presented by The Kitchen and Sarah Lawrence College
ARTISTIC FACULTY
Martha Bowers
site specific performance director
Sheldon Brown
new media/public artist
Christopher Janney
composer/architect
Stephan Koplowitz
director/site choreographer
Stephen Vitiello
sound/new media artist
Marina Zurkow
new media artist
TECHNICAL WORKSHOPS
Drawing, Intellectual Property,
Mapping, Movement,
Promotion, Voice, Yoga
Martha Bowers, originally from Illinois, has been working extensively as a choreographer, performer and teacher since 1978.
She attended Sarah Lawrence College where she studied under Bessie Schonberg. In 1981 she formed her company Martha Bowers Dance/Theatre/Etcetera as a vehicle to produce her choreographic projects. In New York, her work has been presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, DTW's Bessie Schonberg Theater, PS 122, St. Mark's Church, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Central Park Summerstage, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and at Prospect Park's Picnic House and Bandshell. She is a recipient of choreographic fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (`84, `88, `96), the New Jersey State Council for the the Arts (`84), the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art and has received commissions for new works from the Jerome Foundation (through DTW's "First Light" program), the Maine Festival, Mayfair, Dancing in the Streets, the 651/Kings Majestic-An Arts Center, the Gowanus Arts Exchange and the Wagon Train Project, among others. A frequent guest artist, she has taught at numerous universities and colleges including Queens College, Cornell University, Colorado College, Antioch and Rutgers University.
Ms. Bowers has focused her work in recent years on the creation of large-scale events designed to bring community members together with professional artists as performers in site-specific works. She is noted for her six years of work as an artist and arts educator in Red Hook, Brooklyn where she was instrumental in creating a consortium of businesses, cultural, educational and social service organizations who collaborated on urban renewal efforts in this neighborhood.
Her work has been commissioned by several professional dance companies including the Dance Alloy, the Toronto DanceMakers, DansTeater Uppercut and Dublin's Contemporary Dance Company. Since 1986, she has worked extensively in the field of arts education as a teaching artist for the Lincoln Center Institute.
Currently, she teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
Movement on Site/ Site in Community Context This is a full day workshop.
We'll start in the morning visiting a monumental industrial site, the Brooklyn
Army Terminal. In this enormous locale, we'll
explore movement structures that relate to the architecture and look at
movement in relation to the spaces contained within and external to this
complex. From there, we'll travel to Red Hook, an industrial waterfront
community, also in South Brooklyn. We'll lunch with representatives of
the Red Hook
Partners, a group
comprised of educational, social service, environmental and social justice
organizations, artists and neighborhood residents who have been working
collaboratively towards urban renewal efforts in the area. We will discuss
the role
of the arts, especially the site-specific productions that have taken place
there, in relation to community development. The afternoon will be spent
exploring a variety of sites around Red Hook, brainstorming ideas for site
works and collecting data; visual, audio, text responses etc. for possible
use in work developed at The Kitchen.
Sheldon Brown is
an artist, professor and research center director whose
work examines the relationships between mediated and physical
experiences.
This work often examines particular areas across the range of public
realms.
As an artist, he is concerned with the overlapping and reconfiguration
of private and public spaces, how new forms of mediation are
proliferating co-existing public realms whose geographies and social
organizations become ever more diverse. Art that explores schismatic
junctions of these zones – the edges of their coherency - allow glimpses
into their formative structures and how provide a view that suggests
transformative modes of being extending constrained boundaries.
Examples of this include projects such as "In the Event" at the
Key
arena in Seattle where 9 computers choreograph multiple video streams
across 28 monitors in a real time constructive engagement with the
spectators act of envisioning the events of the arena. In "The Video
Wind Chimes" – an outdoor video installation/street lighting project –
the culturally encoded part of the electromagnetic spectrum is
transformed into the passive illumination of a nocturnal lighting
system, articulated by the wind. Projects such as "Smoke and Mirrors" and "Mi Casa es tu Casa", use the contextual apparatus of museums
with
adjacent mission scopes to the artworld, for bringing avant-garde
strategies to engage ranges of social issues to venues that often use
more pedantic forms of discourse.
We will use some contemporary computer visualization techniques to craft
an interactive 3D map of the local zone of the Kitchen neighborhood.
