2007 Artists in Residence

Composer and sound artist Christopher Bailey plans to create an open-source freeware software application and companion database that allows composers to request a series of found sounds by their tonal or auditory properties (attack, duration, agitation, decay) and be presented with a random selection of matches which can then be altered and composed with as desired. To demonstrate the power of this system once it is finished, a ten to fifteen minute composition will be produced using the software.

Nurit Bar-Shai’s project “Nonetheless I’m Still Here” is an online performance in which participants telematically control a simple scene of a curtain flowing in space. Mechanical motions change the overall scene only slightly, but over time they combine to move the curtain in a way that conveys the natural sway of fabric in the wind. The work examines how real-time, telematic performance, in which objects are controlled collaboratively, can be used to explore tensions between the organic and the inorganic, human intervention and natural spontaneity and the poetics of the mundane and the fleeting in life.

Violinist Rebecca Cherry will create a sound installation using a selection of popular music processed with Max/MSP. Using triggers caused by certain chords, notes, and key structures, she hopes to mix the works with newly-sampled music, creating an altered soundscape “descended from” the original music. Cherry has performed in the Baltimore, Annapolis and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, the London and Bergen Philharmonic, and with pop music performers including Jay-Z, Kanye West, Stevie Wonder, and more.

Melanie Crean proposes will create Phrenology, a series of 360 degree photographic panorama housed in a modified game engine, that interconnect with one another through writing worked into the landscapes. The text will be derived from a writing workshop for incarcerated women at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where women will write about their relationship to space and where they would ideally like to be. The piece will include an abstract 5.1 sound score, also based on the women’s writings. Crean is a media artist from Brooklyn who has received commissions from Art in General and Creative Time. She is Director of Production Emeritus at Eyebeam and currently teaches at Parsons and Pratt.

Ximena Diaz’’s Differentiation uses multiple video clips of an identical sidewalk scene, with each clip set to correspond to a specific subjective category—white, black hair, unemployed, short, etc. Within each clip, all people not conforming to the clip’s set category are digitally removed, suggesting the futility of such categorization. Diaz has exhibited and taught extensively in her native Bogotá, Columbia.

Vijay Iyer will create Menagerie, a multi-channel audio installation where musical “agents” move through the sonic space, generating musical streams based on the physiological processes (breathing rate, heart rate) of various animals, in essence creating a garden of invisible musical life forms. Iyer’s award-winning work as a composer and performer spans ten albums and dozens of projects around the world.

Video artist and new media researcher David Stout’s proposed Archipelago utilizes interactive 3D animation to simulate a series of virtual ecosystems, each inhabited by an evolving population of artificial intelligences. The work will be exhibited in multiple locations around the world, with each site possessing a unique aesthetic and diverging population of organisms. A hybrid cinema experience, the work is part video art installation and part interactive game, placing viewer-participants in an expansive ecology in which they are equal, rather than dominant, to the evolving artificial organisms. Stout has toured extensively throughout Europe and the US, and has received the Sun Microsystems Award for Academic Excellence and a Harvestworks Interactive Technology residency.

Tres Warren plans to produce a surround sound installation centered on a short recurring loop set against a background of changing sonic textures, eventually evolving into a semi-programmed composition. The result will be “chaotic and meditative” and serves as an investigation of the theme of urban disorientation. Warren’s previous works have been shown throughout New York City.

Anne Wellmer will create an audio-visual performance environment, using old fashioned technology: by putting audio on the video input of a variety of TVs and video monitors she controls black and white noise patterns. The multi channel audio consists of field recordings which are manipulated on the spot, and live generated sounds from an analog synthesizer; the audio is processed live and distributed via maxmsp… for the New York Electronic Art Festival performance at 3LD sonic environmentalist Anne Wellmer will collaborate with live video artist Adam Kendall. Supported by the Gaudeamus Foundation.