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| 2009 Visual Music Marathon |
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| | Saturday, April 11, 10am - 10pm
The MFA Computer Art Department at School of Visual Arts, the New York
Digital Salon and the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at
Northeastern University present the New York premiere of the Visual Music Marathon,
a 12-hour festival showcasing 120 works by contemporary digital artists
and composers from around the world. The event offers an encyclopedic
look into the burgeoning practice of visual music, which combines
animation and musical composition. The roots of the genre date back
more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music
scales of the 18th century; the current art form came to fruition
following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century.
The
Visual Music Marathon presents a remarkable array of artistic
strategies and sensibilities. Some of the selected works consist of
abstract visual interpretations of pieces of music, while others apply
structural concepts of music to create moving images, or explore the
overlap between visual and musical languages. The artists make use of a
range of media and technologies, including found footage, hand-drawn
animation, stop-motion photography, digitally processed video,
computer-generated imagery, and paintings made directly on film. Works
include audio tracks ranging from computer-generated scores, to sampled
sounds from nature, to both classical and contemporary musical
compositions.
Northeastern University faculty member Dennis Miller,
artistic director and curator for the festival, explains, “With the
Visual Music Marathon, we have put together the largest and most
historically representative selection of work in this field. It is a
unique opportunity to see the best of cutting-edge digital art from
around the world as well as rarely screened historical gems in the
field of visual music.” Bruce Wands,
chair of the MFA Computer Art Department at SVA and curator of the New
York Digital Salon hour of the Marathon, remarked, “We are excited to
share all of these works with the city of New York?the majority of
which have never been seen here before. It is a wonderfully diverse
group of films, which gives a sense of the creativity and momentum in
this field right now.”
The program includes works by established figures in the field, such as Canadian/Belgian artist Jean Detheux (Daydream Mechanics V Sketch 3, Rupture and Liaisons), Icelandic artist Steina Vasulka (Trevor), Austrian artist Tina Frank (Chronomops, Pitbudp) and American artists Stephanie Maxwell (Time Streams, All That Remains) and Karen Aqua (Kakania, Sensorium). The festival also presents the work of emerging digital artists including SVA alumnus Joe Tekippe (2006 MFA Computer Art; Modal Drawing Toy), German artist Robert Siedel (_grau) and UK-based artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt of Semiconductor (200 Nanowebbers),
among others. In addition to the contemporary works, the program will
include examples of rare, historic works from early practitioners of
the art form, such as Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, which will be
screened on 16mm film. The Visual Music Marathon will also feature live
audio-visual acts: 1/X, performed by artist and SVA alumnus Chiaki Watanabe (1996 BFA Computer Art) and musician David Galbraith; and S2: Simstim Squared, performed by artist Marjan Moghaddam and composer Adam Caine.
For further details about the festival or to view the April 11 program schedule, please visit www.2009vmm.neu.edu and www.nydigitalsalon.org.
SVA Theater, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public
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New Art - NYC
February 5 - 20
Visual Arts Gallery
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