Participating Individuals
Mark Bain was born in Seattle Washington, USA in 1966. He lives in Amsterdam (Netherlands). He has shown internationally at the Boijmans Museum (Rotterdam), the Platform Gallery (Istanbul), the MACBA (Barcelona), the List Art Center (Cambridge) and at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt). He has work in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Porin Taide Museum in Finland and the MIT Museum in Cambridge, USA. Bain works where the world of acoustic sound abounds: within the molecular structure of places, spaces and buildings. He links audio and visual, transforming audio and binary information in such a way that we can experience it with our other senses. He has been involved in ongoing research into the area of sound and architecture and how sonic events condition bodies and buildings they occupy. Sculptural aspects of sound are also investigated in the way resonant materials can define structures in space.
Other installations involve living systems and investigative devices, which position the viewer into rarified experiences. In this work, he designs hybrid apparatuses, which engage both locations and the viewing public. These are not necessarily products in themselves, but rather tools developed which lead to certain ends. His research can be thought as a kind of divining, a loosening, or search for living entities, defining a presence within that which is normally thought of as static and dead.
For PSG, Bain recorded at St. Mark's-Church-in-the-Bowery, exploring the site itself a geological entity. His participation in PSG is supported by the Mondriaan Stichting.
Melissa Bliss (UK) is an artist whose work is concerned with people and place, and internal and external geographies. She works across different media including digital media, audio, video and performance. Her work has covered audio walks, films for mobile phones, mappings and installations.
Lise Brenner—Project Concept, Co-Curator & Production
Lise Brenner directed her dance company (Lise Brenner Company) and lived and worked in New York as a choreographer, performer and teacher until 2000 when she moved to the Netherlands to attend DasArts, the MFA in multidisciplinary theater at the University of the Arts, Amsterdam. She taught for many years on the ballet faculty of Alfredo Corvino's Dance Circle Studio (NYC) as well as privately and in private studios in the area and while living in Europe was a guest teacher for a number of companies and institutions in the Netherlands, Germany and Wales. Her most recent choreographic activity was 2004–5 in collaboration with musician and sound technician Colin McLean for RADIODANCE nr. 1, performed at OT301 (Amsterdam) with a simultaneous broadcast on Radio Patapoe; and RADIODANCE nr. 2, created for De Appel Gallery (Amsterdam) and broadcast as part of Radiodays (see www.radiodays.org). Also in 2004–5 she initiated DANCESHORTS, a monthly experimental choreography platform, at OT301 (see http://squat.net/overtoom301/pages/studioz.html), where she produced dance and performance as a member of the STUDIOZ programming collective. She has taught choreography to business people, coached movement for actors, and introduced the Field Group model of peer work groups to mixed discipline performance groups in Wales and the Netherlands. She has a BA in History from CUNY Hunter.
Steve Bull
Steve Bull is a mixed media technology artist whose practice includes writing computer code, rewriting historical narratives, recording audio interviews, and shooting video to create new location specific experiences delivered via cell phones. This summer Steve Bull's "Cellphonia: San Jose," a karaoke cellphone opera with RSS newsfeeds, headlined the ISEA conference and ZeroOne Festival in San Jose and was reviewed in the NY Times. The project was funded by NYSCA and the Experimental Television Center. This year Bull also launched "Slavery in New York," a multi-site downtown Manhattan cellphone and iPod tour for the New-York Historical Society, and co-wrote "Sleuth," an interactive cell phone hunt for the Come Out and Play Festival in NY, and won semi-finalist award at the CTIA Las Vegas 2006 NAVTEQ LBS Challenge with Hot-n-Cold, a multi-player simultaneous real/virtual world tag game.
Victoria Estok
Victoria Estok is finishing an undergraduate degree at Goddard College with a concentration on sound art. Currently her work is being shown at the Knapp Gallery in Philadelphia. She claims that it is her unnatural affection for burlap, clay, and sound that keeps her wholesome and relatively honest.
Hanneke de Feijter
Is an Amsterdam-based artist in sound and video who works for Dutch radio and theater, and as an independent artist. She studied at the Rietveld Art Academie in Amsterdam and in Toronto at OCAD. During 2000–2001, while in Canada, her work was based on living in a foreign country, aspects of telephone, and the (to her unknown) family who had immigrated in the 60s, about whom she made a radio documentary. All of these themes will be explored in de Feijter's work for PSG and the Telephone Tour. Her participation in PSG is supported by the Mondriaan Stichting.
