[spectre] OptoSonic Tonic - Special Event @ EI NYC - Wednesday, June 6th, 7:30pm

[Katherine Liberovskaya]

Special OptoSonic event:

Wednesday, June 6th
7:30 pm  

OptoSonic Tonic 

Live sets by:  
- Katherine Liberovskaya & Ursula Scherrer with Marina Rosenfeld
- Text of Light, featuring Alan Licht, Lee Renaldo & Tim Barnes with
film "I..." by Stan Brakhage, 1995
- Phill Niblock, film and music, featuring his film "T.H.I.R. aka. Ten
Hundred Inch Radii", 1971; with Byron Westbrook, guitar

Invited artist:  
- Richard Foreman  

Suggested donation:
$ 10  

Experimental Intermedia
224 Centre Street at Grand, Third Floor, N Y 10013
212 431 5127, 212 431 6430


OptoSonic Tea is a new regular series of meetings dedicated to the
convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual
component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore
different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide
projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways
they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two
different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set
with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed
by an informal discussion about the artists' practices over a cup of green
tea. A third artist, from  previous generations of visualists or related
fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to
create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different
perspectives on the present and the future.

Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer


OptoSonic Tonic 

The idea for this special event, our season finale, originated from a
proposition by Alan Licht to hold an OptoSonic Tonic, featuring Text of
Light and Phill Niblock, at Tonic. When Tonic closed in April we
all decided to look for another venue for this special evening. Phill
Niblock graciously volunteered Experimental Intermedia's space with its
large scale 16 mm projection we are very excited about. Hope to see you at
this special event!


About the artists: 

Katherine Liberovskaya is a video and media artist based in Montreal,
Canada, and New York City. She has been working predominantly in
experimental video since the late eighties. Over the years, she has produced
many single-channel videos, video installation works and video performances
which have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events
around the world. As of recent years her work - in single-channel and
installation video as well as performance - mainly revolves around
collaborations with new music composers/sound artists, notably Phill
Niblock, Al Margolis/If,Bwana, Hitoshi Kojo, Zanana, and David Watson. Since
2003 she is active in live video mixing exploring improvisation with
numerous live new music/audio artists including: Margarida Garcia, Barry
Weisblat, o.blaat, murmer, André Gonçalves, Monique Buzzarté, Anthony
Coleman, Giuseppe Ielasi, Renato Rinaldi, Alessandro Bosetti, Audrey Chen,
among others. In addition to her art practice she has concurrently been
involved in the programming and organization of diverse media art events,
notably with Studio XX in Montreal (programming coordinator 1996-1998,
president 2001-2003), Espace Vidéographe, Montreal and Experimental
Intermedia, NY  (Screen Compositions 2005, 2006, 2007) as well as the
OptoSonic Tea series with Ursula Scherrer at Diapason in NYC.

Ursula Scherrer is a video artist and photographer living in New York City.
Her work has been shown in festivals, museums and galleries internationally.
She has worked with composers/musicians such as Michael J. Schumacher, Tetsu
Inoue, Michelle Nagai and Brian Moran as well as with the choreographer Liz
Gerring. She is part of the international artist group BIWAK and organizes
together with Katherine Liberovskaya OptoSonic Tea at Diapason, a series
dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sounds. Scherrer¹s
work has been shown at the New York Video Festival 2004, BAC 36th
International Film and Video Festival, Brooklyn Museum of Art, at the
Chelsea Art Museum, the d.u.m.b.o art festival 2005, Experimental
Intermedia, Diapason, Roulette, Issue Project Room and Engine 27 in New
York, at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Dissonanze Festival in
Rome, 9e Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, Saint-Gervais Geneve, Tesla,
Berlin, Galerie Rachel Haferkamp, Cologne, The Red House, Sofia, Bulgaria,
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Strange Attractors II, 2nd
International Festival of Experimental Intermedia Art, St. Paul, Virginia
Film Fest, GAIe Gates etal., Brooklyn, Experimental Intermedia Gent, among
others. Scherrer was born in Switzerland and came to New York in 1988.
http://www.ursulascherrer.com

Marina Rosenfeld is an artist, composer and  turntablist based in New York
City. Her work has explored the social and situational contexts of
music-making and digital/analogue culture in a variety of formats, including
performance, installation, composition, photography and video. Her music
includes large, multi-player performances involving custom playing
techniques, graphic scores, visual elements, costumes and improvisation by
both musicians and non-musicians; electro-acoustic sound installations  for
multiple speakers; and solo and ensemble compositions involving  acoustic
instruments, turntables and electronics. Rosenfeld exclusively  plays her
own custom acetate records or 'dub plates' and is a frequent performer in
the improvised music scene of New York and Europe. She has been on the
faculty of the Milton Avery  School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.

