-
For Immediate Release –
Date: February 19, 2001
Contact: David Means,
Associate Professor, First College (651) 793-3967 / (612) 341-7262
Sixth International Festival
of Experimental Intermedia Art Coming to Nobles Studio
Strange Attractors VI to
feature new operas, commissions, spoken word, video wall and art car
performances. Friday events begin March 23rd through April 27th
at 8pm at the Nobles experimental interMedia Studio, Metropolitan State
University, 645 E. Seventh St., St, Paul.
http://www.geocities.com/davismenas/
Metropolitan State University
Program in Experimental Intermedia Art presents:
Strange Attractors VI
Sixth International Festival of Experimental
Intermedia Art
March 23th-April
27th, 2001
Nobles eXperimental
interMedia Studio
Metropolitan State
University
A new generation
of artists, some from the visual arts and others from dance, music, performance
and the media arts, are creating new materials, performance practices and
methods of artistic expression, which combine and redefine traditional art
forms. Strange Attractors VI, the sixth international festival of experimental
intermedia art, will bring to Metropolitan State University a collection of
renowned artists in a celebration of new work and creativity. The festival will
offer a flexible and interactive environment for artists to present and discuss
their work to audiences who will have a unique opportunity to experience these
works in diverse and creative ways. All events are at Metro State’s Nobles
experimental interMedia Studio beginning at 8:00 p.m. Admission per event is $6
general public/$4 students/seniors. The featured artists and groups are:
Friday, March 23rd
WingDingWammyJam
II - Local alternative rock bands return to
kick off the sixth festival-complete with our new video wall. Nate Pischke
curates and joins his band “Twenty Dollar Love” performing on the Nobles “Art
Car”.
Friday, March 30th
Fred
Ho - The Brooklyn composer-saxophonist and
arts activist will present an evening of new music for baritone saxophone and
jam with local improvisers.
Friday, April 6th
Jon
Spayde – The local writer-performer presents an evening
of recombinant ABC (or chance literature meets high-octane spoken word)
featuring Heidi Arneson's "Snake Lady" (a new work in progress) and
the Tracy's Tertulia Exquisite Corpse Ensemble plus the "Return of
Ankle-Bracelet Larry" and friends.
Friday,
April 13th
Deep
Narrative Band – Local guitarist and cultural
gadfly, Davis Menas returns to Nobles with his new replacement band featuring
sampling percussionist Steve Goldstein, guitarist and instrument builder Steve
Carlino and guests.
Friday,
April 20th
DJDickchain
and Zippy the Pinhead in
"Multimedia, Dialectic,
Moisturizing...
Ambiance"
Friday, April 27th
Georgia Stephens
and the Nobles experimental interMedia Group – The local
writer-choreographer-composer will premier “Hoopla”, with Ted Cabana, Mary
Garvie, David Means, David Thornton and Marlene Tupy-Gaboury.The Nobles Group
will present the results from the Spring Semester Collaboration Class.
Strange
Attractors are those mysterious fields that produce
wobbly figure-eight patterns depicted in recent studies of chaos theory. They
border on the fringe of order and randomness, yet seem to have an underlying
structure of interest to artists and scientists alike. The festival celebrates
aspects of chaos and attraction in the collaborative, compositional process,
the interaction between performers and audience, and the spontaneous
transformation of materials into forms of intermedia expression.
Strange
Attractors Festivals are presented at the Nobles
eXperimental interMedia Studio. Originally built as light manufacturing space
for a World War II defense contractor, the Nobles facility provides a flexible,
urban arts environment suitable for a wide range of experimental intermedia
activities. The festival is produced by Metro State's Program in
Experimental Intermedia Art, which includes classes in intermedia arts,
creativity, collaboration and experimental music, and a creative capstone in
intermedia performance.
The
Nobles eXperimental interMedia Group consists of
Metro State students and guest artists who develop original intermedia
performances and installations in conjunction with classes in Metro State's
Program of Experimental Intermedia Art. Guest artists and graduates of the
group include Anthony Cox, Marlene Tupy-Gaboury, Steve Goldstein, Georgia
Stephens, Jacqueline Ultan, and Johnny Rodriguez. In 1999 the group joined
California Composer Ron George at the Walker Art Center as part of its
"Gallery 8" series, and Georgia Stephens, performing her festival
work "I Have Wished to be Queen" at the Walker / Minnesota Dance
Alliance "Choreographers' Evening" and at Washington University, St.
Louis in September, 2000.
