The Harvestworks New Works is pleased to announce our 2018 recipients. The recipients are commissioned to create a new work in the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) Lab. The applications were reviewed by Composer-Performer/Sound Artist Christina Campanella, Artist/ Director, DiMoDA Alfredo Salazar-Caro with Artist/Technical consultant Matthew Ostrowski.
Beth Bradfish: 
Untied | United
Untied / United is a multi-speaker installation that evokes the unconscious quality of everyday life and memories. Elastic threads strung across the space will trigger sound when touched by visitors.The sounds will transform into a mix that is abstract yet at once familiar. Both fragile and tenacious, the visual elements in the room work in unison with the sound-scape to evoke qualities encountered in both casual and intimate relationships.
Beth Bradfish is a composer and sound artist whose goal is to bring her audience as close to sound as possible – like a musician holding a cello to his or her heart. The permeability and physical intimacy of sound is the foundation of experiences she creates and invites her audiences to participate in. She composes for chamber ensembles, orchestras as well as installations and sound objects she designs.
Mark Cetilia: Laws of Reflection
Laws of Reflection is an active listening experience that explores new technology for the spatialization of sound by pairing pan / tilt controls with a small ensemble of hyperdirectional speakers, which create tightly-focused beams of sound. The resulting sound projection system will allow sound to reflect off of objects within a given architectural space and illuminate different portions of the surrounding environment.
Mark Cetilia is a sound / media artist working at the nexus of analog and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems in art, design, and sound practice, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. Over the past two decades, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image.
Lauren McCarthy: LAUREN
LAUREN is an interactive performance in which McCarthy becomes a human Amazon Alexa, remotely watching over the occupants of a home 24/7 and controlling all aspects of their home. In the face of increasing replacement of humans by automated systems and artificial intelligence, McCarthy attempts to reclaim the position as omniscient watcher and controller of the home. The performance will be experienced by the participants in their own homes, as well as by an audience in a control center. Documentation and artifacts from the performance will be exhibited to a wider public afterward.
Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn whose work explores social and technological systems for being a person and interacting with other people. She makes software, performances, videos, and other things on the internet.
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manda Gutiérrez: Walking on Lightness
Gutiérrez will translate her film essay Walking on Lightness into a virtual reality environment. The audio-visual documentation of the essay is the result of the sensorial exploration of soundwalks recorded in Sunset Park in Summer 2017. The virtual journey will challenge the familiarity and cultural accessibility that is experienced in Gutiérrez’s own embodiment and historical-cultural fears while walking through public spaces in certain time and location within the urban space.
Amanda Gutiérrez explores the experience of home, belonging, and cultural identity by bringing into focus details of everyday practices whose ordinary status makes it particularly hard for us to notice their key role in defining who we are. Trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater, Gutiérrez uses a range of media such as sound art and performance art to investigate how these conditions of everyday life set the stage for our experiences and in doing so shape our individual and collective identities.
Morehshin Allahyari and Prince Harvey:
Morehshin Allahyari, in collaboration with Prince Harvey, will develop a new body of work on immigration, memory, grand-narrative, and other-future building using what they call “micro-Afrofuturism” and “micro-Gulf-futurism” as the main methods of investigation and imagination. By using their personal and collective stories and experiences, they will devise a series of mythic and fictional narratives in the form of virtual time mapping/data visualization, experimental short film, and alternative hip-hop music.
Morehshin Allahyari was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the 21st century.
Prince Harvey is a NYC based artist/musician most famously known for recording his first album in an Apple Store. Harvey spent most of his childhood on the tiny island of Dominica where he started writing songs at the age of 8, influenced by late 90s rappers. At 14, his family moved to New York and since then he has been composing and producing alternative hip-hop music, praised by both mainstream and underground audiences.
Harvey’s music has been featured in The New York Times, Noisey, Billboard, VICE, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Fader, and Afropunk among others. Upon, release of his first album, PHATASS, he’s been mentioned by major music and news publications, as well as celebrities like Lil Wayne, Russell Simmons and Talib Kweli.
In 2017, he created STAY BOLD: 100 DAYS 100 SONGS, where he released a song a day for 100 days as a protest against Trump.
Andrew Neumann: Watching:Camera:Moves
Watching:Camera:Moves is an immersive, multi-channel video/audio installation that explores, analyzes, and reconstructs camera movement through cinematic/video/sonic space. Essentially a large wall installation, it employs tracking LCD screens and projectors that move around on the wall to predetermined positions. By taking license from traditional narrative cinema, and emulating the way the camera moves in and through space, this installation becomes a deconstruction of cinematic/sonic space and breaks apart the idea of the frame.
