Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue’s Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist who is interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. Traversing media ranging from algorithms to installation, her work seeks to question fundamental assumptions underpinning perceptions of human nature, technology and the environment.

Thomas Dexter is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Thomas’ work enacts exchanges of perceptual currency using performative and process-based strategies. Thomas’ moving image work, Errata.Cinema, is an ongoing series of performances and installations that seek to subvert the conventional relationships between film/apparatus/author/viewer/space. Thomas’ solo and collaborative works have been featured at MOMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, The Elizabeth Foundation Project Space, and most recently at the New Museum Festival of New Ideas 2011.

Thomas and Heather are both part of the Future Archaeology collective.

9/27 w. installation artist Chris Harvey
9/28 w. installation artist David Schafer
9/29 w. installation artists Steve Milton and Vince Pan
9/20 w. installation artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter

ISSUE’s Floating Points series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The James E. Robison Foundation.

Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue’s Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.

Steven Milton is a composer, producer, and music researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of popular and experimental artistic practices. Milton received a Master’s degree in Musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music where he studied a variety of musical styles and completed a thesis examining postmodern aesthetics in Beck’s album Odelay. Milton’s work can be heard across various media including television, radio, internet, film, dance, and gallery installation. In 2009, Milton founded a group called, Lavalier, a multifaceted collective of artists who perform and record chamber-experimental pop music.

Vince Pan AIA, LEED AP is an architect and founding principal of Analogue Studio, an interdisciplinary design firm in Cambridge, MA. Analogue Studio brings together disparate design disciplines to create experiences that resonate. In addition to designing award-winning architectural projects featured in Metropolis, Inhabitat, and Architectural Record, Vince has also designed several multi-sensory art installations and temporary exhibits for American Express and Exclusively.In.

9/27 w. installation artist Chris Harvey
9/28 w. installation artist David Schafer
9/29 w. installation artists Steve Milton and Vince Pan
9/20 w. installation artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter

ISSUE’s Floating Points series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The James E. Robison Foundation.

Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue’s Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.

David Schafer was born in Kansas City, MO and received his BA from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO, and his MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He moved to NY in 1983 and spent 10 years in LA. He currently lives and works in NY since 2006.

David Schafer is a visual and sound artist working in sculpture, sound, sound performance, and graphics. His work embodies language, site, and architecture through the appropriation of modernist tropes, popular culture, and theory. His work is concerned with the intelligibility, translation, and structures of language and architecture. Much of his work stems from this complex of situations, both spatial and linguistic.

Schafer has shown nationally and internationally and has received several public commissions. Most recently he participated in LOL: A Decade in Antic Art at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, MD. In 2010, he permanently installed Separated United Forms at the Huntington Hospital, Pasadena, CA, and participated in the Whitney Biennial with What Should a Museum Sound Like?, a sound performance and sculpture.

Schafer is currently a visiting critic for Cornell Art and Architecture Program in NY, and has previously taught at SVA, Cooper Union, Rutgers, and Parsons in NY and Otis, Cal Arts, and Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he was the director of the sculpture and installation track.

9/27 w. installation artist Chris Harvey
9/28 w. installation artist David Schafer
9/29 w. installation artists Steve Milton and Vince Pan
9/20 w. installation artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter

ISSUE’s Floating Points series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The James E. Robison Foundation.

Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue’s Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.

Chris Harvey is a multimedia artist based in Troy, NY who utilizes painting, installation, and performance to create abstract worlds in which to explore the transformative potential of placement, movement, color, and time.

As an award-winning motion graphics art director, Harvey has provided visual support to major broadcast networks, museums, universities, and established composers. He has responded to a career in media packaging by focusing a more contemplative personal interest in the understated poetry of the still image, the power of incremental change, and the unique rewards of sustained attention over extended duration.

Originally trained in painting and art history, Harvey has combined studies in animation, color theory, Hindustani raga, and Buddhist psychology to synthesize a visual vocabulary in which formal arrangement and a decorative impulse are offset by a mischievously recombinant aesthetic to prompt an oblique reflection on the pleasure and mystery of perception itself.

