Full Description:

Two performers, one singing and one processing, create a dense palette of sound and imagery derived entirely from voice.

Bioluminescence is a performance by R. Luke DuBois and Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of human voice. The voice has a unique role in our musical culture, bridging the linguistic and the semiotic in a way that transcends instrumentality through a highly personal embodiment of musicianship. The recorded female voice, in particular, has been the subject of academic investigation following its role in aesthetics (Adorno), cinema and psychology (Silverman) and feminist theory (De Laurentis). In electroacoustic music, the voice has a privileged place in our canon, providing an boundless source of material for sonic exploration from the tape works of Berio, Dodge, and Lansky through the composer-performer repertoire of Joan LaBarbera and Pamela Z. In Bioluminescence, DuBois and Flanigan investigate the possibilities of the improvised voice in tandem with electroacoustic processing. In an intimate and visceral performance, the interplay between the two artists (one singing, one processing) engages the metaphor of the voice as impulse and the computer as filter, creating a dense palette of evocative sounds and images derived entirely from the voice of the singer. Using custom software written by DuBois, Flanigan's melodic voice is restructured and composed in real time through spectral processing. As the two performers sit across from one another in an apparent "dialogue" of sounds and words, the changing shape of voice is traced through live video, leaving trails that evoke the memory of voice. These visuals act as a immersive sonogram, allowing us to see what is heard in relation to how we are listening.

Tonights event is sponsored by the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.

Artist/vocalist Lesley Flanigan's work, which includes both sound and object-based projects, stems from her interests in the sculptural process of building up and breaking down essential materials, and acoustic relationships between processed and natural sound. With a background in sculpture and more recently in media technology from ITP at New York University, she uses custom built electronics as a way of getting closer to more tangible sound, often using loudspeakers and microphones as musical instruments themselves. Her most recent performance and CD release Amplifications (for voice and speaker electronics), toured nationwide in Fall 2009.

DuBois and Flanigan have performed together internationally as Bioluminescence at numerous venues and art spaces including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Stone (New York, NY), The Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN), Transitio_MX (Mexico City '09), and the International Computer Music Conference (Copenhagen '07).

Full Description:

( (( PHONATION )) ) is a multimedia solo performance by Bora Yoon with live video manipulations by Luke DuBois- exploring where sound connects to the subliminal using found sounds, new and antiquated instruments, electronic devices, and voice. Using a sound designer's approach to performance composition that is steered by a penchant for a song, ( (( PHONATION )) ) engages with music as music, and not as part of a genre, taking the means to one end, and using it for another to form new utterances of sound and the beginnings of a new sonic language, within its spatial and architectural context. In every case, a particular sonic geography is evoked that might be inspired by a simple, found-sound in the world, or an expression of a sonic paradox bouncing around only in the mind.

Bora Yoon is an experimental sound artist, composer and performer, who creates architectural soundscapes from found objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice. Featured in WIRE magazine and on the front page of The Wall Street Journal for her musical innovations-Yoon has presented her original soundwork ( (( PHONATION )) ) internationally, at Lincoln Center, the Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, the Bang on a Can Marathon, BAM, and John Zorn's Stone. Her music has been presented by Samsung and the Electronic Music Foundation; commissioned by the Young People's Chorus Chorus of NYC and SAYAKA Ladies Chorale of Tokyo; awarded by Billboard, BMI, the Arion Foundation and the Asian American Arts Alliance; and published by Swirl Records, MIT Press, and the Journal of Popular Noise. Upcoming plans include scoring and performing in the staged production of Haruki Murakami's acclaimed "Wind Up Bird Chronicle"; custom instrument design and performance with LEMUR; recording and remix projects with DJ Spooky, Meredith Monk, and early music group New York Polyphony; and a wax cylinder record for UK phonograph artist Aleks Kolkowski's museum collection- while ( (( PHONATION )) ) continues to resonate and rarefact in concert.

www.borayoon.com

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.

Full Description:

Using the theory of the Four Temperaments as structure for a score, this collaborative live performance constructs a formal analog of emotional states-sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. According to ancient philosophers and physicians, personalities and moods developed as a result of the mix of fluids in the body, otherwise known as humors. Gallagher and Savje collaborate to generate visuals using a variety of techniques which include painting, processing and photography to accompany audio composed and created by Davis.

Tonights event is sponsored by the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation.

Madeleine Gallagher is a visual artist, educator and designer who lives in Los Angeles.Centered at the intersection of traditional object making, time-based media and performance, Madeleine uses her work as a means to investigate cultural filters and cognition in media perception.

Adam Savje is an artist whose lives in Boston. His work predominantly uses handmade film techniques, traditional optical printing and animation effects. Savje's oeuvre includes mostly personal experimental films made with photochemical and light processes on celluloid, which include a variety of hand painted & photographed images. Alchemy, magic and the occult are deep sources of inspiration for him and are an integral aspect of all that he does.

D. Edward Davis is a composer and sound artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His music has been performed by a wide variety of performers and ensembles. He has forged a long-standing relationship with the New York Miniaturist Ensemble, for whom he has composed over twenty works.

