COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION, is an online series featuring media artists and scholars in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts. Each featured presenter will discuss selected artworks in history and context and then present their own work and connections. This series is produced in collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation.
ANNE NIEMETZ has been video-documenting the David Bermant Collection since 2004, and has created most of the visual documentation materials found on the Bermant website.
Operating in the field of New Media Art and Design, Anne’s creative work focuses on the convergence of design, technology, art and science. Her work is intentionally collaborative and interdisciplinary, manifesting itself in forms of interactive and non-interactive audio-visual installations, videos, wearable technology designs and electronic art.
Anne holds a Media Arts degree from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), Germany, with a focus in digital media and interactive sound installation. She continued her studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received an MFA in Design and Media Arts in 2004. In 2007 she moved to New Zealand, where she holds the position of Senior Lecturer in Media Design at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Currently Anne is the programme director of the Bachelor of Design Innovation at VUW.
Christiane Paul is Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020). Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); and What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015).
The David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion was established in 1986 with the mission to encourage and advocate experimental visual art which draws its form, content and working materials from late twentieth-century technology. The working materials include physical sources of energy, light, and sound. The resulting artworks question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts. To learn more about The David Bermant Foundation and its collection, visit the foundation website DavidBermantFoundation.org.
Color, Light, Motion – Episode 2 featured David Familian, the director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology and art historian, curator and educator, Karen Moss from USC Roski School of Art and Design. In this emergent conversation, Familian discussed Virtually Wise by Nam June Paik and Moss discussed the Wind Up Guitar by Christian Marclay, Alan Rath’s, Desktop Breather and NanoMandala by Victoria Vesna. The following dialogue expanded on the historical importance and relationship between the artworks as well as the inherent and hidden connections to artworks by Marcel Duchamp.
COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION, is an online series featuring media artists and scholars in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts. Each featured presenter will discuss selected artworks in history and context and then present their own work and connections. This series is produced in collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation.
The David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion was established in 1986 to encourage and advocate experimental visual art which draws its form, content and working materials from late twentieth-century technology.
We are proud to announce the beginning of COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION, a collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation. This new, online series will feature a media artist in conversation with one of the works from the Bermant Collection. Each artist will go over the selected artwork, in history and context, and then will present their own work and discuss relationships and contrasts between. These rich conversations will be unique, interesting and art-historical.
Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, exhibition curator, and professor at the University of California,
Los Angeles in the Departments of Design Media Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media.
The David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion was established in 1986 with the mission to encourage and advocate experimental visual art which draws its form, content and working materials from late twentieth-century technology. The working materials include physical sources of energy, light, and sound. The resulting artworks question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts. To learn more about The David Bermant Foundation and its collection, visit the foundation website DavidBermantFoundation.org.
Victoria Vesna, James Gimzewski, Carlo Ventura, Charles Taylor, and members of the Art Sci Now collective members -- Ivana Dama, Clinton Van Arnam, John Brumley, and Paul Geluso
This event addresses vibrations from the point of view of visual and sound artists considering the scientific research into matter, brain waves, human and animal voice, environmental noise and outer space. Our starting point is quantum mechanics — based on music theory and that nanotechnology is showing us the waves that underlie all matter which many Eastern philosophies have known for centuries. We will view and listen to sound art projects that utilize vibrations, noise, and audible and inaudible realms and get in touch with our own soundscape that includes our body, mind, voice and environment vibrations. Breathing will be central to every session and we will engage in shared deep listening related to the topic of the week. Each session will include a talk with a particular topic followed by shared listening exercises with binaural / immersive sound. Participants are invited to share their weekly responses as video, recordings or writings. Deep Listening: Molecular and Cellular Vibrations Brain Waves and Space Human / Animal Voice / Mantra Noise Pollution Environment / Weather.