Simon Ferdinando
Simon Ferdinando was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1961. He holds a BA hons from Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and is a long-time resident of Amsterdam. Ferdinando is a multi-media artist and a curator whose varied works have been presented extensively in the Netherlands and internationally. He has published essays and catalogs, and in 2005 was awarded Best Bezorgde Boeken van 2004 for "Migrating Identity-Transmission/Reconstruction." His participation in PSG is supported by the Mondriaan Stichting.
Shyly courting the limelight, composer and librettist Edward Ficklin has found his way in the new music world-and discovered his voice as an artist-working with collectives like the New York Composers Circle and the South Oxford Six. Trained in classical composition and English literature at the University of Denver, he finds inspiration in the small details and sounds of everyday life. Read and hear more at edwardficklin.com.
Scott F. Hall is intermedia artist, Associate Professor, and Graduate Program Coordinator in the Art Department at the University of Central Florida. He teaches the M.F.A. level courses Studio Concentration, Intermedia Sculpture, and Thesis. Hall also mentors select undergrads in independent study research in physical and virtual sculpture (i.e. polymer clay handwork to virtual 3D modeling to 3D rapid prototyping).
Mike Hallenbeck adopts sounds both hither and yon, brings them home to play with each other, and helps them decide what they'll be when they grow up. Recent installations featuring Hallenbeck's sounds include the "Unsilently" group exhibition at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA and commissioned soundtracks for Monika Bravo's "No_Name [Frequency + Repetition]" at Centro De Arte Caja De Burgos in Burgos, Spain. He co-curates the Wandering Ear web label. Hallenbeck often records and releases music under the name Archive.
Ryan Holsopple—Technical direction/programmer
Ryan Holsopple, founder and director of 31 Down radio theater, has worked as an actor with directors: Richard Foreman, Pavol Liska, Tea Agalic and DJ Mendel, among others. He co-created the website Buskerdu.com with John Schimmel, a website that allows you to record and post your favorite subway buskers to the Web. Ryan is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.
Ph.D. 1999 Leiden University, is a postdoc researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Dutch Golden Age of the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the Dutch colony New Netherland and is currently preparing a biography of Petrus Stuyvesant. He has recently published New Netherland, which covers the history of the Dutch colony New Netherland on the North American continent. Based on extensive research of archival material on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, much of which has not been previously used, this work provides the most complete overview yet of a colony that has been generally neglected by historians.
Stefan Jacobs, USA
Stefan has designed sound for over fifty theatrical and dance productions and has toured as Lighting Designer with a number of companies. He currently is serving as Technical Director for The Kitchen in Manhattan.
Saskia Janssen mixes performance, documentary and anthropology in her socially-engaged, site-specific works. She has collaborated on a regular basis with musician David Hollestelle since 2004. She studied at the Royal Academy (the Hague) and at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam). Her work is shown in The Netherlands and abroad. She is on the faculty at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her participation in PSG is supported by the Mondriaan Stichting.
Recent work includes: a record album, "Paradise in Reverse" (2005) with Naxi Chinese in Lijiang, a city in South-Eastern China. In Fall 2006, she worked on a piece commissioned by Haarlemmermeer (near Schiphol Airport) for which she transformed an old city bus into a travelling sound studio, spending two months recording various bands and sounds and creating a sound archive of the area—including the far-too-loud airplanes. Since 2004 she has worked with her students on different art projects in Rainbow Foundation shelters (drop in centers for homeless and hard drug users in Amsterdam). One of these shelters is called "Blaka Watra," and is especially for Surinamese and Antillian clients. For Peter Stuyvesant's Ghost she recorded texts, songs and rhythms with two Blaka Watra clients, named, Ebby Addo and Totty Telgt. Their ancesters may have been slaves and all material is a mixture of historical songs and facts, and free improvisation.
Peter Joost
Peter Joost is a longtime resident of New York City. He is a teacher, writer (the NYC entry in A Birder's Guide to Metropolitan Areas of North America) and editor. He is a naturalist and birder, a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York, and a current board member of New York City Audubon. He has led nature-oriented trips here and in South America.
Kaisu Koski
Kaisu Koski is a Finnish theatre maker/researcher currently based in Amsterdam. She holds an MA in Media Studies, University of Lapland, is finalizing her PhD ("Intermedial Stages of Performance and Installations"), and is participating in DasArts, the Amsterdam University of the Arts post-graduate school of performative arts. In her recent work she has explored scattered staging, interactive applications, and the relationship between the actual and the virtual. She is also looking for ways to discuss her practice within academic research.
