Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center announces the Elements! in Art and Tech, an exhibition for our Art and Technology Program on Governors Island. Programmed for Fall 2024, the artworks in this group show are inspired by elements of light, water, earth, flower plasma and their influence on humans. Selected by the Harvestworks arts committee and the Executive Director Carol Parkinson, the works use creative technology such as audio/video spatialization, gesture, body tracking and vegetal power.
All events are free.
Location: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Open to the public from 11 am to 5 pm Fri Sat and Sun
Date: Opening August 30th, 2024 – Closing October 27, 2024.
Artist Opening Saturday August 31, 2024 and Saturday September 7th from 2 – 4:30 pm.
August 31st, October 5th and October 12th will include a performance by Luc Vitk at 2:45 pm.
PERFORMANCE on Saturday September 14th by Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler
Artists and Artworks include:
Luc Vitk – Water Vision is a multichannel piece for water, visitors, and six speakers where the visitors will become part of the installation if they attend one of the three performances. The participants interpret a number score which then generates three hours of water music to be played in the installation space on non-performance days. The performances are on August 31, October 5th and October 12th at 2:45 pm.
Victoria Vesna with Walter Gekelman and Haley Marks – [SUN] Flower Waves explores the harmonious interaction between sunflowers and Alfvén waves, demonstrating how art and science converge to reveal deeper understandings. Sunflowers, with their heliotropic movement, symbolize growth and energy, while Alfvén waves in plasma transport energy along magnetic field lines, crucial for understanding space weather and solar phenomena.
Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler – Tears for Lost Frequencies is an audio/visual installation that explores our complex relationship with plastic through the act of improvisation. In Tears for Lost Frequencies, microplastics found in tears become material witnesses to the experience of one’s hearing loss and a speculative space for plastic healing. Performance: Saturday September 14, 2024 at 2:45 pm
Max Chung metroequilibrium, a digital instrument that captures the relationship of sound and gesture that defines an immersive embodied experience. This installation uses cameras and Google MediaPipe to create an audiovisual experience that highlight an overwhelming and frenetic encounter.
OPENING SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 2024
Jessica Segall Nom Nom Ohm – two antique chandeliers found in Nolan Park are rewired to illuminate the space using potatoes as a power source. Both futuristic and simple, the revival of the former elegant chandeliers through vegetal power suggests a compromised power grid, and the lengths we go to maintain a level of high consumerism rather than degrowth. The installation will follow the arc of the potato’s life cycle, and will be illuminated at listed times.
Raphaele Shirley – Agency (as in giving..) Shirley transforms the traditional officer’s home into an abstraction of light and geometry. The size and circularity of the work create a dynamic contrast with the room’s context, sparking a dialogue between story, time, and space. Through the tension between scale, figuration (the room), and abstraction (the light sculpture), Shirley invites a reconsideration of space and the present moment as a quantum duality of particle and wave, time and infinity.
Bios of the Artists
Max Chung is a contemporary multi-media sound artist and composer in New York City who blurs the boundaries between EDM, interactive responsive visual technologies and acoustical instrumentation. His recent work has been focused on our shifting perceptions of time that affect our relationship between emotion and temporal illusions. His work explores the current psychological instability that shapes our culture today.
Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler have been collaborating since 2017, creating audiovisual performances that investigate everyday objects, concepts of agency and queer potentiality. They have been artists-in-residence at Harvestworks, Signal Culture (Owego, NY), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY) and LMCC at Governors Island (NYC).
Jessica Segall : Hostile and threatened landscapes are the sites for multimedia artist Jessica Segall’s work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself, examining a queer ecology. Jessica is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Raphaele Shirley is a Franco-American multimedia artist based in New York City and upstate New York. Her work spans technology-based sculptural pieces, public art, place-making social interventions, and performance. She has been an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks with Rhys Chatham and GH Hovagimyan and has received several grants from the Norwegian Arts Council and awards for her collaborative projects. www.raphaeeshirley.com
Victoria Vesna Ph.D., is an artist and professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and the founder/director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Trained as a painter at the University of Belgrade, her work now resides at the intersection of disciplines and technologies, focusing on experimental creative research. Her installations explore how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation (Ph.D., CAiiA-STAR, University of Wales, 2000).
Luc Vitk is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice, and dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification, while in their improvisation practice, Luc works with the characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. Their dissertation, Compositional Techniques of Christian Wolff and Social Aspects in Music, was published in 2021.
PERFORMANCES AND WORKSHOPS –
September 14th at 2:45 pm Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler will perform a 20-minute variation on Tears for Lost Frequencies, an audio/visual installation that explores our complex relationship with plastic through the act of improvisation. The microplastics found in tears become material witnesses to the experience of one’s hearing loss and a speculative space for plastic healing.
October 5th and October 12, 2024: Luc Vitk Water Vision. The participants interpret a number score which then generates three hours of water music to be played in the installation space on non-performance days.
October 27, 2024: Tilen Lebar Limen VIII. A multichannel spectral mutation of the sonic material that initially reveals the sound of extensive improvisations with an electroacoustic guitar.
