The Process – an art and Tech exhibition
Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center announces The Process – an art and tech exhibition for the 2023 Art and Technology Program on Governors Island. Opening on June 30th with artworks exploring sonic holography, psychoacoustics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, neural networks and robotics by an intergenerational group of artists using technology as a creative medium. All events are free.
June 30 – October 29, 2023
Harvestworks Art and Technology Program
Nolan Park, Building 10a
Governor’s Island, NYC
Scheduled Events
Sep 1
11:00 am
Opening
Jun 30
– Oct 29
Ursula Endlicher: Custom HTML Plant Tags (and Input Field reversal #3) is a digital image series accessible through an Augmented Reality experience by scanning the bark of trees, reading their structure as “natural” QR code. Visitors, with their cellphone and AR app in hand, take a stroll around the island to treasure hunt digital files “embedded” within natural trees. Walks & Talks by Ursula: Saturdays at 2:30 and 4:30
Jun 30
– Oct 29
Woody Sullender: Duo Mezzo (Inversion) is a site-specific installation and virtual music performance, utlizing Unreal Engine to create a digital replica of the space, projecting it within the physical room. Through motion tracking, the visitors’ presence is doubled into the virtual space, allowing them to experience a banjo music performance with Sullender’s own avatar as both a real and virtual audience.
Jun 30
– Oct 29
Emmett Palaima: Cathedral-64 is an immersive audio installation and instrument where 64 individually controlled speakers create a three-dimensional sound experience, allowing for ongoing compositional experimentation. The piece focuses on exploring the musical and psychoacoustic possibilities within the space.
Jun 30
– Aug 20
Elico Suzuki: Birds don’t have Borders explores the transmission and migration between humans, birds, and intangible media. The installation combines player toy pianos, played with a score generated by bird flock videos captured during Suzuki’s travels, while light sensors capture bird shadows and convert them into keystrokes, mimicking an old transmission system. CLOSING AUGUST 20, 2023
Jun 30
– Aug 20
Bob Bielecki and David Behrman: Spindrifter utilizes Bielecki’s innovative 48-channel microphone and multichannel playback system to capture detailed acoustic properties of natural environments and create an immersive audio experience. Combined with Behrman’s music passages, the installation envelops visitors in a natural sound environment, evoking the sensation of being outdoors. CLOSING AUGUST 20
Jun 30
– Aug 27
Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons with Zach Layton: All That is Seen and Unseen is an interdisciplinary installation opera that delves into the effects of technology on human consequences, confronting the erosion of truth and trust in our society. It explores machines learning by creating a real-time performative neural network, imagining a quasi-supernatural invasion of malfunctioning intelligent machines, blurring reality and endangering everyone. CLOSING ON AUGUST 27, 2023.
Sep 1
– Oct 15
Efraín Rozas Myth and Prosthesis I: Do Robots Have Culture? Eight robotic “percussionists” improvising simultaneously, as in Latin American rhythmic improvisation. Part of the series “Myth and Prosthesis”. “Myth” being the cultural ideals that inform the creation of technology. Prostheses are the merging of bodies with technology.
Sep 1
– Oct 15
Amelia Marzec East Meets West: A virtual reality piece that is a walking simulator filled with impotent paper-doll tanks. It was inspired by the game, “World of Tanks,” a shooter which depicts historically accurate battles in Eastern Europe. However, East Meets West simply lets you explore the landscape, which is nonetheless littered with ghosts of the past.
Sep 1
– Oct 29
Stephanie Rothenberg and Suzanne Thorpe Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling (Version 1) is a multimedia installation focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that senses safe settlement habitats through sound. Artist Presentation on September 23rd @ 2 pm and 4 pm.
Sep 1
– Oct 29
Michelle Jaffe, David Reeder and Phil Edelstein LocaleS3 is a project that explores sound perception with multiple spatial and kinetic interactions like movements, locations, directions, and integrates virtual/physical sound objects. Multiple hardware/software explorations will be included in the project in collaboration with the NousDigital NousSonic system to localize the audience. Conversation with the artists on Saturday October 21, 2023 at 2:30 pm.
