OptoSonic Tea event: Benefit for Issue Project Room

Sunday, December 9th

4 pm

Live sets by:

- Zarah Cabanas (live visuals) + Paul Amitai (live sound)
- Chika IIjima (live visuals) + bubblyfish (live sound)
- Marie-Helene Parant (live visuals) + Jim Bell (live sound) (Montreal, Canada)
- David Linton (live visuals + live sound)
- Katherine Liberovskaya/Peter Shapiro (live visuals) + Hitoshi Kojo (live sound) (Japan/CH)
- Ursula Scherrer (live visuals) + Kato Hideki (live sound)

Invited artist/respondent-moderator:

- Bruce Tovsky

$ 15 Issue

Issue Project Room
The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215

about the artists:

Zarah Cabanas, aka Lady Firefly, is a Brooklyn-based video artist/VJ who explores the vital, sensual, and transient qualities of details. She has performed her self-dubbed "electrorganic" videoworks throughout the eclectic, beautiful, and unique spaces/events of NYC - recently at the American Museum of Natural History, and residencies at Knitting Factory, and Chashama. Zarah has also participated in festivals in Russia, Spain, Australia, Canada, and U.S. She is co-founder of artist collective Amateur, core member of audiovisual group Silence Corporation, and video editor at Blue Man Group. www.fireflylab.com

Paul Amitai is a musician and media artist who performs electronic and improvised music in clubs and art spaces around the U.S. His installation work has been exhibited at venues such as Scope New York, Art Chicago, Soap Factory (Minneapolis), and Exchange Square (Manchester, UK). Amitai is currently the exhibition and public program coordinator at Eyebeam. www.paul-amitai.com

Chika is a live computer visuals artist working within New York's expanded cinema community and VJ scene. Her videos implement geometric minimalist patterns and original graphics in unique, repetitive combinations. She has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Mutek, Decibel Festival, The Mapping Festival, the Bushwick Art Project and more. www.imagima.com

bubblyfish A sound artist, composer, and audio engineer, Haeyoung Kim explores the territory of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name Bubblyfish, she has been creating 8-bit and experimental sound works. Haeyoung has collaborated with many respected sound and visual artists such as Malcolm McLaren, the founder of Sex Pistols, Hans Jochim Rodelius, and the Brussels based media art group, Lab [au]. Her work has been presented in art venues, clubs, festivals, and galleries internationally including The American Museum of the Moving Image, Pompidou Center, Kunsthalle Wien, MUTEK, LABoral, Lincoln Center Walter Reed Theater, and The New Museum. www.bubblyfish.com/

Marie-Helene Parant is a Quebec-born multidisciplinary artist who has been involved with experimental video and technology since the late eighties. Her art practice is characterized by an interest for the hybridization of artistic genres; collaborations in music, dance and performances as well as installations. She is working with "Sketch-In", a live and interactive video setup she is developping that forms an animated visual fresco activated by the body presence and sound. She has shown her video installation and performance work at different international venues such as InTheMix in Toronto, Club Transmediale Berlin, VidŽoFormes and Traverse Video in France, Societe des Arts Technologiques, ChampLibre, Videographe, ISEA, Artist Space Gallery NY, Experimental Intermedia NY and Festival d'Art Video in Morocco. Marie-Helene is also founding member and coordinator of SHARE MontrealÊthat hosts free, open jams for audio, visual, dance and new media artists and supports experimentation with interactive arts. www.marieheleneparant.com

Jim Bell is an audio professional and new media artist based in Montreal. He has worked as a sound recordist and in post-production for various short and feature length films. Currently studying Fine Arts at Concordia University, he has exhibited and performed in Australia, Italy, United States and Canada. He has also given workshops in audio field recording at universities and artist centres in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. His work explores correlations between natural and constructed worlds, obsolescence and novelty, control and communication. www.voxish.net/words/

David Linton Perhaps to spite a persisting relative obscurity unknown to many of his peers David Linton has remained an active and influential (one could say at times "leading") figure within the experimental music, performance, dance, theater, and multimedia subcultures he has inhabited since his arrival in NYC at the tail end of the 1970's. His design, production & performance work in music, sound, and multi-media has traversed a cultural map spanning new wave, no wave, post punk, noise, post minimalism, post modernism, industrial (the genre), improvisation (the genre), digital electronica, 'DJ culture', ' VJ cluture', analog revivalism, neo psychedelia, & finally - he hopes - post-'ism'-ism. With his Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound & light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. He employs an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and - sometimes - body shaking realtime audio visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animistic ritual "medicine show" emerges where subject and object blur. David is very pleased to announce that he will relocate to Paris for an artistic residency in the early months of '08 at RESIDENCES INTERNATIONALES AUX RECOLLETS. Early '08 should also see the first ever release of his 1982 downtown art/noise band INTERFERENCE by Brooklyn's The Social Registry label. Those curious or interested may keep track of what he is up to via: bicameral.multiply.com/