These tools will be custom hacks of photogrammetry, scientific
visualization and game authoring environments, such that by the end of
the session, there will be a template of the local neighborhood that can
be extended for installations and performances throughout the
environment.
Stephan Koplowitz is an award winning director/choreographer who has developed an international reputation for creating large-scale, site-specific multimedia works in architecturally significant urban sites. He is the recipient of an Alpert Award in Dance 2004, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a 2000 New York Dance and Performance Award, “Bessie” for “Sustained Achievement” in Choreography and six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships (1988-’96). Since 1984 he has created 46 works (33 commissions) for both sites and the concert stage and recently film. His site works have been seen throughout the United States and Europe in such venues as New York’s Bryant Park (the Internet-inspired “Webbed Feats”), in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC and two London sites commissioned by the Dance Umbrella Festival: the newly reopened British Library (’98), and the Natural History Museum. In 1999, Mr. Koplowitz premiered “Kohler Korper” (Coal Bodies), for 50 dancers at the Kokerei Factory in Essen, Germany. In 1999, he premiered a new version of one of his most celebrated site-specific works, “Fenestrations”, for the windows of Grand Central Terminal. This version featured 72 dancers and was recently featured on PBS’ Egg, the Arts Show. In 2001 he created a site-work/installation for the reopening of the NY Public Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. He recently directed two short films which meld site-specificity and narrative. The first: “Catching the 5:23”, was selected by the 2002 Hampton International Film Festival where it had its world premiere. His work for the stage has been produced at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop for seven seasons since 1987 and has toured to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Bates Dances Festival, American Dance Festival, Lincoln Center and among others. He has twice been awarded a fellowship to work in Dance Theater Workshop’s new Artist Resource and Media Laboratory to begin research on a new concert length work on site specificity and digital media. Koplowitz is one of three curators of DTW’s new dance video series “Captured”. In the Spring of 2004, he will premiere his “Grand Step Project” produced by Dancing in the Streets, to be seen on NYC’s grand staircases. As part of DTW’s Mekong Project, he has recently returned from Hanoi, Vietnam where he began a long-term collaboration with two visual/performance artists which will continue in a residency at the 2004 Bates Dance Festival. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and holds an MFA in Choreography from the University of Utah.
Thomas Roland is an intellectual property and litigation attorney at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP in New York. Tom has helped The Kitchen develop many of the contracts it uses with artists and performers.
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist.
Since 1988 he has collaborated with musicians, visual artists and choreographers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tetsu Inoue, John Jasperse, Joan Jeanrenaud, Rebecca Moore, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Scanner, Yasunao Tone, Frances-Marie Uitti.
Vitiello's CD releases include Scanner/Vitiello (Audiosphere/Sub Rosa), Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Humming Bird Feeder ver. 02 (Lucky Kitchen), 17:48 from the Texas Gallery, (Texas Gallery), Scratchy Marimba (Sulphur UK/Sulfur USA), Light of Falling Cars (JDK Productions) and Uitti/Vitiello (JDK Productions).
Recent exhibitions include the "2002 Whitney Biennial," "Ce qui arrive" at the Cartier Foundation, Paris, curated by Paul Virilio, Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest, also at The Cartier Foundation and solo exhibitions at The Project, NY and The Project, Los Angeles. Previous exhibitions include "BitStreams," at the Whitney Museum of American Art, "Greater New York" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, and a solo exhibition at the Texas Gallery, Houston, TX. Additional exhibition participation includes Postmasters Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon. In 1999, Stephen Vitiello held a 6-month WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. The residency resulted in a site-specific sound installation. This project was awarded a "Radio/Sound Art Fellowship" from the Jerome Foundation. It was later acquired by The Whitney Museum, their first purchase of a work of sound in 30 years.
In 1999, Stephen Vitiello created music for White Oak Dance Project's See Through Knot, choreographed by John Jasperse and featuring Mikhal Barysnikov presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY.
New media productions include work for the Internet, Sound Archive 7.01-7.31.01 for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with The Walker Art Center and ZKM and Tetrasomia, for the Dia Center for the Arts. In July 2000, Dia Center for the Arts published the CD-ROM Fantastic Prayers, a collaborative work with artist Tony Oursler, writer Constance DeJong, and composer Stephen Vitiello.
