The Media Arts Map Blogroll

If you are in the Buffalo area, please come to our workshop at Squeaky Wheel.

The Guide to Useful Technology is an ongoing project of workshops, symposia,

consultations, tutorials and problem-solving forums taught by Harvestworks staff at

art and music centers in the US and around the world.

Workshop Activities

In the first part of the session, Hans Tammen, composer and deputy director from

Harvestworks, and Adam Rokhsar, a teaching artist from Harvestworks will give a lecture about current

and recent artistic projects at Harvestworks. In the second part of the workshop they will

be available for individual Project Management consultations from workshop

participants. Consultations will outline project resources, timelines, skill needs and

financial estimates.

Sounds Elemental – Weeklong Producer Intensives

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Curriculum:

Each morning of the intensive Michael Schumacher and Brenda Hutchinson will offer lecture-demonstration on the history and landscape of contemporary sound art. Students will have up to 15 hours of individualized “lab” time listening to and drawing on a rich archive of sound to assemble a piece inspired by the respective themes – Earth, or Sky. Participants will have the option to bring with them audio they have previously gathered that supports the theme of their respective intensive (Earth or Sky), but it is not required.  Brenda Hutchinson will work with students to produce a final sound piece representative of the week’s work, to be distributed by AIR as a podcast. Each daily session will be punctuated with critiques and discussion. Lest there be all work and no fun, the class will gather for an evening of socializing at Michael Schumacher’s Diapason sound gallery in Brooklyn.

Instructor biographies:

Michael J. Schumacher is a composer/performer, installation artist and curator. He works predominantly with electronic and digital media, specializing in computer generated sound environments that evolve continuously for long time periods. Schumacher’s sound installations have been heard at festivals and venues in North America, Europe and Asia.    He is founder and director of Diapason, a gallery devoted to sound art located in Brooklyn, NY, which has produced exhibitions by David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and other pioneering sound artists. Schumacher’s composition “Grid,” a computer generated score that unfolds in real time, has been in exhibitions in New York, Barcelona and Houston. His CD “Room Pieces” was rated best of 2003 for “modern composition” by The Wire magazine.

Hans Tammen is a composer/guitarist whose music has been described as a journey through the land of unending sonic operations, and his playing as reverse engineering of the guitar. Tammen’s music is documented on almost 20 CDs, and he’s worked with dancers, light designers and video artists on numerous site-specific projects. From 1997 to 2000 he hosted a weekly 2-hour radio show in Germany, devoted to new and experimental music and sound art. Tammen has a degree in Adult Education, and as a technology consultant from 1992 to 2000 he led more than 120 seminars to advise practicioners about new technologies in the workplace. Tammen is currently Deputy Director at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, where he is responsible for the studio projects and the education program.

Award-winning radio producer, musician, and sound artist Brenda Hutchinson covers a broad range of media, including performance and composition for dance, opera, film, video, public radio, and interactive installations. Her work is based on the cultivation and encouragement of openness in her own life and in those she works with. Hutchinson encourages participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. She has spent almost 2 decades singing into a 9 1/2 foot tube and has designed a gestural interface for the Long Tube and MAX/MSP. Hutchinson’s most recent work  — the dailybell – reflects her large-scale experiments in socially based improvisations. Several of her radio documentaries have been showcased on public radio’s series SoundPrint and her work featured at festivals in New Zealand, Europe, Latin America and Canada, and venues such as the Lincoln Center, Merkin Concert Hall and The Kitchen in New York City, and New Langton Arts, The Lab and The Exploratorium in San Francisco. Hutchinson has been recognized with a Gracie Allen Award from American Women in Radio and Television, Ucross Residency Award and a Montalvo Artist Residency. Her recordings are available through TELLUS, DEEP LISTENING, THE AERIAL, O.O. DISCS, FROG PEAK MUSIC and Leonardo Music Magazine.

Nick Hallett and  Shana Moulton present an original one-act opera titled Whispering Pines 10 at The Kitchen on April 16 and 17.

The work tells the ever-evolving story of Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac whose constant search for health and happiness leads her towards fad cures and new age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal.  The mundane objects in Cynthia’s world act as portals into her own overactive subconscious, wherein hallucinatory sequences explore the nature of material and spiritual concerns in contemporary culture.

For this latest installment, video and performance artist Shana Moulton collaborates with composer-vocalist Nick Hallett to transform the work into an electronic chamber opera, woven out of pop melodies, extended vocal techniques, alternative sound controllers, and a flexible instrumentation performed by Hallett along with the soprano Daisy Press and harpist Shelley Burgon.  Moulton stars as Cynthia, enveloped in her original multi-channel video design, which tackles the divide between low and high production values through the use of green-screen compositing and interactive technology.

Whispering Pines 10 was made possible with support from the Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program and with Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds, funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.  The Kitchen’s presentation of Whispering Pines 10 was made possible with the support of the Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

For further information http://www.thekitchen.org/event/197/0/1/

Jonathan Caouette will be present to present his groundbreaking doc Tarnation, along with some surprise sneak-peak new work.

Caouette emerged as the emo golden boy of the 2004 Sundance with Tarnation, his iMovie magnum opus about a troubled southern childhood and schizophrenic mother. Sundance programmer Shari Frilot called it a “sensual masterpiece of self-destruction and re-birth.” It’s the kind of film — excruciatingly intimate, full of startlingly raw material — that unnerves as much as it impresses, causing critics to reach, almost defensively, for the hyperbole that would fend off its relentless psychic charge. Tarnation also had talking points out the yin yang: along with being the first feature made on iMovie, in almost every story on the film its price tag — which was reported, with several variations, as an absurdly accurate figure in the realm of $213.18 — was mentioned, along with the fact that both Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell signed on as producer and consultant, respectively, after seeing long cuts of the film. Mitchell was especially excited, predicting a huge directing career for Caouette, who in the film is also clearly an incorrigible performer.

In a Sundance report, Movie City News called Tarnation a “cinema landmark,” and Wellspring seemed to agree, signing on as co-producer (funding an upgrade to 35 mm) and distributor in April 2004. When it opened in October of 2004, after a showing at the New York Film Festival, Tarnation could not have been more poised for documentary sleeper-dom. Caouette turned to acting for a couple of years and is now working on a music documentary tentatively titled “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” –Michelle Orange

Official Selection Sundance, Cannes, New York, Toronto, Tarnation went on to win awards including Best Documentary from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirits, the Gotham Awards, and the LA and London International Film Festivals.

More information to come!

Click here to view the embedded video.