This special event will be held at EXPERIMENTAL INTERMEDIA!
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 Ranaldo & 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
Invited artist:
- Richard Foreman
Suggested donation: $ 10
Experimental Intermedia
224 Centre Street, 3rd Floor
New York NY 10013
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.
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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, Andr Gonalves, Monique Buzzart, 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 Vidographe, 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. Scherrer is part of the international artist group BIWAK. Together with Katherine Liberovskaya, Scherrer organizes OptoSonic Tea at Diapason, a series dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sounds. Scherrers 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. 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 (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.
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 yearand 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.
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