The Text of Light group was formed in 2001 with the idea to perform
improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the
American Cinema avante garde of the 1950s-60s (Brakhage's film 'Text of
Light' was the premiere performance and namesake of the group). The original
premise was to improvise (not 'illustrate') to films from the American
Avante-Garde (50s-60s etc), an under-known period of American filmic
poetics. Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht
(gtrs/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker
(drums/perc), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes
(drums/perc).Various combinations of these players attend 'Text' gigs,
depending on individual schedules, so the group takes on various
permutations---sometimes all members participate, sometimes not. To date the
group has performed with the following films: Brakhage's Text of Light, Dog
Star Man, Anticipation of the Night, Songs; Harry Smith's Mahagonny
outtakes, Oz-The Approach to the Emerald City, and Late Superimpositions.
The group has headlined the Victoriaville Music Festival, Canada (2002);
Three Rivers Film Festival, Pittsburgh; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and
have done 2 tours of Europe to date, as well as performing in New York City
and other USA club and cinema venues.

Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video
and computers. He makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones
of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance
space. Simultaneously, he presents films / videos which look at the
movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract
images floating through time. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the
mid-60's he has been making music and intermedia performances which have
been shown at numerous venues around the world among which: The Museum of
Modern Art; The Wadsworth Atheneum; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival;
Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London;
Akademie der Kunste, Berlin;  ZKM; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at
Harvard; World Music Institute at Merkin Hall NYC. Since 1985, he has been
the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York
(http://www.experimentalintermedia.org/) where he has been an
artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia
presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1000 performances) and the curator of
EI's XI Records label. In 1993 he was part of the formation of an
Experimental Intermedia organization in Gent, Belgium - EI v.z.w. Gent -
which supports an artist-in-residence house and installations there. Phill
Niblock's music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode and Touch labels. A
DVD of films and music is available on the Extreme label.

Byron Westbrook is a composer/sound artist living in Brooklyn, NY.
His work involves performance of processed instrumental and
environmental recordings through a multi-channel environment with a
focus on redistributing distilled energy of sound and light.   In solo
performances under the name CORRIDORS, a system of multiple amplifiers
is used in conjunction with PA speakers to create a dynamic space
within a space using sound and video projection.    He has also
collaborated with Rhys Chatham in the group Essentialist (Table of the
Elements), as well as performed in Phill Niblock, Chatham, Glenn
Branca and Jonathan Kane's ensembles.

Richard Foreman 
Born June 10 1937 N.Y.C.
Brown University BA, (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) l959, Yale Drama
School, MFA (Playwriting) l962. Honorary Doctorate Brown University 1993.
Founder & Artistic Director, Ontological-Hysteric Theater. (1968-current)
Richard Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own
plays both in New York City and abroad. Five of his plays have received
"OBIE" awards as best play of the year‹and he has received five other
"OBIE'S" for directing and for 'sustained achievement'. He has received the
annual Literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Club Master American Dramatist Award, a
MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected officer of the Order
of Arts and Letters of France. His archives and work materials have recently
been acquired by the Bobst Library at NYU. Foreman is the founder and
artistic director of the non-profit Ontological-Hysteric Theater
(1968-present). Since the early seventies his work and company have been
funded by the NEA, NYSCA, as well as many other foundations and private
individuals.  In the early 1980s a branch of the theater was established in
Paris and funded by the French government. The theater is currently located
in the historic St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City's East
Village neighborhood, and serves as a home to Foreman's annual productions
as well as to other local and international artists. Foreman's plays have
been co-produced by such organizations as The New York Shakespeare Festival,
La Mama, The Wooster Group and the Festival d'Autumn in Paris and the Vienna
Festival. He has collaborated (as librettist and stage director) with
composer Stanley Silverman on 8 music theater pieces produced by The Music
Theater Group & The New York City Opera.  He wrote and directed the feature
film, Strong Medicine.  He has also directed and designed many classical
productions with major theaters around the world including, Three Penny
Opera, The Golem and plays by Havel, Botho Strauss, and Suzan-Lori Parks for
The New York Shakespeare Festival, Die Fledermaus at the Paris opera, Don
Giovanni at the Opera de Lille, Philip Glass's Fall of the House of Usher at
the American Repertory Theater and The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Woyzeck
at Hartford Stage Company, Don Juan at the Gutherie Theater and The New York
Shakespeare Festival, Kathy Acker's Birth of the Poet at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music and the RO theater in Rotterdam, Gertrude Stein's Dr.
Faustus Lights the Lights at the Autumn Festivals in Berlin and Paris.
Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books
studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.


for more information about OptoSonic Tea please visit
http://www.diapasongallery.org