Folly Systems is a two-night festival featuring a diverse group of artists working in the intersection of performance and media art. Using media and technologies not as an end in themselves but as non-neutral creative strategies, Folly System artists utilize tools that range from virtual reality, custom projectors, wooden artisanal instruments, communication media, and DIY video interfaces. What is the difference between a spoon and virtual reality? Is one more technological than the other? Despite differences in materials and technical complexity, the same creative gesture is made across various media over and over again as if we were endlessly rediscovering the wheel. Performances by Ragnhid May, Aki Onda, Lee Gilboa, Forbes Graham, Amanda Gutierrez, Ying Liu, Ian Kornfeld, Jean Carla Rodea, Art Jones, Nao Nishihara, and Gill Arno. Curated by Cecilia Lopez. Co-presented with Outpost Artist Resources.
Tickets: $15 online, $20 door. $25 Festival Pass! See both nights for $25.
Wednesday, November 13th Performances:
Ragnhid May
Aki Onda
Lee Gilboa
Forbes Graham
Amanda Gutierrez
Thursday, November 14th Performances:
Ying Liu
Ian Kornfeld
Jean Carla Rodea
Art Jones
Nao Nishihara
Gill Arno
11.14 Performances
Ying Liu, Hang Out 2.0
Yi Chen (yi.549221) and Jack Skaggs (@vaguelyjapanese), collaborators of Ying Liu (@makeafountain), converge at Roulette for Folly Systems, an experimental audio & visual concert, where Ying serves as a bar back. Through their hyper-looking self-documentation (documented by GoPro cameras) and use of social media as audience members, their activities outline the viewership and communal experience in experimental music and arts.
Ian Kornfeld, ANTIPLAN
ANTIPLAN is an audiovisual project focusing on the live experimentation of the artist who, conjoining cinema, music, and visual arts, constructs and deconstructs a vertigo-inducing landscape of animated collages and electronic sounds.
Jean Carla Rodea, Buscando a Marina (Looking for Marina)
Buscando a Marina (Looking for Marina) is a vocal performance incorporating poetry, sound and movement that explores intersections between history, ritual, spirituality, and technology through the figure of “La Malinche,” the woman who played a key role in the so-called conquest of the Aztec Empire.
Jean Carla Rodea: video, sound, vocal performance.
Art Jones: video mapping.
Art Jones, A Symmetric Warfare
A landscape of small, uniquely similar sculptures. Each sculpture is based on Google Maps data and marks the longitude and latitude of a fatal encounter between an unarmed civilian and law enforcement officers in the United States during 2019.
Nao Nishihara, Ma
The artist maneuvers a self-built musical machine that contemplates the meaning of the Japanese word “Ma,” which means space, timing, people, and communication—integral components in any music.
Gill Arno, mpld
Gill Arno’s mpld consists of the amplified projection of “found” slides, which he has collected for over two decades in old attics and cellars, flea markets, abandoned factories and schools, and countless odd places around the world. These objects, which he regards as affective ready-mades and long-lost miniature universes — the not quite permanently fixed perspectives of unknown and now vanished observers — he then manipulates in his studio by layering, masking, and otherwise delicately altering their internal structure and meaning.
Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. Lopez studied composition with Carmen Baliero and Gustavo Ribicic. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College and an MA from Wesleyan University in composition (2016). Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (AR), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Festival Internacional Tsonami de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Roulette, Issue Project Room, Floating Points Festival, Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Ostrava, Czech Republic), MATA Festival 2012 (NY), Experimental Intermedia (NY), Fridman Gallery (NY), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway) and Ende Tymes Festival (NY), Festival Punto de Encuentro organized by the Asociación de Música Electroacústica de España (Spain), and the XIV Cuenca Biennial, among others. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various residency programs such as Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ostrava Days Institute, Harvestworks, and Rupert Residency.
Outpost Artists Resources supports new creative work through residencies and events. Their mission is to serve artists in need of technical assistance with video, audio, and physical computing-based art projects and to foster a dialogue between visual art and experimental music. Outpost hosts gallery exhibitions, artists talks, screenings and events that pair visual art, video, experimental music, and performance in an effort to bring adventurous audiences challenging interdisciplinary projects. Outpost has served the media arts community since 1991, providing access to high quality video editing technology, sound engineering, and custom programming.
Folly Systems is made possible by the support of National Endowment for the Arts, NYC Cultural Affairs, NYSCA and media The Foundation Inc. It is a co-presentation between Roulette and Outpost Artist Resources.
