PEEL will be shown at  Videozone as a part of MUV music and digital arts festival along with 13 other selected videos from the Celeste Prize Network.

MUV is an event that explores a world of languages that intersect: digital arts and electronic music. The festival, now in its sixth edition, is edited by the cultural organization events and MUV Intooitiv. The event is characterized by a multitude of disciplines: electronic music concerts, DJ sets, video performance, multimedia and interactive installations, video contest, international workshops, meetings, video review and production. Video images and music, in continuous interaction, contribute to originate a dynamic and interactive entertainment with strong involvement of the public. Besides socio-cultural aspect of music, live performance is therefore of the testimony of actual contamination of the music with the different art forms.

http://www.firenzemuv.com/2010/muv.php

February has been crazy busy and March will be the same. First the performance at CCRMA with Jakes and then the  planning for Aster’s new office. Now March is staring with two performances and I am really excited. The first one is on the 6th March at SOMArts as a part of an event called 100 Performances for the Hole and the second one is a talk and a short performance at Work of Women Artists organized by BArCMnT at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) on the 11th. Check them out if in town.

LOCATION:
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor Street
Thursday, March 11th
7PM – 9:30PM

* Visda Goudarzi (Stanford CCRMA), will present Fosotomo/Gestonic/Neuroklang a video-based interface for the sonification of hand gesture for real-time timbre control. The goal of the system is to survey the space of musical possibilities and generating computer music using human movements. The system is build up on top of chuck and processing and uses simple frame difference as the metric.

* Julia Ogrydziak (Black Square, Capacitor, MIT) will present her recent work with the K-Bow

* Composer Cheryl E. Leonard will discuss how she creates music with natural objects, materials and sounds. She will demonstrate several of her unique natural-object instruments, including ones constructed with materials, such as penguin bones and limpet shells, that she collected in Antarctica last year.

*Surabhi Saraf will present her recent audio/visual works. She is interested in the dense, layered structure of sound with a focus on creating dynamic physical experiences. Her short performance will involve live singing and digital manipulation of the sound.

BIOS:

VISDA GOUDARZI is a computer musician interested in research in software for computer music, human-computer interaction, gesture-based interfaces, computer graphics, sonification, sound synthesis, and the application of new media in art. She is currently a researcher at Stanford working on an audio-visual feedback device in the Department of Oncology. She received her MA in Music, Science, and Technology at CCRMA in 2009. She also holds an MS in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, which she earned in 2008. Visda began her studies at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran before relocating to Vienna in 1998.

CHERYL E. LEONARD is a composer, performer and instrument-builder whose music investigates sounds, structures and materials from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, leaves, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the intricate worlds of sound hidden within these instruments and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. Many of her projects involve constructing one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments, which are played live onstage. Cheryl also enjoys creating site-specific works and collaborating across artistic disciplines. She has written numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and designed sounds for exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Cheryl holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College. Her music has been performed worldwide and featured on several television programs and in the video documentary Noisy People. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, ASCAP, American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer. Leonard has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Villa Montalvo and Engine 27. Recordings of her music are available from NEXMAP, Unusual Animals, Pax, Apraxia, 23 Five, Old Gold, the Lab and Great Hoary Marmot Music. www.allwaysnorth.com www.musicfromtheice.blogspot.com

SURABHI SARAF is a new media artist whose work brings together elements from experimental sound art, classical music, choreography and video art. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with an MFA in Art and Technology. Prior to that, she obtained her BFA in Painting from MSU Baroda (India) in 2005. Surabhi is the winner of Art vs Design (2009) organized by Artists Wanted, New York and presented her work at the announcement reception at the New Museum, NY. Her work PEEL is the Winner of Celeste Prize (2009), Italy and was exhibited at Alte AEG Fabrik, Berlin. Surabhi’s collaborative work with Nadav Assor, was presented at the NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, Bologna, Italy. Her video Peel was also shown at the 13 International Video Festival, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. Surabhi is the recipient of the International Graduate Student Scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her solo and collaborative works have been presented at the Links Hall, Looptopia and Sullivan Galleries in Chicago. She has shown at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi and was a part of Peers student residency program at Khoj International Artist Association New Delhi in 2006. Surabhi currently lives and works in San Francisco.