Felicia Mayro, St. Mark's Historic Landmarks Fund—Panelist
Felicia Mayro is the Director of the St. Mark's Historic Landmark, which is dedicated to the preservation of the historic buildings and grounds of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery and to strengthening the public use of St. Mark?s by fostering its innovative arts and community projects. Ms. Mayro also oversees the Landmark Fund's Neighborhood Preservation Center project, dedicated to the improvement and protection of New York City's diverse neighborhood and its cultural heritage. Prior to her work with the Landmark Fund, Ms. Mayro worked at the World Monuments Fund, an international preservation organization; and has a Master's Degree in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.
Thomas Miller, PhD.—Moderator, Panel Discussion
Thomas Ross Miller is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and sound artist. His professional background includes production work in radio, theatrical music direction and sound design, exhibition curation, and publishing. He has made field recordings in more than a dozen countries, created audio and multimedia installations for museums, galleries, and performance spaces, and is a National Endowment for the Arts award-winning composer and librettist. A former staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, he has expertise on indigenous and urban cultures, ethnohistory, museology, media, and shamanism. Dr. Miller teaches at New York University, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers-Newark, and holds degrees in music (B.A. Honors, Wesleyan) and anthropology (MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia). His writing has been published in the United States and Europe by Houghton Mifflin, Rodopi, Rolling Stone Press, Smithsonian Institution Press, University of Washington Press, and many others. He is an Assistant Editor of The Encyclopedia of New York State (Syracuse University Press, 2005).
Edmund Mooney, NYSAE—Sound Installations
Edmund Mooney has worked extensively in electro-acoustic music and sound design for all media. His work has been presented at P.S.122, DTW, St. Marks Church, Lincoln Center, among others. Recent works include, Fare Well with choreographers Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, at Danspace at St. Marks Church, Born Is My Still Try with choreographer Eva Lawrence at Bennington College and Object Of Desire with installation artist Erika Harrsch at Diverse Works Gallery in Houston, TX as part of Fotofest 2006. He is a founding member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, currently developing NYSoundmap.org, a sound specific interactive website involving the geography of New York City.
Michelle Nagai, NYSAE—Co-Curator, Walk Leader
Brooklyn-based composer Michelle Nagai utilizes sound, physicality and concept to create site-specific performances, installations, radio broadcasts, dances and other interactions that address the human state in relationship to its setting. These works and activities explore the exchange of perception between performer and audience/viewer. Recent creative projects incorporate through-composed and improvised music for acoustic instruments and electronics, as well as natural environments, found objects, video, costumes, texts and material structures fabricated from a variety of media. Nagai's work has been presented throughout the US, Canada and Europe, most recently in Sofia, Bulgaria and Cologne, Germany as part of a touring exhibit of sound works by artists affiliated with NY's Harvestworks digital media center. She has been supported by the American Composers Forum, Harvestworks, the Jerome and McKnight Foundations, Meet the Composer and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A graduate of Bennington College (BA Music Composition, 1997), Nagai has studied with composers John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros and Yung Wha Son, video artist Tony Carruthers and sculptor Sue Rees. Nagai is a founding member of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology and co-chair of the NY Chapter of that organization. She holds a teaching certificate from the Deep Listening Institute.
Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Hunter College. Polli's work addresses issues related to science and technology in contemporary society. Her projects often bring together artists and scientists from various disciplines. She is interested in global systems, the real time interconnectivity of these systems, and the effect of these systems on individuals. She has exhibited, performed, and lectured nationally and internationally. She is currently working in collaboration with meteorological scientists to develop systems for understanding storms and climate through sound. For this work, she has been recognized by the UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2003 and has presented work in the 2004 Ogaki Biennale in Gifu, Japan and at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work in this area has also been presented at Cybersonica at the ICA in London and awarded funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Greenwall Foundation. As a member of the steering committee for New York 2050, a wide-reaching project envisioning the future of the New York City region, she is currently working with city planners, environmental scientists, historians and other experts to look at the impact of climate on the future of human life both locally and globally. She has recently presented the installation and digital print project The Fly's Eye, (2002) which creates a live movement and light analysis and deconstruction of the video image, at Le Centre de production DAÏMÕN in Quebec, the Politecnico di Milano University in Milan, Italy, at The Kunstgewerbe Museum in Berlin, Germany, at The Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, OH, at Apex Gallery in New York City, at the V Salón y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital in Havana, Cuba, and at SIGGRAPH '03 in San Diego among other venues. Polli's longest running performance project, Intuitive Ocusonics, a system for performing sound using eye movements, began in 1996 and has been shown at V2 in Rotterdam, Holland; at the N-Space Art Gallery of SIGGRAPH '01 in Los Angeles, CA; at the Subtle Technologies Conference at the University of Toronto, Canada; and at Immedia, at the University of Michigan. Other performances and presentations include: The Monaco Danses Dances Forum, Monaco; ISEA, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Paris France; Invencao, Sao Paolo; and Imagina 98, Monaco. To support this work and the production of an Audio CD, Active Vision, she was awarded a 1999 artist's residency at The iEAR Institute at Rensellaer Polytechnic, a Harvestworks Recording Production Grant in New York, an Artist's Residency at The Center for Research in the Computing Arts at The University of California at San Diego, and a residency at Franklin Furnace in New York as part of The Future of the Present. She has also shown this work in venues throughout New York City, Chicago and the Midwest; in San Francisco, and in Finland, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and the Phillipines. Her performance work and research is documented in the article Active Vision in the October 1999 issue of The Leonardo Journal. A retrospective article about her work from 1991–1998, Virtual Space and the Construction of Memory, is published in the Spring 98 issue of The Leonardo Journal.