Andrew Neumann is an artist who works in a variety of media, including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and electronic/interactive music. His original artistic output consisted of single channel videos and films. He then moved on to integrate a variety of electronic and digital technologies into his sculptural work. In addition, he has been building electronic musical interfaces, and is active in electro-acoustic improvisation. He has studios in Brooklyn, NY and Boston, MA.
Jon-Carlos Evans: Drea
mpop/Dysphoria
Dreampop/Dysphoria is an Audiovisual Album and coinciding immersive video performance that narrates the downfall and awakening of a 21st century A.I. manifested Pop Star known as “dVA.” The goal of the piece is to present an innocuous form of anti-propaganda for those still trapped in the material world. Dreampop/Dysphoria combines multiple art forms to hopefully dissolve barriers between the avant-garde and populist crowds of not only music and cinema, but also digital art and performance.
ReVerse Bullets is an audiovisual collective conceived by Klaas von Karlos in Brooklyn in 2009. Klaas von Karlos is the musical alter ego of Berlin-based filmmaker, audiovisual artist and writer Jon-Carlos Evans. A native of Saint Louis, USA, he holds a BA in Film Production from Webster University-Saint Louis and an MFA in Media Arts Production from CUNY-City College of New York. Under the alias Klaas von Karlos, he is also a live member of the band BIINDS. His most recent projects include the 2016 album “The Mansa Musa Affair, the Naked Sweatshop EP with vocalist Kyoka Jinjabrew, and the film, “All Tomorrow’s Children.”
Efrain Rozas: Myth and Prosthesis
Myth and Prosthesis is a series of performances in which a drumming robot improvises in real time generating polyrhythmic patterns with accuracy and no latency. The robot will interact with site specific events that have an interesting rhythmic or cyclical quality, such as a flag moving in the wind or microbial activity, using camera tracking systems. Some of the events will occur during the performance and some will be prerecorded and projected.
Efraín Rozas (PhD) is a Peruvian musician/researcher, specialized in software design, robotics and artificial intelligence focusing in polyrhythm and the cultural dimensions of technology. He holds a PhD in composition and ethnomusicology at New York University, funded by the McCracken fellowship, advised by Jaime Oliver and Nicolas Collins. He currently works as a professor at the New York University music department.
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ulia Sinelnikova: Persons of Interest
Persons of Interest is an interactive video installation which explores otherness in the context of the American sociopolitical landscape. The installation builds on past works using MAX which interpret local surveillance feeds of unknowing citizens alongside webcam feeds of the audience, with results projected on translucent installations. Video portraits of citizens affected by immigration bans, surveillance feeds, and an ambient audio work will comprise the projection-mapped environment.
Julia Sinelnikova is an interdisciplinary artist who works with holograms, performance, and digital culture. Heavily inspired by electronic music, Sinelnikova has designed sculptural sets for performers including Lee Burridge, Machinedrum, The GZA (Wu Tang Clan), and Aurora Halal. Selected profiles of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, Artnet, Huffington Post, The Creators Project, PAPER Mag, and The New Criterion.
Jakob Steensen: Re-animated Archives
During his residency, Jakob Kudsk Steensen will be working on Re-animated Archives (working title), a project about virtual natural history collections of recently extinct species, exploring how archives and imaginations of past natures impact how we imagine future ecological circumstances. At Harvest works, he will develop a workflow for spatial audio for VR, utilizing new developments in ray-traced audio, where it becomes possible to have audio bounce, occlude and respond in real-time to virtual landscapes and their digital materials. The project remixes audio recordings of recently extinct species, interviews with people who have had “last encounters” with them, and 3D scans of preserved specimens of the species. The final work will manifest itself as a VR, video and audio installation, where a vast virtual eco-system comes to life
Jakob Steensen is a Danish artist and art director based in New York. He has masters of Art and New Media from Central St. Martins and Copenhagen University, and has most recently exhibited at Time Square for the Midnight Moment, at Carnegie Museum of Art, The Moving Image Fair, NYC, MAXXI, Museum of Modern Art, WIRED annual conference, FRIEZE in London, Podium in Oslo, Ok Corral in Copenhagen, 86 Project Space, Brooklyn, Sleep Center, China Town and at London Science Museum.
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my Youngs: Becoming Biodiversity
Becoming Biodiversity is an augmented reality artwork that will encourage participants to explore and experience local, ecological, and indigenous networks present in an urban park site. Cell phones and headphones are used to view the artwork, which includes mixed-reality animations and storytelling as an overlay to the actual park. The experience will be an embodied one, designed to connect humans empathetically with the biodiversity, symbioses, and unseen histories in public park spaces.
Amy Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ohio State University.
