[spectre] OptoSonic Tea @ Issue Project Room NYC - Sunday, March 8th, 4pm

[Katherine Liberovskaya]

Sunday March 8th
4 pm

OptoSonic Tea

Live sets by:

- Richard Lainhardt (live visuals and live sound)
- Domenico Sciajno (Italy) (live visuals and live sound) with Gene
Coleman (live sound)

Invited respondent/moderator:

- Zach Layton

Suggested donation:
$ 7

ISSUE PROJECT ROOM
232 3rd Street, 3rd floor (3rd Avenue)
Brooklyn NY 11215
http://www.issueprojectroom.org

OptoSonic Tea is a 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 Tea is partly funded by the Experimental Television Center.
The Experimental Television Center¹s Presentation Funds program is
supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.





About the artists:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker.
He studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the
State University of New York at Albany, and has worked and performed
with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David
Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He's also played vibes
in a swing band; composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs,
interactive applications, and the Web; engineered audio for
recordings and live sound; and served as technical director at
Intelligent Music, a pioneering music software company.
His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden,
Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared
on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, ExOvo and Airglow
Music labels and are distributed online via MusicZeit. As an active
performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times.
He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works, and has been
making music for 40 years. In 2008, he was commissioned by the
Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York
Soundscape (www.arts-electric.org/stories/080511_nycsoundscape.html).
Lainhart's animations and short films have been shown in festivals in
the US, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New
Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film "A Haiku
Setting" won awards in several categories at the 2002 International
Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2008, he was awarded
a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for
"No Other Time", full-length intermedia performance designed for a
large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-
channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.
You can find examples of his music and digital artworks at his
website, http://www.otownmedia.com.
Some of his short films are available at http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart.

Domenico Sciajno was born in Torino (Italy) in 1965. He is based in
Palermo since 1999. A double bass player and composer, he studied
'Instrumental and Electronic Composition' with Gilius Van Bergeijk
and Double bass in the 'Royal Conservatory' of Den Haag in Holland.
His interest in improvisation and the influence of academic education
bring his research to the creative possibilities given by the
interaction between acoustic instruments, indeterminacy factors and
their live processing by electronic devices or computers.
 From 1992 he has played at some of the most important festivals as
musician, improviser or composer in the contemporary and experimental
music scene and some of his work is documented by worldwide
independent labels of experimental and electronic music.
The wide spectrum of his experiences bring him very close to the
concept of performance, where he uses texts and electronics in
combination with a choreografic use of the scene space and the
projection of visuals made by himself. He also makes Interactive
Sound Installations for art galleries and exhibitions.
He is also an activist in the developement of experimental arts. In
1995 he founded the association Antitesi and from 1995 and 1998
organized concerts and little festivals (Antitesi in musica Œ95/Œ96,
Folk it out! Œ97, i(n)terazioni Œ98, Inaudito! Œ99). In 1997 he
collaborated to give birth to the Fringes record label. In 2003 he
started toghether with other musicians the label Bowindo and  founded
the national collective iXem (italian eXperimental electronic music).
In the 2004 edition of Prix Ars Electronica his work OUR UR in
collaboration with Alvin Curran received an honorary mention.
http://www.sciajno.net
http://www.myspace.com/sciajno

Gene Coleman is a composer, musician and director. He has created
over 50 works for various instrumentation and media, often using
complex notations and improvisation in the same score. Innovative use
of sound, image, space and time allows Coleman to create work that
expands our understanding of the world. Since 2001 his work has
focused on the global transformation of culture and music's
relationship with other media, such as architecture, video and dance.
He studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, where his principle teachers included legendary
experimental film artists Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, as well as
Robert Snyder (sonic arts) and Barbara Rossi (painting). Since 2000
he has been the artistic director of Soundfield, a producing and
presenting organization with operations in Philadelphia, Chicago, San
Francisco, New York and internationally. His ongoing projects feature
musicians from many parts of the globe.
More info at: http://www.soundfield.org

Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser and new media artist
based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative
algorithms, experimental culture and architecture. His work
investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the
interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces
and kinetic visual patterns.
Zach's work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and
he has performed and exhibited at the Kitchen, Roulette, Joe's Pub,
exit art, Art forum Berlin, New York Electronic Art Festival, Yerba
bBena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center, Diapason, Issue
Project Room, Millenium Film Workshop, Bushwick Arts Project, St.
Mark's Ontological Theater, Dumbo Arts Festival, New York Digital
Salon, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Participant Gallery, Monkeytown and many
other venues in New York, South America and Europe. He has
collaborated with Luke Dubois, Vito Acconci, Joshua White, Jonas
Mekas, Bradley Eros, Andy Graydon, Nick Hallett, Matthew Ostrowski,
Michael Evans, MV Carbon, Seth Kirby, Matthew Welch, Christine Bard,
Alex Waterman, Patrick Hambrect, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam
Kendall, Chika Ijima, Tristan Perich and Ray Sweeten among many other
artists, filmmakers, curators and musicians.
Zach is also founder of Brooklyn's monthly experimental music series,
"darmstadt: classics of the avant garde" co-curated with Nick Hallett
featuring leading local and international composers and improvisers,
co-curator of the PS1 summer warmup music series and is one of the
directors of Issue Project Room. Zach has received grants from the
Netherlands America Foundation, Turbulence and the Jerome Foundation
and is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and the Interactive
Telecommunications Program.
http://www.zachlaytonindustries.com



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