OptoSonic Tea

Sun 08 Mar, 2009, 4pm
Old American Can Factory

Live sets by:

Richard Lainhardt - live visuals and live sound
Domenico Sciajno - live visuals and live sound
Invited respondent/moderator: Zach Layton

OptoSonic Tea is a regular series of meetings dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed by an informal discussion about the artists’ practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist, from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different perspectives on the present and the future.

Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer.
OptoSonic Tea is partly funded by the Experimental Television Center.

About the artists:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker. He studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany, and has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He’s also played vibes in a swing band; composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web; engineered audio for recordings and live sound; and served as technical director at Intelligent Music, a pioneering music software company.
His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, ExOvo and Airglow Music labels and are distributed online via MusicZeit. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works, and has been making music for 40 years. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape (www.arts-electric.org/stories/080511_nycsoundscape.html).

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown in festivals in the US, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2008, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

You can find examples of his music and digital artworks at his website, http://www.otownmedia.com.
Some of his short films are available at http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart.

Domenico Sciajno was born in Torino (Italy) in 1965. He is based in Palermo since 1999. A double bass player and composer, he studied ‘Instrumental and Electronic Composition’ with Gilius Van Bergeijk and Double bass in the ‘Royal Conservatory’ of Den Haag in Holland. His interest in improvisation and the influence of academic education bring his research to the creative possibilities given by the interaction between acoustic instruments, indeterminacy factors and their live processing by electronic devices or computers.

From 1992 he has played at some of the most important festivals as musician, improviser or composer in the contemporary and experimental music scene and some of his work is documented by worldwide independent labels of experimental and electronic music.

The wide spectrum of his experiences bring him very close to the concept of performance, where he uses texts and electronics in combination with a choreographic use of the scene space and the projection of visuals made by himself. He also makes Interactive Sound Installations for art galleries and exhibitions.
He is also an activist in the developement of experimental arts. In 1995 he founded the association Antitesi and from 1995 and 1998 organized concerts and little festivals (Antitesi in musica ‘95/‘96, Folk it out! ‘97, i(n)terazioni ‘98, Inaudito! ‘99). In 1997 he collaborated to give birth to the Fringes record label. In 2003 he started toghether with other musicians the label Bowindo and founded the national collective iXem (italian eXperimental electronic music).In the 2004 edition of Prix Ars Electronica his work OUR UR in collaboration with Alvin Curran received an honorary mention.
http://www.sciajno.net
http://www.myspace.com/sciajno

Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser and new media artist based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental culture and architecture. 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 bBena 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, Patrick Hambrect, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam Kendall, Chika Ijima, 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 is one of the directors of ISSUE Project Room. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation, Turbulence and the Jerome Foundation and is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
http://www.zachlaytonindustries.com

for more information about OptoSonic Tea please visit:
http://www.diapasongallery.org/optosonic.html