Oct 20
– Oct 29
Marta Grasso and Kevin Ramsay Karkinos is a sound installation that encompasses eleven terracotta sculptures, six exciters, and six solenoids. In this immersive project, the sculptures are brought to life by the exciters and solenoids are employed to produce rhythmic tapping sounds reminiscent of an MRI machine.
Aug 19
1:00 pm
– 4:00 pm
What is the Shape of Water? A cross-species meditation by Lisa Moren with Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff.
Aug 19
1:00 pm
– 4:00 pm
Women’s Labor: Rheostat Rotary Rack – A mid-20th century umbrella-style rotary dryer embedded with a rotary encoder and potentiometers, performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand or by wind.
Sep 9
UnStumm – conversation of moving image and sound featuring Seth Cluett. UnStumm is a project for real-time film and music (Echtzeitfilm) for cross-disciplinary and cross cultural collaboration between visual artists and musicians from Germany and other countries.
Oct 28
Aligned Illusion – computational performance by the Harvestworks technical interns Malu Laet and Ti Wen Hsu, with AI generated visuals by Yuting Tao.
Related projects/events
About the artist(s)
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance.
Suzanne Thorpe is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. She interweaves critical listening practices with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft immersive sound engagements and creative research sites that question circulations of power within human and nonhuman systems.
Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty (AutomaticRelease) are multiplatform artists who make interdisciplinary performances, installations, experimental films, documentaries and interactive video scores to accompany live performance. Shaun and Lauren’s projects have been seen in NYC, nationally, and internationally at venues such as BAM, The Brooklyn Museum, Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Tokyo Wonder Site, and the Venice Biennale.
Elico Suzuki is an interdisciplinary sound artist based in Tokyo, Japan. She is also active as an improviser and composer under the name “suzueri”.
URSULA ENDLICHER is a new media and interdisciplinary artist working with interactive media and the Internet since the early 1990s. She investigates structural components and interfaces of digital and “natural” networks and creates works in contrasting formats including net art, AR, installation, performance, environmental works, and dinners – often a combination thereof. In her works humans and more-than-humans, machines and nature, are inspired by each other’s behavior – often in humorous ways – and create new forms and “worlds” in between.
Woody Sullender is a media artist and musician based in Queens, NY. His pieces encompass a myriad of media including sculpture, video games, performance, theater, music, installation, architecture, origami, and sonic weaponry. His recent work utilizes video game space as an arena to undermine specific modernist ideologies and rituals of music reception. Previously, Sullender was recognized as a pre-eminent experimental banjo improviser.
Emmett Palaima is an artist working with electronics and esoteric processes of sound creation. His work is conceptually rooted in the idea that technology and magic are one and the same, and that electricity is a manifestation of the divine or elemental forces underlying physical reality. He creates instruments which explore the experience of sound as an embodied, physical process and the sculptural beauty of the systems used in sound creation.
Peruvian musician, interdisciplinary artist and scholar. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by The New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine.
Amelia Marzec is an American artist focused on rebuilding and engaging with local communications infrastructure to prepare for an uncertain future.
Lisa Moren is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with emerging media, bio-matter, public space, and works-on-paper. Since 2001, she has worked with communities to document under-represented memories from Berlin and cities in Central and Eastern Europe that were archived as interactive installations.
Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff’s is a marine biologist whose research is focused on dinoflagellate evolution with special emphasis on the parasitic dinoflagellates, using large scale sequencing and phylogenetic methods to describe the evolutionary history of different types of genes in dinoflagellates. He uses DNA sequence analysis from data collection, assembly, annotation and phylogeny.
Michelle Jaffé is a New York inter-media artist creating time-based experiential works. Since 2002 she weaves sound together with sculpture, video & performance. Jaffé mines sound as powerful sensory experience; forging new neural connections by engaging mind, body & limbic brain simultaneously.