100 Performances for the Hole – Take Two is the second incarnation of 100 Performances for the Hole, the event features 100 two-minute performances created for and around an old mechanics pit in the floor of the gallery. SOMArts is proud to be partnering with Bay Area Video Coalition (BVAC) to broadcast this event to their cable access channels 76 and 29.  This unique event and may never be recreated, so don’t miss out!

SOMArts Cultural Center has a unique space, among other attributes, it houses a large mechanics pit in the floor of its main gallery. On March 6th, for one night only, this pit will be transformed into a unique platform for performance. Anyone is invited to submit a piece for this exhibition. Your proposal will be reviewed by a special jury of artists, curators and visual arts professionals, consisting of Kevin Chen, Peter Foucault, Justin Hoover, Jackie Im, Lex Leifheit, Lucy Kalyani Lin, and Jennifer Locke. After the live event, documentation of all the pieces will be exhibited in the gallery for the duration of the month. 100 Performances – Take Two is all about live art. It is about using the gallery as a space for experimentation. This show treats the gallery space as a laboratory as opposed to a repository, and requires the energy of the public in order to make it happen. Any type of performance is allowed, from dance, to spoken word, to games and songs, to body art, and awkward gestures. If you can think it you can make it happen. There are only two rules.

What: 100 Performances for the Hole – Take Two
When: March 6 from 5:58 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Where: SOMArts Cultural Center Main Gallery

An evening of electronic music of all kinds at CCRMA’s quarterly concert. This time featuring, in no particular order, a wild band of percussion robots, a two dimensional harp, beating phaser filters, networked dinosaurs, a computer guided improvisation quartet, a fan (yes, just one), multichannel music and more…

Music and performances by Mark Applebaum,  Edgar Berdahl, Juan Pablo Caceres, Johan Chowning, Diane Douglas, Mark Goldstein, Visda Goudarzi, Rob Hamilton, Max Matthews, Jonathan Norton, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Alain Renaud, Jakes Bejoy and Surabhi Saraf.

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/ccrma-winter-concert-2010

A short excerpt  from our 30 min performance. The sound was recorded by the camera too and so its quite bad. But I will be uploading a short studio version of the track soon. Thanks to Luca for shooting this for us.

I started writing this post almost a week ago, but never finished it, and more and more details started to fade away from my experience. Anyway here I am finally back from my ten day trip to Chicago and Bologna. The trip started crazy and ended crazy with two performances before and after fews hours of my flights. It was fun and action packed. The performance and presentation of my work at Transistor went very well, less stressful then I thought . But the three days in Chicago were totally crazy with practicing for Bologna, and that too almost after an year. Nadav and I tried to practice as much as we could during the day and evenings was booked for get together with friends, which was awesome. The night before we were suppose to leave Nate cooked us the most delicious four course dinner, it totally took all my tiredness away.

In Bologna, the Italians gave us the warmest welcome, with someone receiving us at the airport, a fancy hotel in the heart of the city and someone to help us find find the local materials, for constructing our different layers of the wall. It was the best thing happened to us, we felt so pampered. And like they say the stylish italians were stylish in everything they did, from the food that was served every night in the palace during the festival to the music that was playing while we ate. They had an impressive productions and technical team, who knew what they were doing, and genuinely wanted to help you. Everyone wore black only, not like a uniform, but well designed stylish jackets, coats and shoes, they were all so handsome!! And Man! these guys know their brands and designers, unlike many of the geeks I come across here in america. I was totally bowled over when saw some men talk about the top designers and their clothes lines etc like some americans would talk bout their favorite football players . Later I found out that it was very common for general public to know bout the latest designs and fashion trends. I felt so fashionably challenged I din even know any of the designers they spoke about:(.

The venue Palazzo Re Enzo was gorgeous, it is literally the center of the city if you look it up in the map, surrounded by  Piazza Maggiore, which is one of the finest squares in all of Italy. We were performing in Mangrovia which is the second largest spaces in the palace after the live media floor. The space had  a crazy crazy reverb in it, and sounded great initially but after working their for sometime I realized that it actually just absorbed all the mid-highs and the highs of my sounds and so things sounded a bit muffled. But I still enjoyed working  there cos they had a great sound system with which I was able to fix some of the problems.