Full Description:

Backbreakerneckbrace is Michael and Dawn Haleta. They have worked together for over a decade creating an elaborately designed and highly detailed body of audio visual based work.

"The forces which hold the elementary parts in a certain orderly relation to each other are not derived from the affinities of just a few kinds of units, but arise from the interactions of very numerous active entities".**

Backbreakerneckbrace animations are a conglomeration of micro and macro-based sonic and visually entangled events. At times the work may be auditorially and visually fierce and abrasive while at other moments passages hinge on comedy and playfulness. Time-based grids, drawings and graphs play an integral role in the initial shaping and overall composition of each piece. Highly detailed drawings on graph and watercolor paper assist in the audio and visual structuring and development of there animations and enable them to work simultaneously together.

Through harnessing both pen and paper, computers and stop animation, Backbreakerneckbrace create their own unusual A/V events. There animations become interpretations of events occurring within and outside of there environments. Each piece utilizes texture, object and color systems and repetition to reference structures, city grids, the flow of urbanized areas, etc. as well as the unconscious world embedded within our imagination. Their animations take a colorful approach composed directly by their hands, ears, eyes, pen and paper.

References:
** Wassily Kandinsky

Tonights event is sponsored by the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation.

Backbreakerneckbrace have shown at numerous galleries, houses, raves, and clubs all over the United States and Europe. Past shows include: Bauhaus University: "Back-Up!" festival (Weimar, Germany), The Whitney Museum: ISP Exhibit 2004, Contemporary Museum: New Media Installment Summer 2004, Transmissions 004 festival 2001, OpenVideoProjects A/V festival 2005 and many more.

Dawn Haleta is an artist from the small coastal town of Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. In 2000 she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland with a BFA. Dawn has worked with the ever evolving performance group Backbreakerneckbrace for five years. Backbreakerneckbrace is a collaborative effort between Dawn and audio/visual artist Michael Haleta which continually works with collaborators to fully realize their audio visual intentions. In 2002 she co-founded the New No York collective which presented events throughout New York to promote audio and visual artists who did not have a place to show their work. This group has now exhausted itself but while in action it presented artists such as Kevin Drumm, Jim O'Rourke, People Like Us, and Julian Ottavi.

Dawn is interested in time sensitive pieces in which large amounts of information are condensed within intentional time constraints. Multiple movements are packed into one viewing and echoes the layout and structure of a musical score composed as individual movements. Dawn's interest in the synchronization of video and audio enhances the experience of the viewing. These visual works are designed with an audio component in collaboration with Mike Haleta. The works become animations in which there is no separation between the audio and the visual. Her work is influenced by the weavings of Annie Albers as well as animations by the Canadian artist Norman McLaren.

Dawn has shown her work at numerous shows and events including Tonic, NY, NY, the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, Art Scape, Baltimore, MD and the Whitney Graduate Program, NY, NY. Dawn is currently working towards a degree in sustainable design.

Michael Haleta (born in 1978 in Princeton, NJ) is an intermedia artist living and working in Atlantic Highlands, NJ. He studied the cello from an early age up until the guitar, effects pedals and free form improvisation peaked his interests in the generation of sound. "Everything starts from a dot."-Kandinsky. Haleta is interested in individual sounds and bits rather than complete things. In terms of visuals, he graduated in 2001 with a BA in information design from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). A list of current visual and audio-based collaborators include: BBNB: Dawn and Michael Haleta, HD: Jeffrey Donaldson/Haleta, Zbigniew Karkowski/Haleta, the Voltage Spooks: Rick Reed/Keith Rowe/Haleta, MATH: Jeremy Sigler/Haleta and 2673 (Kevin Winters)/Haleta. Haleta has worked and/or played together with numerous composers, artists and musicians, including: Paul Neidhardt, Stephan Moore, Shaun Flynn, 2673 (Kevin Winters), Rick Reed, Jeremy Sigler, Keith Rowe, Jason Urick, Kasper Toeplitz, Scott Smallwood, Seth Cluett, Dan Deacon, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jeff Donaldson, Andrya Ambro and more. He has released audio for Alienation, Raw Special Effects (RSE), Carpark, Antiopic and Hoss records. Michael runs the small edition label/autonomous shop, Raw Special Effects (RSE) which is scheduled to release material by EVOL, Peter Rehberg and many others within the year 2010. A small portion of Haleta's visual research can be viewed here: http://rse.sevcom.com/

Full Description:

A composer and software designer, working in the intersection between image and sound using a hybrid of digital and analog media.



He has worked and performed with Michael Galasso, Sesame Street, Vito Acconci, Zach Layton, Alex Waterman, Ha-Yang Kim, Nick Hallett, Nate Boyce, Robert Wilson, Experimental Television Center, Harvestworks and many others.



Sweeten has performed and screened at The Kitchen, PS1, NY Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CinemaTexas, Liverpool Biennial, The Stone, Issue Project Room, Aurora Picture Show, The New Museum, Lux2008 Spain, and has held youth workshops for electronic music at Community Musicworks (RI), Vibe Songmakers (NY), and The Guggenheim Museum (NY).



Ray is currently an Interface Engineer at LBi IconNicholson in New York City.