9/27 w. installation artist Chris Harvey
9/28 w. installation artist David Schafer
9/29 w. installation artists Steve Milton and Vince Pan
9/20 w. installation artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter

ISSUE’s Floating Points series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The James E. Robison Foundation.

Photo by Bryan Derballa

The Floating Points programming explores the versatility of ISSUE Project Room’s house speaker system. Began in 2006 as Points In A Circle, an annual month-long series of multi-channel audio concerts featuring the Hemisphere speaker system, it became the Floating Points Festival in 2008 when Issue Project Room moved to the Old American Can Factory.

Starting in 2011, Floating Points is taking a different direction, away from a festival atmosphere and towards sustained residencies culminating in performances. This new approach will allow artists a longer period to familiarize themselves with the Hemisphere speaker system and create new multi-channel works that take advantage of its unique capabilities. The freedom to take the speakers off of the ceiling and sculpt them into evolving installations will encourage work that meaningfully engages the relationship of sound, movement and space.

Designed by sound artist and Floating Points curator Stephan Moore, this fifteen-channel installation of Hemisphere loudspeakers re-imagines the concert experience for both performer and audience. Each Hemisphere radiates sound in all directions, activating the acoustics of ISSUE’s unique concert space. Immersive sonic environments are generated, electronic sounds take on the intimacy of acoustic instruments, and location is liberated as a musical dimension.

Photo by Bryan Derballa

2011-2012 Floating Points Residency Schedule

July 14-27, a canary torsi  (performances in early 2012).

For this project, a canary torsi is composer Benjamin C. Bernstein, director/choreographer Yanira Castro, performers Amity Jones and Marina Libel, assistant director Kirsten Schnittker and assistant composers Jon Myers and Eliza Perlmutter.

For this new work, Ben and Yanira are interested in the ways that movement in a particular room affects a simple sound environment. Created for ISSUE, it is specifically an investigation of how movement affects sound through the hemispheres in the sanctum of the Old American Can Factory. To remain true to the task, Ben and Yanira will start and complete the work within the two-week residency, never rehearsing or working on the piece outside of the room. For Yanira, it is a break from metaphor and an attention to the qualities present in the people, the room, the sound. For Ben, it’s a chance to make sound as visual as possible, using the body in space as an instrument.

September 25-October 1, Volume & friends.

December 12-18, Francisco Lopez.

2012 residencies TBA.

Micah Silver is an artist, composer, and curator working in music and its intersections with other areas of cultural production. Shows of his work have been mounted by the Jersey City Museum in a mini-retrospective called BE STILL. TAKE UP AS MUCH SPACE AS POSSIBLE. by Artspace New Haven, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The James Joyce Centre in Dublin Ireland, The Place in St. Petersburg, the 2008 MATA Festival in NYC, among others. His current project is a commissioned installation-opera titled The End of Safari for Mass MoCA, which opened in April 2009.
 
As a curator and co-conspirator in the work of other artists, Silver has been Associate Curator at Diapason Gallery for Sound in New York from 2003-2006, Administrator of The Earle Brown Music Foundation from 2002-2006, Director and Conductor of the Wesleyan New Music Ensemble, and currently Curator for Music at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer. Silver is a member of The Earle Brown Music Foundation and Diapason Gallery for Sound Board of Directors.

Mem1 seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In their improvisation-based performances, Mark and Laura Cetilia’s use of custom hardware and software, in conjunction with a uniquely subtle approach to extended cello technique and realtime modular synthesis patching, results in the creation of a single voice rather than a duet between two individuals. Their music moves beyond melody, lyricism and traditional structural confines, revealing an organic evolution of sound that has been called “a perfect blend of harmony and cacophony” (Forced Exposure). Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Mem1 has traveled extensively, performing at Roulette (NYC), REDCAT / Disney Hall (LA), the Orange County Museum of Art, Electronic Church (Berlin), the Laptopia Festival (Tel-Aviv), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and the Borealis Festival (Bergen). In 2007, they were awarded an artist residency at Harvestworks in New York for the creation of a new Surround Sound piece entitled Sonodendron. They have since taken part in residencies at STEIM and Kunstenaarslogies in the Netherlands and USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. In 2009, they created a site-specific installation for the Museums of Bat Yam (Israel); their work has been screened and installed at venues including the Sundance Film Festival, Fringe Exhibitions (Los Angeles), and the Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen). Their third full-length album, +1, consisting of collaborations between Mem1 and artists such as Steve Roden, Jan Jelenik, and Frank Bretschneider, was released in Spring 2009 by Interval Recordings.

