The first of the improvisation and new media performances is a split program by audio-visual trio Shadow Puppies and duo Nicolas Collins and Nicholas Collins.
Premiering at Roulette on October 18th, 2009, at 8:30 pm.
Shadow Puppies is a cutting edge trio which conjures rich, complex, and entrancing worlds of electronic sound and vision in real-time. Didkovsky and Tammen stretch the boundaries of the electric guitar with an arsenal of objects, electronics, and homebrew computer software, while Ralske interactively captures and processes video using digital technology of his own design. The result is an uninterrupted journey through sonic eruptions, video hallucinations, and aggressive, entrancing mediascapes.
N.Collins vs N.Collins: a duo performance by American composer, author and media artist Nicolas Collins employing live circuit building and live coding.
“They said it couldn’t be done; they said it couldn’t happen twice in one place; they said all sorts of things, BUT:
Live in New York City
Fingers and Soldering Irons
Improvised by the Second
With non-Patented Projectionification
Circuits at Dawn (in some timezone around the world)
To the Death (of the Party)
These Gentleman Duettists will Entertain and Confound in Equal Measure.”
About the artists:
With a musical career spanning 25 years, Doctor Nerve founder and leader Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and music software programmer. In 1997 he developed the music programming language JMSL, which he continues to develop and use for his own work today. He has composed new music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, New Century Players, Ethel, ARTE Quartett, and others. His compositions and guitar work appear on over 50 records. He is director of bioinformatics for the Gensat Project at The Rockefeller University.
Hans Tammen creates music that has been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He discovers hidden sound properties through means of his modified Endangered Guitar, interactive software programming, stereo and multi-channel sound systems, and by working with the room itself. He received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) in the category Digital/Electronic Arts in 2009 for the Endangered Guitar.
Kurt Ralske‘s video installations and performances are created exclusively with his own custom software. His work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, and most recently in the exhibition “In-finitum” at Palazzo Fortuny for the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is a faculty member at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The School of Visual Arts, NYC, in the MFA Computer Art Department.
Nic Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world. Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. He is currently Chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Routledge published his book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking, in 2006.
Nick Collins is a composer, a performer, and a researcher in the field of computer music. He lectures at the University of Sussex, running the music informatics degree programmes and research group. He builds autonomous musical systems, explores generative music, and occasionally live codes as the Swedish avant-gardist Click Nilson. As well as helping to edit the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (CUP, 2007) and The SuperCollider Book (MIT Press, forthcoming), he is also the author of the soon to be released Introduction to Computer Music (Wiley).
The New York Electronic Art Festival is produced by Harvestworks in partnership with arts>World Financial Center, Roulette and New York University with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, mediaThefoundation, Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, the Québec Government Office in New York, Electronic Music Foundation, the Experimental TV Center Presentation Funds and the Institute for Electronic Art and the Paula Cooper Gallery. Corporate sponsorship is provided by Tekserve: the Apple Specialists, Newmark Knight Frank, Original Sin and Cycling74.
The NYEAF will plug into a national and international network of electronic art festivals, bringing significant contemporary art and music to the city. NYEAF is produced by Harvestworks, an international digital media arts center with 30 years of experience helping artists to get ”inside the electronics” and to develop a hands-on, experimental and explorative approach to making art with technology.