook, NY), Contour Editions (Online), and New York City venues Galapagos, (le) Poisson Rouge, The Firehouse Space, and Diapason Gallery. He is a 2012 Harvestworks Artist-in-Residence, and other recent projects include working with the new-music ensembles Le Train Bleu (NYC) and Fuse (DC). He has organized a/v performance series and workshops, including {R}ake, and is a software developer who incorporates his own programming in his work.
http://www.hellbender.org
DAFNA NAPHTALI, VOCALIST
Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician from an eclectic musical background (jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music). Since the mid-90’s she composes/performs experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music using her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing of voice and other instruments, and also interprets the work of Cage, Stockhausen and contemporary composers. With a large variety of projects with well regarded musicians in the US, Europe and India, she has received awards from NYFA, NYSCA, Franklin Furnace, American Composers Forum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and American Music Center, and recorded several CDs, including “What is it Like to be a Bat?” a digital punk trio with Kitty Brazelton (on Tzadik).
http://www.dafna.info