Eva von Schweinitz: The Space between the Letters
The Space between the Letters is a new multi-disciplinary, research-based performance project that investigates adult literacy, the experience of learning, and the socio-political fabric of education in the United States. Integrating recorded interviews, interactive video, sound design, live-drawing, and choreography,
The Space between the Letters explores the perspective of those who struggle with reading and writing and considers the ways in which adult education can provide tools to become empowered as a citizen.
Eva von Schweinitz is a German-American interdisciplinary artist who lives in Brooklyn and creates original, research-based work in collaborative settings. The Space between the Letters is a collaboration between eight core artists, each occupying one or more roles including director, producer, choreographer, dramaturg, performer, to video and sound designer.
John Kelly Underneath The Skin, a multi-media dance theatre work based on the life and work of Samuel Steward (1909-1993), a brilliant closeted queer scholar who left academia to create his own survival strategies, reasonably flourishing as a tattoo artist, diarist, novelist, and writer of erotic fiction. The live performance will include multi-channel video projections, including animation renderings of tattoo designs, and various modes of rendering written texts.
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist. His character-driven dance theatre works focus on the threats of survival resulting from the personal and public struggles encountered by artists and social outsiders, and the nature of creative genius. Kelly’s visual artwork frequently involves self-portraiture, including drawing and painting, photography and video; 2 of his films ‘The Dagmar Onassis Story’ and ‘The Mona Lisa’ were recently acquired for the permanent collection of MOMA. His solo exhibition ‘Sideways Into The Shadows’ includes 52 hand drawn memorial portraits of friends and lovers lost to the AIDS epidemic, and dated journal transcriptions rendered on paper, was recently exhibited at Howl! Arts.
Kyle de Camp will produce a multimedia installation/performance that explores the movement of light, bodies and images through the lens of architecture, providing a subjective experience of space. The project was sparked by recent demolition of the massive public health complex Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island (1939-2015), the first major design by Russian Jewish immigrant, Harvard educated architect/ designer of hospitals Isadore Rosenfield (1896-1980) who is also coincidentally her grandfather.
Kyle deCamp is an interdisciplinary artist. She writes, designs, directs and performs at intersections of media, architecture, theater, performance and choreography drawing on multiple perspectives, exploring interactions of art, history, technology and individual lives. Her multi-focused projects combine varied perspectives to create hybrid experiences of space in live performance. Rome Prize Fellow in Design, American Academy in Rome 2017.
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Qubit is a collective of composers and sound artists who curate and produce events that feature innovative applications of technology in music. At Harvestworks, their residency projects will use the audio recording studio and our public presentation programs. David Bird is composing a music theater work for the TAK ensemble with playwright Kelsey Torstveit. His work explores the themes of domestic loneliness and will record sounds of buzzing refrigerators, creaking floorboards, leaky windows, as primary musical materials which will become orchestrated out onto the ensemble. Alec Hall is composing a long-form experimental music theatre work for the TAK ensemble in collaboration with director Katherine Brook and writer Dan O’Neill. He will use the recording studio to record acoustic instrument samples from the TAK ensemble and combine them with various electronic sounds from the Harvestworks analog studio as well as digital methods. Bryan Jacobs will present Subwhistlea sound installation that uses low frequency sound to play slide whistles. The air forced out of each of four subwoofers is directed into the mouthpiece of a slide whistle, causing the whistles to sound. The subwoofers are fed oscillating sine waves between 10 and 30 hertz- mostly below the threshold of human hearing. This piece uses one audio signal to physically create another. Subwhistlewas presented on Governors Island as part of the Artworks and Experience exhibition produced by Harvestworks.
Scholarships
Danny Bracken: A Stillness in the Dark
A Stillness in the Dark is a subtly interactive installation. Using multi-channel sound and electroluminescent wire the work will explore the use of space, movement, and interactivity. Built with Max/MSP interfacing with a microcontroller, the installation will play a musical sequence that is synchronized to sections of wire, illuminating as sound plays. As people enter the space, a camera will detect their movement and pause the work, and turning on when there is stillness.
Danny Bracken’s creative practice explores technological change and its impact on our perceptions and experiences of the people and places that surround us. Employing contemporary and historic references, the work examines the role of the physical in our progressively intangible existence.
Stephanie Gray: Do You Know What A Magician Is?
Stephanie Gray’s film-video, “Do You Know What A Magician Is?” explores the process of communication and hearing, as one with a hearing loss. With a mix of found and original video/film footage and sonic experimentation, this work will immerse viewers in the world of those with “less” hearing and dissect the ways in which we may make assumptions about those with such hearing. The title is named after a line in a condescending 1950s film about children with hearing loss.
Xiameng (Summer) Lin:
Inspired by the Italian Pavilion at Caramoor (Katonah, NY), Lin will create an interactive installation, which is also a multichannel composition. The Italian Pavilion magically “freezes” sounds made strictly within the boundaries. These sounds keep building up to a point where they sound like a landscape composition and a sonic texture. This acoustic feature often inspires passengers to make interesting sounds or sing. Using microphones and sound processing, Lin will reproduce this experience.