Katherine Liberovskaya is an artist, based in Montreal and New York City, whose practice has mainly revolved around different forms of experimental video since the late eighties. Her works (single-channel videos, video installations, video performances, intermedia works and sound pieces) have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events around the world. As of recent years her work mainly focuses on diverse collaborations with new music composers and sound artists, notably Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If,Bwana, Hitoshi Kojo, Zanana, David Watson, Jim Bell, Margarida Garcia, o.blaat, murmer, AndrŽ Gon�alves, Anthony Coleman, Giuseppe Ielasi, Alessandro Bosetti, Audrey Chen, Marina Rosenfeld, Anne Wellmer... Concurrently she has been involved in the programming/organization of multiple media art events both in Montreal (Share MTL, Espace VidŽographe, Studio XXÉ) and NY (Experimental Intermedia Screen Compositions 2005, 2006, 2007, as well as the OptoSonic Tea live visuals-audio series with Ursula Scherrer at Diapason).

Peter Shapiro is a video maker from New York City, involved in the dance of life, with camera in hand since the 1970's. His work deals with catching glimpses and moments, documenting nature, environments, people and behavior, as well as allowing creatures to be comfortable enough to reveal an intimate part of themselves to the camera. He has performed and collaborated with a multitude of artists, in venues, clubs, galleries, underground parties, museums and the United Nations, in New York City, and around the world.

Hitoshi Kojo has worked in various artistic disciplines such as music, painting, installation and performance. With his sound works he uses so-called "experimental" methods such as field recording, sight-specific recording, and performances with found objects, however his poetic manner of composing these elements conveys a classical and intimate feeling. Since the late 1990's, his recordings have been released under his real name as well as 'spiracle', which began as a collaborative project (Kojo now use s this pseudonym for his solo drone music recordings). In 2000, he founded ÔOctpiaÕ and has released 9 titles under this label. A new title will be r eleased by the American label ÔAlluvial RecordingsÕ later this year. Since moving from his native Japan to Switzerland in 2004, KojoÕs activitie s have expanded throughout Europe, and he has collaborated with numerous sou nd and video artists. He is currently focusing on projects with the multimed ia sound action unit 'Kodama' (with Michael Northam), and the experimental f olk duo 'JŸppala KŠŠpio' (with Carole Zweifel). Further information can be found at: www.octpia.com

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 Michelle Nagai, Michael J. Schumacher, Tetsu Inoue, Monya Pletsch 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. Scherrer was born in Switzerland and came to New York in 1988. http://www.ursulascherrer.com

Kato Hideki (Kato:family name; Hideki:given) is a Japanese-born composer/bassist/multi-instrumentalist. He is the co-founder of Death Ambient with Ikue Mori & Fred Frith. His most recent projects are: Green Zone with Otomo Yoshihide & Uemura Masahiro; OMNI wtih Nakamura Toshimaru & Akiyama Tetsuji; and composition Tremolo of Joy for his quartet with Charles Burnham, Briggan Krauss & Calvin Weston. Besides his own projects, Kato collaborates with Nicolas Collins and James Fei. He is also a member of analog synthesizer collective, Analogos. www.katohideki.com/

Bruce Tovsky is a visual/sound artist based in in Brooklyn, New York. After earning his MFA degree in Multimedia from Rutgers University in 1979, Tovsky began showing his video work across the USA, as well as Europe and Japan. His early 80's video/sound work INVADED was included in the Whitney Museum exhibition "Video/Music: New Correlations" and toured exten extensively in the USA as part of a Beard's Fund exhibition of new video art. INVADED was also shown at the 1984 World's Fair and is in the collections of The Kitchen and the New York Public Library Donnell Film Center. During the 90's Tovsky focused on collaborations with choreographers, scoring works for Muna Tseng, Charles Dennis and Bessie-winning choreographer Cydney Wilkes, among others. His dance scores have been presented at Lincoln Center, Joyce Theater, DTW, PS122 and The Kitchen. For the past several years he has been creating live video and sound improvisations, often in collaboration with artists such as John Hudak, David Linton, Kim Cascone and Michael Schumacher in a variety of spaces around New York City, including Diapason, Experimental Intermedia, Issue Project Room, Tonic, and his own installation space 106BLDG30 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the summer of 2003 he performed the video/sound collaboration FOR THE TIME BEING with John Hudak at Roulette's "Festival of Mixology" at The Performing Garage. The audio portion of this performance was released in Octo October 2004 on the Swiss label CUT, and was reviewed in the February 2005 issue of The Wire. His video/sound piece ETHER premiered at 106BLDG30 in June 2005, and played in international festivals from Sao Paulo to Seoul to Paris. The audio from ETHER was featured in "Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher," a BBC4 radio documentary on shortwave numbers stations. Tovsky was artist-in-residence at Diapason gallery during October 2006, where he presented his latest work UNDERPASS, a 50 minute silent video piece accompanied by some of New York City's most accomplished improvisors, including Kato Hideki, o.blaat, Bryan Eubanks, Richard Garet and Matthew Ostrowski. UNDERPASS will be touring the EU during spring 2007.

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