Jascha Narveson is a Canadian composer and sound artist based in New York. His work ranges from traditionally scored music to multi-channel sound installations to electronic music for fixed media, live processing, and laptop orchestras.

For this piece, a specially constructed coffin was equipped with 15 separate microphones and buried. The resulting multi-channel recording will be played back over Issue Project Room’s overhead 15-speaker array, and the audience will be invited to lie down in the dark and contemplate it.

Lainie Fefferman

After studying music and near eastern languages at Yale, Lainie is currently in her third year of the composition graduate program at Princeton.

Lainie has participated in workshops including: the Sentieri Selvaggi composer workshop in Milan (with Julia Wolfe), the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble Workshop in New York City, The Bang on a Can Summer Residency in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Arabic Music Retreat with Simon Shaheen at Mount Holyoke College.

Lainie’s recent performance projects include writing for and singing alto with avant vocal trio Celestial Mechanics (with sopranos Anne Hege and Sarah Paden) and writing for and singing with post-minimalist folk funk band Phthia (with Missy Mazzoli on melodica, Sara Phillips Budde on clarinet, and James Moore on banjo).

Lainie has enjoyed rich success with her soulful kazoo playing. Her performance experiences include joining the Bang on a Can All-Stars in a performance of Louis Andriessen’s “Worker’s Union” and numerous New York area performances of Terry Riley’s “In C.”

Lainie’s past, present and future collaborators include: pianist Michael Mizrahi, cellist Jody Redhage, guitarist/banjoist James Moore, electric guitar quartet Dither, So Percussion, the New York Virtuoso Singers, and the Yale Collegium Musicum.

Matt Welch

music of Matthew Welch (b.1976) stems from a remarkably multi-faceted foundation. Matthew holds contains a BFA from Simon Fraser University (1999) and a MA from Wesleyan University (2001) in Experimental Music Composition; studying with noted composers such as Barry Truax, Rodney Sharman, Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. His compositions range from traditional-like bagpipe tunes to electronic pieces, improvisation strategies and fully notated works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles and orchestra. He participated in a number of compositional collaborations with Indonesian Gamelan composer-performers in Bali and Java, performed in free improvisation contexts with numerable New York City improvisers, and played with art rockers in the Brooklyn underground. As a virtuoso of the Highland Bagpipe, he studied traditional music with Gold Medalist masters such as Colin MacLellan, Jack Lee, Angus MacLellan and Andrew Wright. Matthew also was a member of the four – time World Champion Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, winning with them in 1999 and 2001. Indonesian Gamelan percussion music, both Javanese and more recently, Balinese, have been another focus of Matthew’s, which he has pursued throughout his academic career, with the New York Indonesian Consulate gamelans, and in Bali. Matthew appears on Anthony Braxton’s 10 [Solo Bagpipe] Compositions, 2000 and  a few compact discs of his own music including  Ceol Nua ,(Leo 336) highlighting orchestral and chamber works; Hag at the Churn, (Newsonic 33) a collection of electronic concoctions; and Dream Tigers, (on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records’ Composer Series 8015) a program of ecstatic chamber music featuring his critically acclaimed string quartet Siubhal Turnlar. His compositions for Balinese Gamelan Semara Dana are featured in his multi-media collaboration with Ikue Mori known as Bhima Swarga (Tzadik DVD edition 3007, 2007). The eclectic breadth of his interests in Celtic music, gamelan, minimalism, improvisation and rock also converge in compositional amalgams for his New York based ensemble, Blarvuster…”