Renée Ridgway is an artist and free-lance curator based in Amsterdam. After studying fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Rietveld Academie, she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad, and completed residencies in France, China, the U.S. and Germany. Her artistic practice consists of constructing visual presentations in the form of installation, lectures or performance. These podiums further generate material for forthcoming events. Her methodology is process-oriented and involves aspects of colonial commodity, displacement mappings, ersatz questioning regarding the (re)construction of identity organized within a semi-'pataphysical nomenclature of recyclability. In 2004, Ridgway was co-curator of the manifestation: Migrating Identity—Transmission/Reconstruction at Arti & Amicitiae in Amsterdam, an exhibition, parallel program and publication that examined shifts and alterations of self, nationality, and identity by initiating a dialogue between the nomadic artists practice and the image contingency of the migrant/refugee. Her participation in PSG is supported by the Mondriaan Stichting, and additional support was provided by the Netherlands-America Foundation in support of Ridgway's site-specific presentation: DOUBLE-DUTCH at the Dyckman Farmhouse (for full details see dyckmanfarmhouse.or)
Nienke Rooijakkers
Nienke Rooijakkers, theatre director and radiomaker, graduated from the Amsterdam School of the Arts, Directing Dept. After working professionally in theater for several years, she began her study at DasArts, Amsterdam, De Amsterdamse School/Advanced Research in Theatre en dance Studies, where she graduated with her first radio play: Song for the Savage Ground. Nienke Rooijakkers works within her own foundation: KILO. Recent plays staged were: 'Taal zonder mij' by Kristien Hemmerechts, 'Yellow Wallpaper' adapted from the book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 'To the Lighthouse' adapted from Virginia Woolf. This year she will work on a 'language-opera' 'Feesten van angst en pijn' by Paul Van Ostaijen. Nienke Rooijakkers also is the dramaturge for SPACE, a Dutch/Hungarian theatre group; writes texts, edits books and makes sound pieces.
Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta Project—Panelist, Walk Leader
Eric W. Sanderson is the Associate Director in the Living Landscapes Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based out of WCS headquarters at the Bronx Zoo. He supports efforts to save wildlife and wild places in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the oceans, using geographic information and landscape ecology. He has written about how to save a species and the global footprint of people on the environment. Six years ago he became interested in what Manhattan was like before Europeans arrived and developed the Mannahatta Project to find out. Sanderson received his Ph.D. in ecology (emphasis in ecosystem and landscape ecology) from the University of California, Davis, in 1998.
Andrea Williams
Andrea Williams is a multimedia artist who enjoys stretching the boundaries of an art experience out as far as they will go. Her background in environmental studies, art therapy, and sound theory are infused into her various works in radio, sound/video, and installations where often the viewer is an integral part of the art-making process. Andrea is a founding member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology and initiated the group's webcast radio show, Giant Ear))), at free103point9.
Jonathan Zalben explores the intersection between interactive art and music composition. Bringing live instruments and recorded sound into a space, Zalben designs pieces where the audience is the performer and the creator is the architect. His multimedia work has been presented at the Boston Public Library during Boston Cyberarts 2005, Art Without Walls in Central Park, Knitting Factory, PS122, HERE Art Center, Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church, and Galapagos Art Space. In 2000, he was a research fellow at the US Dept. of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory and in 2003 he was in residence at STEIM. He has received grants from the Experimental TV Center through NYSCA, LMCC's MCAF and Swing Space Program, US Navy, ASCAP, and the National Academy of Sciences. Compound Pilot, a net art collaboration with Marshall Jones, has been shown internationally and won the 2006 "Classic" Web Award at SXSW. Zalben received a BA in Music from Yale University, an MA in music composition from NYU, and has also studied violin and music composition at Juilliard Pre-College. For more information, please visit jonathanzalben.com or myspace.com/jonathanzalben.