Strange
Attractors I (Spring, 1998) featured David Revill (England),
Cinnamon Sphere (Toronto), Mario Van Horrik and Petra Dubach (Holland), Johnny
Rodriguez (San Antonio), and the Electric Arts Duo (Ohio), with new works by
the Nobles experimental interMedia Group.
Strange
Attractors Il (Spring, 1999) featured Paul
Higham (England), Ursula Scherer (Switzerland), Michael Schumacher (New York
City), Ron George (Los Angeles), Blood Magnet (Minnesota), and
T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.l.
Consort (Minnesota) with new works by the Nobles experimental interMedia Group,
including new operas by Anthony Cox and David Means.
Strange
Attractors III (Fall, 1999) featured Dan Senn
(Tacoma), Linda Dusman (Boston). Johnny Rodriguez (San Antonio), Georgia Stephens
(Minnesota), Harold Fortuin (Minnesota) and Benderflaus (Minnesota), with new
works by the Nobles experimental interMedia Group.
Strange
Attractors IV (Spring, 2000) featured local
artists and groups Burnt House, Spud Wells and his New Rhythm Ranch Hands,
Steve Carlino and "Cafe Hemingway" by the Nobles experimental
interMedia Group.
Strange
Attractors V (Fall, 2000) featured David Revill (England),
AudioFiction I, Susan Rawcliffe (Los Angeles), Warren Burt (Australia), Dixie
Treichel and the Unique Sounds Ensemble, and the Nobles experimental interMedia
Group’s “Art Car”.
Strange
Attractors VII (Fall, 2001) will feature a new mediated opera
by David Means “This World (and then the fireworks)”, video wall commissions
from Stephanie Japs and Jim Malec, local community artists and international
guests
Strange
Attractors VIII (Spring, 2002) will feature
the Composers Commissioning Program premier of Los Angeles composer Ron
George’s new work for mixed ensemble of voices, instruments and American
Gamelon based on Icelandic microtonal vocal music.
Nobles Art Car
Strange Attractors VI –
Festival Artists’ Bios and Materials
Jon Spayde is “Ankle-bracelet
Larry”
Jon Spayde is a writer and performer
who works as a freelance journalist. He's an MFA candidate in fiction at the
University of Minnesota and a contributor to many local and national magazines.
He is a former Senior Editor and current Contributing Editor to Utne Reader.
His fiction has appeared in Harvard Review (Cambridge, MA), Spindrift
(Boston), and Wire (Chicago). He has held an Edelstein-Keller fellowship
in fiction and a Loft Mentorship award, and has studied performance with Heidi
Arneson, appearing at Patrick's Cabaret, Balls, and the Acadia Cafe. He
collaborated with his wife, public artist Laurie Phillips, on the Electronic
Literature Generator, an installation funded by the Jerome Foundation via
Forecast Public Artworks, currently on display at the Open Book Center in
Minneapolis. He will curate an evening of text-based performance at Strange
Attractors VI.
HoopLa
Georgia
Stephens has been creating sound, movement and
language theater since 1975. She has recently on a sabbatical of sorts after
dissolving her role a co-director of SpaceSpace studio in Minneapolis.A
previous life as a choreographer has been rewarded by grants from the Bush
Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation of St. Paul,
McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.Her latest work,
“HoopLA” will be premiered April 27th at the Strange Attractors VI Festival
in Nobles.
Fred Ho
Fred Ho’s
performance is co-sponsored by Metropolitan State University’s Center for
Community-based Learning and made possible with funding from the McKnight
Visiting Composer Fellowship 2000, administered by the American
Composer Forum.
Fred Ho is a
prodigious composer, having written over a half dozen operas, music/theater
epics, cutting edge multimedia performance works, martial arts ballet, and
oratorios. In the nid-1980s, Ho created the Asian Pacific American performance
art trilogy, Bamboo that Snaps Back, presented at the Whitney
Museum (NYC) and other venues across the U.S., and for which the music/spoken
word score was released on Finnadar/WEA records. Ho wrote the first
contemporary Chinese American Opera, A Chinaman’s Chance, staged
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring a bilingual libretto (Chinese and
English) and which signaled his ground-breaking combination of traditional
Chinese and western instrumentation. In 1988 he conceived and composed the
music/theater epic A Song for Manong as a tribute to Filipino workers. His
multimedia bilingual (Spanish and English) oratorio, Turn Pain Into Power!,
released on O.O. Disc, was acclaimed by The Washington Post in its performance
at The Smithsonian Institution as “charged with such anger, longing,
affirmation and beauty that it defied the listener to turn away”(Mike
Joyce).His music/theater/opera/dance-ballet epic Journey Beyond the West: The
New Adventures of Monkey was commissioned by the Joseph Papp Public Theater,
developed by the Guggenheim Museum Works Process Series of Mrs. Mary Sharp
Cronson, and presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music 1997 Next Wave
Festival.
