04/29 @ 8:00pm - Laetita Sonami + Zach Layton + Torino:Margolis presented by Analogous Projects

Laetitia Sonami

Composer, performer, and sound installation artist Laetitia Sonami was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music. She studied with Eliane Radigue, Joel Chadabe, Robert Ashley and David Behrman.

Sonami’s work combines text, music and “found sound” from the world, in compositions which have been described as “performance novels. Her signature instrument, the Lady’s Glove, is fitted with a vast array of sensors which track the slightest motion of her enigmatic dance: with it Sonami can create performances where her movements can shape the music and in some instances visual environments. The lady’s glove has become a fine instrument which challenges notions of technology and virtuosity.

Sonami’s sound installations combine audio and kinetic elements embedded in ubiquitous objects such as light bulbs, rubber gloves, bags and more recently toilet plungers. She collects electrical wire and embroids them in walls.

Sonami gives extensive workshops and classes. She tries to familiarize and enthuse students to adapting old technologies and new media to the creative process and thus expand their field of imagination and play.

Sonami has been performing in numerous festivals across the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and China, among which the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, the Bourges Music Festival in France, the Sonambiente Festival in Berlin, the Interlink festival in Japan, Bang-on-a Can, The Kitchen and Other Minds, S.F.

Awards include the Alpert Award in the Arts (2002), Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Award (2000), the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2000), Studio Pass-Harvestworks residency (2001) and a Creative Work Fund award (2000) for a collaboration with Nick Bertoni and the Tinkers Workshop.

Sonami lives in Oakland, California and is guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Milton Avery MFA program at Bard College.

“.. Sonami sometimes looked like a human antenna searching the air for sounds, or like a deity summoning earth-shaking rumbles with a brusque gesture.” – New York Times

“…sultry and magical” -Village Voice

Brainwave Audio/Visuals at Monitorgalleri Copenhagen from Zach Layton on Vimeo.

Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser and new media artist based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental improvised music, dada and chance. 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 buena 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, Ryan Sawyer, Scott Draves, Emily Manzo, Patrick Hambrect, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam Kendall, Chika Ijima, Peter Gordon, 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 the chief curator of Issue Project Room. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation, The Danish Committee for Visual Arts, Turbulence.org and the Jerome Foundation and holds a Bachelors degree in composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of music and a Masters from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

ANALOGOUS PROJECTS:

Complexity theory is not new to art or to our culture. It migrated from computer science and biology to economics and art and, with the advent of the world wide web, it invaded our collective subconscious. Analogous seeks to support complexity-driven art and artists playing under this conceptual umbrella of “Interaction Art”. Progress occurs by metaphor and analogy: Their hope is (by bringing together people and projects irrespective of media and genre) to enable philosophical crosstalk.

Complexity theory centers around the concept of emergence, which refers to the observation that individuals acting within a shared context will create something greater than the sum of its parts. Since this principle explains the richness of biology — from molecule to ecology — it is able to lend an organic nature to highly-technical projects and to guide the logistics of elaborate social experiments.

We believe an emergence-based perspective can serve as both (1) a catalyst for new and progressive works, and as (2) a way to view existing works and practices from a new light.

Our objectives:

(1) to support artist-led, complexity-driven projects technically, financially, and administratively.

(2) to develop a cross-genre community of artists and philosophers in order to facilitate new works and novel collaborations.

http://www.analogousprojects.org/

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience.

“A noticeable hush swept the space when their arms started to twitch in Frankenstein-like fashion. This was one of the freakiest, most fascinating performances of the night”

-George Krzewski: The L Magazine Blog About Town

“BM-JT shifts the audiences’ expectation of performance with the intervention of machines”

-Sherry Mayo: The Online Journal of the New Media Caucus

http://www.torinomargolis.com/