During our stay their I met some of the most fun people and made great friends with them, which was the best part of my experience in Bologna, such warm and nice people . The festival started on the 21st and on the 1st day itself there were about 700 people in the audience, and was very very impressive since it was only going to grow in the next two days, with the last day being a Saturday, where there were close to a thousand people. The performances started pretty late every night at around 9pm and went on until 2 am. All performances there were experimental with most of them being very very loud, and I was just surprised to see how many people actually stayed throughout the festival. I really can’t imagine a concert of this scale and dynamics in San Francisco or even in New York, it was bloody craziness out there and I absolutely enjoyed it

Its only a week before I leave for Chicago where Nadav Assor and I will be practicing for our performance at Netmage 10, Bologna. Tunneling is a live audio visual performance we did in 2008 at Links Hall in Chicago. The  audio visual narrative of the performance uses a metaphor of cutting through a wall and at that time since we were performing in Chicago, we wanted to make the wall Chicago specific, so we literally  followed all the different layers that go into that thick winter fighter Chicago wall (a typical Chicago wall can have upto 8 different layers).

In Bologna we are performing in a 12th Century palace, Palazzo Re Enzo located at the heart of the city, and is primarily made of huge stone bricks. Since the most interesting part of Tunneling in Chicago was going through exploring the many layers of the wall,  looks like cutting through this palace is going be very different. This time we are trying to incorporate some other interesting ideas and history associated with the palace and the city of Bologna, and thus this performance perhaps wont be as straight forward as the last one. We still don’t know what the exact layers and but I am sure this performance is going to be full of wonderful surprises.

Some details about the Festival:

The tenth edition of the Netmage festival (Bologna, 21,22,23 January 2010) will present, in the historical castle of Palazzo Re Enzo, an unpredictable scenario of contemporary audiovisual research featuring live media, live cinema, concerts, performances, sound and visual installations.

Netmage festival, focusing on multi−media design, electronic arts and cutting−edge style, works as a meeting point for video−makers, multi−media and visual artists, musicians and performers from Europe, North America and Asia. In its ongoing investigation, Netmage presents some of the latest trends in live media. Together with research on essential aspects of perception and the intersection of visual and acoustic phenomena, the festival introduces a very wide range of approaches.

Featuring: Rachida Ziani/Dewi de Vree (F/NL), Francesco Cavaliere/Marcel Türkowsky (I/D), Harappian Night Recordings (UK), The Hunter Gracchus (UK), Lee Hangjun/Hong Chulki (KR), My Cat Is An Alien (I), Ectoplasm Girls (S), The Magic State (S), Be Maledetto Now (I), Richard Lainhart (USA), Cluster (D), Canedicoda (I), Nassa (Nadav Assor/Surabhi Saraf) (USA), Andrê Gonçalves (P), Es (Fin), Margareth Kammerer/Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia/Daniela Cattivelli/Michaela Grill (I/D/A), Carlos Casas (E), Vincent Dupont (F), Nana April Jun (S), Aaron Dilloway (USA).

See hereunder the complete programme of Netmage 10 (including the following sections: Mangrovia, Live Media Floor, Elektrolab, Cemetery and Performing Arts).

Netmage festival was conceived and created by Xing, a cultural network operating in Italy and abroad, with the purpose of planning, supporting and promoting products and events characterized by an interdisciplinary approach toward the issues of contemporary culture.
Artistic direction: Daniele Gasparinetti, Andrea Lissoni. Performing Arts: Silvia Fanti. International Live−Media Floor: Lino Greco, Riccardo Benassi.

Netmage 10 is supported by: Regione Emilia−Romagna, Comune di Bologna, Ambasciata del Regno dei Paesi Bassi, Culturesfrance. Media partners: The Wire, Mousse, Edizioni Zero, Blow Up, Nero, Alias, Il Manifesto, Città del Capo−Radio Metropolitana, Radio Città Fujiko.

Netmage 10
venue: Palazzo Re Enzo − Piazza Nettuno Bologna − Italy
headquarters: Xing − Via Ca’ Selvatica 4/d Bologna − Italy
info: tel +39.051.331099 info@xing.it
press: pressoff@xing.it
www.netmage.it | www.xing.it