Michelle Nagai: Tree Set

Wed 02 Feb, 2011, 8pm

Post-concert Q&A for Members, with Anne Hege

Michelle Nagai presents new work for the MARtLET, a handsome, wearable hunk of tree bark that's been fitted with light-sensing circuitry, machine learning software and sound synthesis algorithms. Responding to the ambient light in spaces, and the slightest hand and body movements, the MARtLET looks, listens, and thinks before she speaks. Just as nature intended.

Michelle Nagai creates site-specific performances, installations, radio broadcasts, dances and other interactions that address the human state in relationship to its setting. Her work has been presented throughout the US, Canada and Europe with the support of the American Composers Forum, the American Music Center, the Deep Listening Institute, Eyebeam, free103point9, Harvestworks, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, the Jerome and McKnight Foundations, Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a founding member of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology and holds a teaching certificate from the Deep Listening Institute. Nagai is currently a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She holds an undergraduate degree with concentration in music composition and multi-media performance from Bennington College and an M.A. in composition from Princeton University.

Michelle Nagai’s new work is commissioned as part of ISSUE Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission and is made possible, in part, through generous support from: the Greenwall Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.