Bec Stupak is an artist living and working in New York City. She works mostly with video, but her imagery is rarely limited to a rectangular screen. You don’t just sit and watch her videos– they affect your glands and elevate your serotonin levels like drugs. They are mood enhancing. Maybe it’s because Stupak got her start as a “VJ” at raves and dance parties scratching and superimposing video imagery like a DJ. For 4 years, she accompanied superstar mixmasters like Paul Van Dyk and Derrick May, traveling to thumping clubs and warehouses in Detroit, Washington DC, Vancouver– even as far as Slovenia and Macedonia. Mixing her wildly varied imagery in a room full of people with dilated, color-hungry pupils honed her editing skills and sharpened her eye for arresting images.
In 1999, she founded Honeygun Labs, an experimental video project that has created branding, animation and graphics for major companies like Bacardi, MTV2, and Red Bull, as well as music videos and live visuals for artists like Derrick May, Ultra Nate, and Delia & Gavin.
In 2002 Honeygun Labs moved into the art world. The studio joined with the NYC-based art collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus, and together they created an installation for the Whitney Biennial called “Garden 8″. At the LA MoCA Ecstacy Show in 2006, they presented two pieces: “AVAF vs. HGL #2″ and “AVAF vs. HGL #3,” which were projected through mirrors onto the psychedelic wallpaper to create an environmental sensory overload. Also that year, the collective exhibited at the Tate Liverpool and Stupak screened “Pills and Cigarettes” a looped recording of a live VJ performance.
In 2003, Honeygun Lab’s video, “Shiny Disco Balls” won the award for Best Underground Music Video at the Winter Music Conference in Miami, and Stupak created 4 DVD “‘zines” that were shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
2004 she appeared in Art Star, a documentary/reality show broadcast on the art network Gallery HD. The show, a very contemporary hybrid of television pop culture and artworld commentary, was the final lesson in media spectacle for Stupak. Since then, her gallery shows have evolved into performances that mix all her previous work as an artist and commercial designer. In 2006, for example, Stupak created “Radical Earth Magic Flower,” her companion piece to Jack Smith’s 1961 classic drag film, “Flaming Creatures.” The installation, shown at Deitch Projects in New York, displayed Stupak’s technical fortitude and production savvy. Using 3 video screens, LED lights and lenticular signage, Smith’s original film and her remake were projected on opposite walls of the gallery while her storyboards outlining the action were projected on a surface in the middle of the room. Meanwhile, friends and collaborators who appeared in her video would often come to the space, decked out in eye-popping costumes and glittery makeup. Surrounded by Stupak’s gorgeously dressed colleagues, the audience would become part of the environment, invited to lounge on a huge bed. The happening was “amazing,” according to Roberta Smith in the New York Times, who found Stupak’s film “much more fluid, androgynous and flaming’ than the original” in this regard, she may have surpassed her inspiration.”
Based in the Philadelphia area, Charles Cohen has been amazing and challenging audiences for over 20 years. His music is entirely improvisational and produced solely on a vintage Buchla Music Easel synthesizer. An avid collaborator, Cohen is most well known to STAR’S END listeners from his work with Jeff Cain in their group The Ghostwriters. With few recorded/commercially available works to his credit, Cohen prefers to concentrate on creating Electronic Music in the setting of the live performance space. His music ranges from completely abstract and challenging to pleasantly rhythmic and infectious. Each performance is original and new, to the audience and to Cohen as well.
Anthony Jay Ptak is an artist and a composer born in Brooklyn, New York in 1970. He grew up near the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the RCA Radio Central testing facility. An inviolable autodidacticist, he has studied with Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Lydia Kavina, and Herbert Brün, and had technical consultations with Robert Moog. He performed at the First International Theremin Festival. He has been a guest theremin artist under director Scott Wyatt at the historic Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2000. He was appointed visiting researcher in 2001, and participated in the C4A Computing for the Arts initiative for Fine and Applied Arts at UIUC. He taught sound art and musique concrète for new media artists at the School of Art and Design at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has presented at Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), School of the Art Institute, Chicago Cultural Center, St. Louis Art Museum, Krannert Art Museum, FFMUP Princeton University, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Roulette Intermedium, The Kitchen, and Issue Project Room in New York. He was first introduced to the theremin in 1987 by improviser Eric Ross. He began playing an etherwave theremin kit 0017 in 1995. A. J. Ptak is a founding member of the New York Theremin Society. He currently resides in New York City and is a visiting scholar at NYU Department of Art and Art Professions.