Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center announces Time-Based Art -an exhibition programmed for the 2025 Art and Technology Program building on Governors Island. Opening on May 17, 2025, the artworks in this group show are inspired by the earth, sea and space. Selected by the Harvestworks arts committee and the Executive Director Carol Parkinson, the works explore the sense of expanded time through multiple channel sound and video, artificial intelligence and nautical instruments. All events are free.
Location: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Open to the public: 11 am to 5 pm on Sat and Sun.
Opening: Saturday May 17, 2025 from 3 – 5 pm
Artist Talk: May 17th Stephen Vitiello @ 2 pm.
Performances: Laetitia Sonami – Saturday June 21, 2025, Rebekkah Palov Saturday August 23
Artists include Nick Brooke, Laetitia Sonami, Jillian McDonald, Rebekkah Palov, Stephen Vitiello with Meredith Leich and Ash Eliza Williams
Art Works
Nick Brooke: Extant is an immersive installation about celestial navigation amidst rising tides. An older mechanism of navigation–the sextant— is wired up to modern sensors and surround sound, to make an audience touch and learn this device. Extant reflects on “absence-of-field” effects— classic psychoacoustic experiments, such as Shepard tones and rhythm–acoustical barber poles–that are based on how fast they travel, not where they are, and they get lost over time. Amidst this sonic disorientation, the participant orients themself against programmed odds, while sounds swirl adrift around them.
Laetitia Sonami After decades of aversion to documenting her work on recordings, a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX treats listeners to two side-long performances with the Spring Spyre. OCCAM IX was the very first piece developed for the instrument and a Song for two Mothers, the most recent, the two contrasting remarkably in sound palette, energy and form. Harvestworks presents an in-situ spatialized rendition of these two pieces for the first time. Performance on July 21, 2025.
Jillian MacDonald The experimental video Total Eclipse and the Heart is inspired by the solar totality of 2024.During an eclipse gone wrong, characters are drawn into nature and disappear into oblivion, sinking in ponds and crumbling to dust. The video alternates between live action and footage generated by artificial intelligence. A colossal 3D moon hovers inside and out, asteroids float by, the sun morphs from one strange version to the next, and some scenes display the point of view of mosses, lichens and fungi.
Rebekkah Palov: Before Us this Horizon is an installation of sonic emergences, falls, pivots and lifts and moody quadraphonic sound-travels. Also in the space are round screens with original video recordings of, and around Hornell, NY. The hundreds of brief videos are from rebekkah’s large ongoing project – The Plane(s). The juxtaposition of otherworldly surround-sound and no frills handy-cam video, make for moods of unease, hazard, pleasure, longing. Performance on August 23, 2025
Meredith Leich, Stephen Vitiello and Ash Eliza Williams aka “The Sensing Lab” The Pond was conceived and produced at the Mountain Lake Biological Station. Drawn by mysterious lights moving along the perimeter of Riopel Pond, the artists set up camp at the water’s edge for four nights to sense the pond’s activities and sounds, both human and animal, beneath the stars. The emerging project is a quiet witness to and performance of the slow process of gathering scientific knowledge. It is also a record of our attempts to experience the inscrutable sensory world of a frog: a habitat which is becoming ever more rare. Artist Talk on May 17, 2025
Bios of the artists
Nick Brooke combines sound with theater, dance, and installation, creating unique devices and performances. In his theater works, vocalists and actors are trained to mimic sampled collages of sound effects, pop songs, and musical ephemera, blurring the line between recording and live performance. He has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation awards, and multiple residencies including Djerassi, MacDowell, Bogliasco, and Bellagio. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton and teaches at Bennington College.
Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer and researcher. Born in France, she settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music and studied with Eliane Radigue, Joel Chadabe, Robert Ashley and David Behrman. in 2015, Sonami embarked on the design of a new instrument, the Spring Spyre based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis. Magnetic Song cycles with the Spring Spyre is an on-going exploration with this instrument and currently comprises five live compositions. Performance June 21, 2025.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist based in New York, and Professor of Art at Pace University. Her work was exhibited and screened recently at Undercurrent in Brooklyn, the Art Gallery of Regina in Saskatchewan, aCinema in Milwaukee, Deluge Contemporary in Victoria, La Bande Vidéo and AxeNéo7 in Quebec, Philip Steele Gallery in Denver, The Esker Foundation in Calgary, and through Temp Files video collective.
Rebekkah Palov has a range of experiences in artist and activist communities. Since 2012, Rebekkah has been a member of Carrier Band (founded by Oliveros, Deutsch & Bode) with its signature Harold Bode Vocoder and archive recordings. Rebekkah also is a video artist, with work exhibited at MassArt Boston MA, SAT Montréal QC, Oblo Film Festival Lausanne CH, Digital Art Weeks Zurich CH and Transient Visions NY.
Meredith Leich, Stephen Vitiello and Ash Eliza Williams aka “The Sensing Lab”: a collaborative team.
Meredith Leich is an animator, painter, and video-artist who currently serves as the Co-Director of the Cuttyhunk Island Artists’ Residency. Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist currently a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. Ash Eliza Williams is a painter and interdisciplinary artist making work abouit inyterspecies communication, non-human language and vibrant methods of connection. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Roswell Foundation.
The Harvestworks Art and Technology Program is funded in part by the New York City Dept of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts, mediaThe foundation Inc, New Music USA, Cycling 74 and Friends of Harvestworks.
ABOUT HARVESTWORKS: Founded in 1977, Harvestworks offers an environment where artists can make work inspired and achieved by electronic media. Harvestworks helps the community at large to understand, assimilate, and make creative use of new and evolving technologies. Harvestworks creates a context for the appreciation of new work, advances both the art community and the public’s agenda for the use of technology in art; and brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts by fostering collaborations across electronic media.
Program subject to change. Check the website for the latest information: Harvestworks.org