Fred Ho has received numerous
awards, including the McKnight Foundation Composer Fellowship and Residency
award; three Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Project grants (1999, 1998,
1991), two National Endowment for the Arts Music Composition fellowships
(Opera/Musical Theater, 1994 and Jazz Composition, 1993); two New York
Foundation for the Arts Music Composition fellowships (1994 and 1989); a 1988
Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black
Musicians Conference (the first Asian American to ever receive this).
A long-time activist
in the Asian American community, Ho helped to found the East Coast Asian
Students Union and the Asian American Resource Workshop, the Asian American
Arts Alliance and many other organizations as well as cultural and political
projects. His newest book projects include: Afro/Asia: Revolutionary Political
and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans, and
Wicked Theory/Naked Practice: Collected Essays on Radical Cultural and
Political Theory and Love. Fred Ho lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Nobles
Video Wall
David Means, Strange Attractors Festival
Producer
David Means was born on the same day the
sound barrier was broken. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois
at Urbana where he participated in the original (1967) "Music Circus"
event staged by John Cage. After compulsory military service in Vietnam, he
returned to Illinois and the formal study of music, integrating aspects of
invented notation into sculptural scores and performance installations for a
variety of architectural and environmental settings. His music has been
presented at such places as the New Music America Festivals, (Minneapolis,
Hartford, Houston), Dance Theater Workshop, Experimental Intermedia and the
Roulette Performance Series, (New York City), and the Stuttgart Graphic Music
Festival. His graphic scores, installations and performance systems have been
exhibited and presented by the Walker Art Center, IRCAM (Paris), Documenta IX
(Kassel), the Xi An Conservatory of Music (China), Het Stroomhuis (Holland),
Logos Foundation (Belgium) and the Arts Council of Great Britain. He is a
four-time recipient of the McKnight Composer Fellowship and has received
fellowships and grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota Arts Board, the
Jerome Foundation's Composer Commissioning Program, and Meet the Composer, Inc.
He has taught music and performance art at the University of Illinois, the
Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the MacPhail Center for the Arts. He
is currently an Associate Professor in The First College, and Coordinator of
the Program in Experimental Intermedia Art in the Media and Fine Arts
Department at Metropolitan State University, where he produces the Strange
Attractors International Festival of Experimental Intermedia Art each semester
at the Nobles experimental interMedia Studio, which he directs for Metro State
in St. Paul.
Among
his major works are CANNON RIVER WAVE/FORMS, a computer sound and performance
installation along the historic Riverfront Commons in Northfield, Minnesota;
STANTON AIRFIELD LAND/FORMS, a Mayan creation myth played out on intersecting
grass runways in rural Minnesota; THE VILLAGERS PROJECT, a series of operas
based on a Haida Indian myth; and SUPPORT SYSTEMS, a series of site-specific
performance installations for various architectural spaces. His recorded music
is available on Innova Recordings and from Dymaxion Music, and his 1992
performance installation, BERLINER ANDENKEN, is distributed on videotape by
Intermedia Arts Minnesota.
In
addition to his own projects he has collaborated extensively with other
creative artists, forming organizations such as Roulette Intermedium (NYC) or
the Nobles experimental interMedia Group (St. Paul), and creating new
intermedia works with choreographers Georgia Stephens, Laurie Van Wieren and
Chris Aiken; sound artists Mario Van Horrik and Petra Dubach and Sonic
Architecture (Bill and Mary Buchen); writers JoAnne Makela and Nicole Neimi;
visual artists David Cole, Dean Lettenstrom and Galen Brown; videographer Jim
Malec, and composers Warren Burt, Ron George, Johnny Rodriguez, Dan Senn, Fred Ho, Carei Thomas, Gary
Schulte, Wendy Ultan, Steve Goldstein, Susan Rawcliffe among others.
In
recent years he has developed a personal pitch-to-MIDI performance system for
his 1959 Gretsch “Firebird” electric guitar and a mid-Eighties vintage Yamaha
digital wind controller. In his current “Deep Narratives Project” Means uses
this performance system as a “home sound base” for a series of sound and
performance operas in which he interacts with fellow artists and ambient
surroundings to invigorate and engage texts, images, scores, videos and spoken
performance.
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