07/09 @ 8:00pm - Jesse Stiles + Andrew Neumann

Jesse Stiles (b. 1978, Boston, MA) is a new media artist, musician, and designer of electronic systems. Through the adaptive misuse of emerging digital technologies, Stiles creates works that are simultaneously entertaining, disorienting, immersive, and transcendental. Stiles’ performances and generative installation work engage with and deconstruct a number of populist formats including electronic dance music, narrative cinema, and the “light show” – pushing these mediums into realms both sublime and subliminal.

Stiles’ work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at institutions including Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Lincoln Center (NYC, USA), Eyebeam (NYC, USA), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin/Madrid), and the American Land Museum (various sites, USA). Stiles has also produced a number of site-specific performances in unconventional sites such as “Topics in Advanced Facemelting,” a light and sound performance in one of the United States’ few remaining gasholder buildings (Troy, NY), and “Deja Rendez Vous” a performance on a floating video stage adrift in the Buffalo Bayou (Houston, TX).

In 2000, Stiles was awarded the Watson Fellowship, a one year grant, which enabled him to travel around the world creating electronic music, a project which culminated in the album, “Watson Songs.” His forthcoming release “The Target Museum” is a record of experimental pop songs, employing dream logic and imaginary instruments. Stiles has worked as a sound designer and composer on a wide variety of IMAX films, feature films, touring exhibitions, and experimental video works. He has led courses, lectures and workshops on sound design, digital audio composition, studio production, and field recording at universities and colleges including NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, The New School, Princeton, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Stiles holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Vassar College and a MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Andrew Neumann is a Boston-based artist who works in a variety of media, including sculpture, electronic/interactive music, and film and video installation. In 2004 he received a Guggehneim Fellowship. He has had solo shows at bitforms Gallery in New York City, the DeCordova Museum, Howard Yezerski Gallery and at the Boston Cyberarts Festivals in 2003 and 2005. During 2001, he was an Artist in Residence at the iEAR Studio at Rensalear Polytech Institue and at the Visual Studies Workshop. He has also had residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2000), YADDO (1999, ’03), Ucross Foundation (1998), Steim (1999), ATLANTIC CENTER for the ARTS (2001), Art/OMI (2000), and the Experimental Television Center (1982, ’87). Group exhibits have included “Tech-Art II” at the South Shore Arts Center, Art Interactive in Cambridge, Ma, Gallery Bershad, and numerous others. His music is available on Sublingual Records. He has had solo music/video performances at Experimental Intermedia and Roulette, both in NYC. He has taught filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has also been an instructor at the Art Institute of Boston and the Boston Film/Video Foundation.

Tonight, he’ll be performing “Bring Me the Head of Mariah Carey (or, Seven Degrees of Separation)”