Joshua Light Show :: May 28-31, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Issue Project Room, (oa) can factory, 3rd Floor, 232 Third Street at 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY.

ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to host pioneering multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary Joshua Light Show for a week of unique audiovisual collaborations. The residency will involve White’s iconic projections alongside an incredible roster of musicians, with a different musical genre represented on each night of the residency. The Joshua Light Show involves a team of video and light artists, led by White and his senior collaborator, Bec Stupak (Honeygun Labs) to improvise live synesthetic visuals behind a giant rear projection screen, involving the “liquid light” techniques he developed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s. Continue reading

A chapter on Live Audiovisuals written by Nick Collins and Amy Alexander appears in the recently released book, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, edited by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan.

The chapter discusses histories of audiovisual performance, including its ancestry in color organs, visual music filmmaking, light shows, cognitive science, and more - as well as various approaches to current practice including VJ’ing, live cinema, and digital media art performance. This one is not available online, but the book is available from the usual sources. Continue reading

EFFLEUREMENTS :: March 28 - April 26, 2008 :: Opening: March 28, 5:00 pm :: Society for Art and Technology [SAT], 1201 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Quebec.

An exhibition from the curator Nicole Gingras who joins the work of two artists fascinated by light, movement and sound. Diane Morin transforms her favourite material, light, into singular shadow plays, awash in penetrating sounds. The videos of Nelly-Eve Rajotte, who is just as sensitive to the power of light and sound, create destabilising experiences which may cause some viewers to lose their spatio-temporal bearings. Continue reading

Schwelle II at Festival EXIT, Maison des Arts, Creteil (Paris) France :: March 28 - 29, 2008.

Schwelle is a three part new media and performance project using cutting edge acoustic and interactive technologies to explore the extreme threshold states of consciousness that constitute human experience. Schwelle II is a live performance in which the audience confronts a lone single performer Michael Schumacher, master improviser and former dancer with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, experiencing the traumatic transition period between death and rebirth. Continue reading

Longue Durée by Angie Eng and David Linton :: Finissage (closing party): March 21, 2008 7-9 pm :: Maison Populaire, 9 bis rue Dombasle - 93100 Montreuil.

Eng and Linton have been working in a similar vain exploring experimental cinema and sound in the electronic arts scene in New York. This is the first collaboration between these two artists who have spent a life dedicated to observing, manipulating, pushing the limits of vision and listening. Here at Maison Populaire, they have combined their ideas of nomadic movement (Eng) with continual optical spirals (Linton). Change in the perspective of character, window, reflection of light, scale and mirroring are subjects at hand. The sensitive observer will notice the subtleties in the connection between image and sound which affects one another. Continue reading

Paula Matthusen: Filling Vessels and circadia :: March 8, 2008; 8 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY 11232

Filling Vessels is a multi-channel sound and light installation / performance inspired by Alvin Lucier’s Empty Vessels. The installation is dependent on interaction with feedback generated within the installation space. It functions as an audience-navigable space in which people can explore the effects they have on the sonic and visual events that take place within it. Continue reading

At the gallery and performance space Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, I was fortunate to catch a show of electronically mediated music, art, installations, and short films. Among the participants was a musician and tinkerer named Jamie Allen whose set-up was a revelation in its simplicity.

His instrument was a wooden wine crate filled with custom-made circuitry and six joystick-like levers. Allen called his tool circuitMusic, and it emitted a throbbing, old-school sound — the sort of sound that’s often called “feedback laden” when in fact it was more like he was exploring the feedback, simultaneously navigating and lending shape to the noise. (There is additional coverage of the event, including photos, in an August 2007 disquiet.com entry.) Continue reading

Snowy Day at MGFest 2008 from Michael Una on Vimeo. Continue reading

filmachine - by Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami places the visitor inside a vortex of sound and light that transcends the traditional perspective of the cinematic experience.

Three circles of loudspeakers are suspended from the ceiling above an abstract landscape. On entering the space, the visitor starts the composition with a button at the center of the piece, triggering an immersive audio-visual experience in a 3-dimensional soundscape, enhanced by a specially designed LED lighting system. Continue reading

Siren, by Ray Lee, is a whirling, spinning spectacle of mechanical movement, electronic sound and light. Twenty-nine large metal tripods, up to 3m tall, have rotating arms that spin around, powered by electric motors. Hand built electronic tone generators power loudspeakers at the end of each arm creating an extraordinary sonic texture of pulsing electronic drones. Small LED’s at the end of the arms trace circles of light as the arms rapidly rotate creating a compelling visual image. Continue reading