Past performances include the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Engine 27, NYC with Frances-Marie Uitti, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris with Yasunao Tone, and participation in per/Son, a concert series of solo and collaborative pieces also featuring Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, Frances Marie-Uitti and Andres Bosshard. The event was organized by the Kunsthochschule Für Medientechnologie, Koln, and broadcast by WDR radio's Studio Akustische Kunst program.
In addition to music based work, Vitiello directed the videos Light Reading(s) (Visual Display), Nam June Paik: SeOUL NyMAx Performance, 1997 - Dress Rehearsal and The Last Ten Minutes and Nam June Paik: Two Piano Concerts 1994/1995. He also produced the audio CD, Nam June Paik: Works 1958-1979 (Sub Rosa).
As a Media Curator, he curated the Sound Art component to the Whitney Museum's exhibition The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000 and Young and Restless a video program for the Museum of Modern Art and New York, New Sounds, New Spaces at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon.
Archive Presentation: An introduction to The Kitchen's Archive
of approximately 4000 video and audiotapes, which include rare documentation
of performances, lectures
and
installations at The Kitchen since 1972. Featured works in this morning's
talk will include Lunar Rambles, a series of site-specific sound
performances by Terry Fox, recorded in 1976 in various New York City
locations, and a dance/performance work by Sarah Michelson which transformed
The Kitchen's performance space in 2003.
Site and Sound: A three-hour workshop on sound recording and editing software as well as the use of contact microphones and other inexpensive, non-traditional recording technologies. Participating students will each be given a contact microphone, a thin, wafer-like recording device which picks up surface vibration and allows one to listen to objects and other surfaces in a form not so unlike a stethoscope. Students will be given the opportunity to explore The Kitchen's building and neighborhood as a sound-site. A listening session will follow.
Marina Zurkow is a multidisciplinary artist engaged with character, icon, and narrative in several forms: animated works, interactive installations, graphic design, and physical stuff. Her projects include the award-winning animated episodic “Braingirl” that chronicles a mutant-cute girl who wears her insides on the outside; and “PDPal,” a mapping application/ installation for screen, web and PDA that allows a user to “write her own city,” in collaboration with architect Scott Paterson and technologist Julian Bleecker. Her pictographic icons have been incorporated in diverse projects, from animated films to hotel design, lightboxes and clothing.
Zurkow’s work has been exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Ars Electronica, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, SFMOMA, Eyebeam Atelier, Totem Design and bitforms gallery, and broadcast on MTV and PBS. Zurkow is a 2003 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and received grants in 2001-2002 from Creative Capital Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and the Walker Art Center. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design in the MFA Design & Technology Department.
Currently Zurkow is working on a long-form, multilinear animated narrative called “Little NO,” and a series of interactive character installations with Julian Bleecker.
After attending Barnard College, Zurkow received a BFA with honors in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts, where she also received the Silas Rhodes Award for Outstanding Achievement. She was born in New York City and resides gleefully in Brooklyn.
http://www.o-matic.com
http://www.thebraingirl.com
http://pdpal.walkerart.org
Mapping spaces: Mapping is a way of constructing a system, that always
presumes a framework and a point of view. Maps tell stories about sites,
through their selection and omission process. Mapping can also become the
framework through which one can break through preconceptions of sites. This
workshop consists of a team based "walkabout," in which we will make alternative maps
of the Kitchen or the neighborhood, based on a directive, such as "map the
inherent and normally invisible art," or "if you were an alien
anthropologist, map ten sites that together give a sense of the culture."
PR and Marketing: A short workshop that will focus on the materials that go into your presentation package. Come to the SI with a portfolio (all the materials you would send to a prospective venue) so we can do a portfolio exchange exercise. We will also have a set of template handouts that outline the protocol for press releases, bios, artist statements, and marketing.
Narrative and Context: Narrative is traditionally comprised
of character development, and character action, told over time through
conflict
and resolution. We will
break into teams, dissect a story and present a sketch adaptation of it
to a specific site.
Context is more than a site specificity; it is also the "story of
your
story." We will take the workshop sketches and discuss their "stories"
in their larger contexts of work: personal, contemporary and historical.
