Custom Portfolio: Mount Holyoke

100 Millions

This is my first pandemic livestream film - commissioned by Experimental Sound Studios in Chicago. It is the third live film in collaboration with Laetitia Sonami, and also includes Paul DeMarinis - they are both artists that I have been in conversation and collaboration with since the early 2000s. I was solely responsible for the video production, live creation of all images, collating the streaming data and broadcasting via OBS. I chose this as a representation of my fluidity with technologies, both those I have worked with for many years and those that were brand new. It showcases my innovative approach to creating a performance space, even with the restrictions of a livestream. Since there was no technology to get a Zoom feed into Max at that time, I re-filmed the Zoom call with a second camera and mixed it in as a layer. This is another film that uses literature as a jumping off point (both IC You and Sheepwoman are similar in this way). You can read my public facing description and see more images at the button below. This film was performed only one time.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/qpFaPx5GPo0

Until Spring

For about 5 years I developed and toured an evening-length piece with Morton Subotnick. It was fairly early in my career and working with him was a beautiful serendipity. A curator asked me to create live imagery at Arc Electronica to accompany the Linz Philharmonic’s performance of Morton’s expanded orchestral work “Until Spring”. The whole thing was a leap of faith for me as an artist. I explored abstraction so deeply with that work, in large part because that is also the space Morton works in. He became my mentor and friend, an unusual duet perhaps but one that was never short of full immersion in my work each night. We both improvised a great amount and I built a solid base of confidence in my ability to visualize sound, create a language of abstraction and perform at a very high level of quality and sophistication. One recording was released on Mode Records: https://moderecords.com/catalog/237subotnickdv/

It’s Normal…

I am currently touring and workshopping this piece in the USA. This still is from a performance on the opening night of the Ann Arbor Film Festival in March 2021. In the greater context of my work, this is a continuation of the arc I began with Morton Subotnick in the early 2000s - creating a piece together from scratch for which I develop a specific visual language, while maintaining my own unique aesthetic. I am using the same general “movie-making instrument” that I started coding in Max in 1999, but there have been many refinements over the years. For this piece, as with prior ones, the recipe evolves over time and then I like to think of it as a soup - we have created all of the ingredients and there is a built-in synergy. On stage we set all of the parts in motion and after enough time together, the soup is done. Each performance is highly improvisational, which makes the experience as performer, and audience member, unique each night. I still find it fascinating how iterating on ideas leads to new discoveries.

In-progress edit of September show on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/611984197/09da091d49

Negativland Website: https://negativland.com

Ann Arbor Film Festival show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKI5BYfrKyw

Naturestille

A long-time collaborator of mine is AGF, a German electronic musician whose music I discovered while owning and operating a boutique experimental electronic music label in the late 90s. We released a DVD together, performed at many festivals and made two dozen works that paired my imagery with her sound. Sometimes we would start with images and no sound, sometimes the other way around. My short film, 40thousand3hundred20 memories, is scored by her. This piece however, I chose because it is an example of a technique I love. A simple Max patch allows me to “play” a series of photographs in sync with music. It is a kind of improvisational stop-frame animation. I often teach it to students as it uses the computer keyboard to control the animation and is easy to adapt to other ideas. You can watch it here on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/25485079

Infinite Jest

This is my most significant museum installation to date. It is an adaptation David Foster Wallace’s novel to an immersive audio-visual + game-entertainment experience; curated by Kathleen Forde as part of a group show where each artist performed in the space during the first week. The work includes a series of handmade films, a 30-min audio piece composed by AGF under my direction, and the physical constructions (1/4 size tennis court, radio booth, vintage pong as gaming console and performance surface). I am actively pursuing more work of this nature - where a live film can be experienced outside of the original performance and people can be up close to technology in a playful setting. The piece had three presentations, each with a live performance component. You can read more on my public facing website at the button below.

Code Camp

I have always considered teaching to be part of my practice and I love opportunities to teach in unique places. In 2017 I was invited to teach a group of high school girls finishing out school inside a juvenile prison facility in Oregon. Portland Community College organized it, with the goal of inspiring the girls to enroll in college upon graduation. This is the slide presentation I gave them. It was a really hard place to be in, and we almost had no students because the staff told them it would be “boring'“ and “about numbers” so they chose to earn money on work duty instead. The director from PCC convinced the staff to pay them to come to class instead and we had a great time, they learned at least a few things, there was a pizza party and a few sparks were ignited. I'm really proud of my teaching work that day - it humbled me and is something I carry with me now everywhere I go.