Daniel Neumann: CHANNELS.applied
Neumann’s new continual composition piece CHANNELS.applied was initiated in the form of a sound installation at Fridman Gallery in January 2018. The sonic “raw” material of CHANNELS, as well as recordings, will be applied to various architectural spaces and systems in form of future performances and installations. The intital patch used in a performance in 2017 will be expanded into a more versatile and flexible architecture to be used for Neumann’s new piece.
Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and professional audio engineer, originally from Germany. He holds a master’s degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and also studied electronic music composition under Emanuele Casale in Catania, Italy. A main focus of Neumann, throughout all three of his different occupations, is how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound.
Simona Prives in collaboration Ross Williams: We Said We Didn’t See It Coming
We Said We Didn’t See It Coming is an immersive interactive installation that represents an examination of our complex relationship between the organic and the man-made and offers a multi-sensorial construction of reality. The work is a dynamic choreography between the audience, musical compositions and video animations, presented in multiple life-sized projections, that plays with the viewer’s perception of time and place. The experience will offer dreamscapes that ignite a fragmented memory.
Simona Prives creates physical and digital collages, both still and moving, that focus on the process of decomposition and reconstruction. Simona uses multiple forms of printmaking and drawings in fragments, as well as video and found materials to assemble her intricate animations.
Workspace Residents
Laura Splan:
Material Expressions is a new series of kinetic sculptures whose movement is triggered by biosensors. Motorized components of the sculptures will be actuated by a live performer’s movement through electromyography (EMG) electrodes. Changing levels of electricity in muscles will control motorized movement of sculptural apparatus. The sculptures will incorporate found materials, handcrafted elements and 3D-printed forms. The project explores the potential for objects to embody corporeal experience and to materialize the unseen machinations of the human body.
Laura Splan’s work explores intersections of art, science, technology and craft. Her conceptually based projects examine the material manifestations of our mutable relationship with the human body. She reconsiders perceptions and representations of the corporeal with a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate culturally constructed notions of order and disorder, function and dysfunction. Her frequent combinations of textiles with technology challenge values of “the hand” in creative production and question notions of agency and chance in aesthetics. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Andrea DeFelice: Lemon Bomb Face
Andrea DeFelice has been working with an engineer to design & complete an initial piece of a series. The series entails three mechanized light paintings where words are hidden & revealed by two types of light: ultraviolet and daylight. Each individual piece is a wood and steel box frame, built with a linear motion mechanism, light fixture, UV & daylight tubes, UV pigment, Arduino, and custom components.
Andrea DeFelice works in a range of media including video art, drawing, algorithmic art, and mechanical hacks. With a background in new media, engineering, and sculpture, her work references different concepts behind technology and human behavior as responses to how we receive and understand information; particularly amidst the tech-evolution and the environments created from it.
Tali Hinkis: Fremd Comfort Zone
Fremd Comfort Zone is a new wearable and spatial technology environment for immersive audiovisual performances. Combining original textile designs, biosensors, and embedded spatial sensors, the suits and space will be used to establish deeper connections between performers, instruments, and audience. This new work is a continuation of LoVid’s ongoing practice combining handmade audio/video instruments, wearable and mobile technology, and visceral video performances and installations.
Brian McCorkle: 11 Attempted Decompositions
An act of composition in reverse, an antidote to composer-as-landowner, a Decomposition is defined as a series of musical decisions rather than a predetermined melody or harmony. Each Decomposition is based around a different focal point: light, timbre, loudness, note, meaning, contact, conversation, periodicity, presence, and absence. Over the course of 2018 individual recording sessions will be held with over 50 artists, engaging with a focus of their choice, designed with them in mind. The recordings will be assembled into an album, culminating in a record release show and exhibition of selected compositional systems for the public to engage with. brianmccorkle.work
Brian McCorkle is a composer, performer, and digital artist. In addition to his solo work and with the composer’s collective Varispeed, he is the Co-Director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) with Esther Neff. brianmccorkle.work
Catherine McCurry: That Time When
That Time When is a mixed reality narrative – a VR experience mapped to a physical installation that unfolds as viewers move through it. The project combines neuroscience, physicality, sound, and comedy, presenting itself as an amusement park-style exhibit in which participants walk through the memories of an unnamed research subject. She is the first person to have her brain scanned with micron-level precision, then meticulously mapped over the course of many decades.
Catherine McCurry is an artist, musician and creative technologist based in Brooklyn New York. Through her work, she explores scientific concepts and uses technology to create new paradigms for interactive and participatory storytelling. Her work spans multiple media including performance, film, sound, software, and installation.