MycoMythologies: Storytelling Circle is an on/off_line performative workshop that evokes and employs the mycelial mind of the attendants through nodes of knowledge gathering practices and embodied mycology. Participants create their own mycomythological, speculative stories to share with one another and donate to the Spawn database. Participants will learn about World Networks Entanglement also known as planetary infrastructures through the various portions of the performative workshop: How to be a Mushroom Hunter soundwalk, Spores and Networks guided meditation, Mycelial Storytelling Objects, Carrier Bag Weaving tutorial and Mycelial Map-Making. Each portion of the workshop is a node in the mycelial web: networking, expedition, gathering story spores, making maps, storytelling and spawn.
Since 2015, Joel Ong has been collecting sonic memories through interviews and casual conversations. As part of his Residency with UCLA this summer, Ong turned his attention to sonic memories in the environment, and is collecting these in order to draw attention to fluctuations in the climate observed and remembered through the inter-subjectivities of a diverse group of interviewees. The archive of memories is then audiated/imagined as a musical composition through binaural recordings and electroacoustic processing of field sounds. Where appropriate, each interviewee also provides an image of his/her ears that are then sculpted as closely as possible in clay and included in a binaural recording system. Through this, his project asks – how do we hear through someone else’s ears the same way we may imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Might we develop a deeper responsibility to the environment through the conservation of sounds that may be lost, or never again heard because of noisy anthropogenic changes to our soundscapes? How might we attend to the affect within each instance of listening, and create transformative politics of listening?
Sept. 9th - 9:00am PST / 18:00 CET
That Unseen Vibrance
Yolande Harris
Can our conscious listening effect the world around us? That unseen vibrance. These are dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums. They work through us. They present as oceanic. I have a sense of being inside the sound, submerged in another medium, molten, or perhaps growing wings. Of enormous pressure depth yet vibrance shimmer. To dive into the oceanic with our own airborne sounds, feet on the ground, ears underwater. What animal could hear like this?
Imagine an entwined sonic future of humans and ocean creatures. The pandemic-induced ‘anthropause’ in human activity, when oceans and land became suddenly and significantly quieter, offered both a window into possible sonic futures, and importantly, an opportunity to reflect back and hear ourselves more clearly. Yolande Harris’ audio visual worlds setup hope that an expanded sonic imagination can contribute to re-balancing human relationships to our environments. Sound is the harbinger of such a renewed relatedness.
Yolande will lead remote underwater sound walks along the Pacific coast as part of ‘Melt Me Into The Ocean’ (2018) and present work with collaborating scientist Ari Feidlaender using video and sounds from tagged whales in ‘From a Whale’s Back’ (2020). Her most recent highly resonant sound work presents the oceanic with dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums, sounds that work through us, in ‘That Unseen Vibrance’ (2021)
Walking and breathing meditation led by Anna Nacher and members of the Art Sci collective. Audiences are required to RSVP and encouraged to record and add 30 seconds of their breath to the growing Breath Library. The way we, as humans, participate in the vibrational fields and flows of energy of the Planet Earth is embodied practice, even if the process often remains somewhat mysterious, unnoticed or unacknowledged. This workshop will explore how a human vocalization, which is nothing else than amplified and conscious breathing, can become a practice of inquiry into the planetary water cycle. The human body is a fluid phenomenon, not only because the average amount of water in human organism ranges between 45-75%, depending on the particular organ or tissue (majority of which constitutes intracellular fluid), but also because it is incorporated into the planetary cycle, in which water constantly changes from liquid to vapor to ice, circulating around, through, and above the Earth. Through a simple act of breathing we may participate in the whole range of scales and time flows: for the terrestrial atmosphere, a given water molecule, the one we breathe in and breathe out as oxygen, might spend in the atmosphere 15-23 days on the average. What if the way we breathe and vocalize impacts the water cycles? Can we turn our bodies into water cycles measuring units and the instruments of cooperation with weather patterns? What if even the tiniest movement of the oxygen in our nostrils and lungs and even the slightest resonation of the vocal cords, chest, and abdomen can affect a rainstorm? Meditating on such questions may provide an interesting departure point for both scientific inquiry and embodied practice of breathing and vocalizing.
