DIAPASON GALLERY - NEW YORK
12 JANUARY 2009
Live sets by:
Alexandra Dementieva (live video) and Michael Attias (saxophone) ;
Aki Onda (slide projection) and Alan Licht (guitar)
Invited respondent/moderator: Amanda McDonald Crowley
Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer
OptoSonic Tea is a regular series of meetings dedicated to the
convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the
visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to
explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live
slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the
different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each
evening features two different live visual artists or groups of
artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their
choice.
The presentations are followed by an informal discussion
about the artists' practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist,
from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited
specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a
dialogue between current and past practices and provide different
perspectives on the present and the future.
About the artists:
Alexandra Dementieva is a multi-media artist based in Brussels. Her
main interest is application of social psychology and perception in
multimedia interactive installations. She manages to create
installations in which numerous cultural forms of expression, such as
dance, music, film, environments and performance are being given a
meaningful place. She links the "open" work of art to the freedom of
the spectator to assemble his or her own images. In her work there is
no trace of one way traffic - not from the art work to the spectator,
nor in making the art work as the frozen form of one or the other
hunch or reflection. Her video work integrates different elements,
including behavioral psychology and developing narrative through a
point of view of subjective camera.
http://alexdementieva.org/
Michaël Attias has been active in New York City as saxophonist,
composer, and improvisor since 1994. Upcoming CD releases include
Volume 5 of Paul Motian On Broadway for Winter&Winter, Sean Conly's
Re:Action for Clean Feed, John Hebert's Byzantine Monkey for
Firehouse 12, as well as the debut CD of Attias' Quintet Twines of
Colesion, recorded live in Portugal in June 08. Both this album, and
the second of Attias' trio Renku will be released on Clean Feed in
2009. He will be performing a live electronic score to Robert
Woodruff's stage adaptation of Notes From Underground at Yale
Repertory Theatre in Spring 2009.
www.myspace.com/michaelattias
Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda
was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is
particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled
from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a
span of two decades. Onda's musical instrument of choice is the
cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the
Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with
electronics in his performances. In another of his projects,
Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set
to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such
as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren
Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley
Hirsch.
www.akionda.net
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a
veritable who's who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends
(Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim
O'Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and
veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). He has
released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and
his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and
Europe. With Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, he founded Text of Light, an
ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside
screenings of classic avant garde cinema. Licht was curator at the
famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its
closing in 2007, and has written extensively about the arts for the
WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review, Film Coment, Sight & Sound,
Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and
other publications. His book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media,
the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by
Rizzoli in fall 2007.
http://myspace.com/alanlicht
Amanda McDonald Crowley is Executive Director of Eyebeam in New York
http://www.eyebeam.org. She is a cultural worker, curator and
facilitator who specialises in creating new media and contemporary
art events and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice,
collaboration and exchange. Amanda was executive producer for
ISEA2004, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004, held
in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, and on a cruiser ferry in
the Baltic sea. She was Associate Director, Adelaide Festival 2002
and in this position was also Chair of the working group that curated
the exhibition and symposium 'conVerge: where art and science meet'.
From 1995 to 2000 she was Director of the Australian Network for Art
and Technology (ANAT) where she made significant links with science
and industry by developing a range of residencies for artists in
settings such as science organizations, contemporary art spaces and
virtual residencies online; developing cross-disciplinary
masterclasses for artists and curators; as well as beginning to
establish links with media artists and organizations in Asia. She
previously worked with a range of arts organizations in Australia
including the Australia Council for the Arts (the federal
government's arts funding and advisory body), Arts Training Australia
(conducting research for a multimedia education and training
strategy), and Electronic Media Arts Australia (incorporating the
Australian Video Festival). She has done residencies in Berlin,
Germany (1994/5), at Sarai in Delhi, India (2002/3), and Banff
Center, Canada (2002), regularly speaks at international conferences
and festivals, occasionally writes for journals such as Artlink,
RealTime and the Sarai Reader, and lurks on a lot of media,
technology and culture related email lists.
www.diapasongallery.org/optosonic.html
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