Featuring seven artists’ innovative and interactive sound sculptures and light installations, Water World invites viewers to enter into a fog-drenched imaginary seashore anchored by Jeff Ray‘s Ark and Surroundings,’ which envisions a post-apocalyptic world with boats and bridges as living structures with multi-media works and a 15-foot pipe organ-outfitted sail boat; and Reenie Charrière’s ‘Sirens’, featuring sounds and dress-like tapestries and seaweed and barnacle-like extensions from plastic found in the Oakland estuary linking the mythological Sirens from Homer’s Odyssey to the horrific ongoing accumulation of plastic in the oceans and waterways.
Diving into the conscious state of mind, the back room submerges you underwater with light-activated installations including the oceanic cave-like surroundings of Gene A. Felice II’s ‘Oceanic Scales’ using LED-phytoplankton that react to changing temperatures, pH and elements of the Monterrey Bay; Mary Franck and Kadet Kuhne’s ‘As Machines Shine,’ is an interactive sound and projection-mapped archipelago or colony of cells that is a meditation on our macro/micro humanities; Jean Tarantino’s ‘Imagination Water Change’ showers viewers in a cascade of voices that explore our intimate notions about water; and Re*Colectivo’s ‘El Odor del Agua’ video installation investigates access to clean water in our world through the eyes of women in rural Mexico.
Further, the exhibition invites you underground into your deep unconscious for Shane Myrbeck & Emily Shisko’s ‘Surface Tension,’ a circular ambisonic loudspeaker array installation based on a central metaphor of the behavior of water when an object is dropped into it. Its narrative follows the impact (creation); the propagation (exploration and growth); the distortion (turmoil and conflict); and dissipation (peace, resolution); which ultimately has participants imagine our states of being through immersive sound.
Reenie Charrière is a mixed media artist living in Oakland. She received her MFA in Studio Arts in 2009 from Maine College of Art in Portland,. Her work addresses environmental issues exposing the natural beauty as well as the synthetic trouble around us, and actively considers the consequences of our human conditions. Reenie was a resident artist at the Château de La Napoule, Mandelieu la Napoule, France, where she created an installation, Wastelines and Sauvons La Planete, for a 2014 international exhibition, Her most recent solo installation, Floe, was exhibited in 2012 as part of Vast and Undetectable at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.
Gene A. Felice II currently splits his life into three directions: art, design, and education. His art is a lens through which he develops balance between himself and other living systems. Design is an outlet for sharpening his ability to communicate visually while availing of the latest technology available, including interactive web design, 3D modeling and compositing. In education and as a graduate student in the Digital Arts and New Media Program at UC Santa Cruz, he balances being a student and teacher, an act that produces unique and fresh results. Digital arts and new media form a fluid nexus for his work, providing a point of intersection to evolve new hybrids of nature and technology. Through motors, sensors and microcontrollers such as the Arduino or Raspberry Pi, he is able to interact directly with the viewer. Video and animated imagery, viewed through projection mapping and alternative screens, give him the ability to transform 3D space and surface through the vehicle of light.
Mary Franck’s video and programming-based practice moves between installation and performance to create intimate, visceral experiences that stir the non-rational aspects of the human mind. These works instantiate new symbols and metaphors for subtle emotion in the era of the rational, binary machine. They manifest the ambiguity and tension between technology as liberator and technology as oppressor to examine the emotional fallout of our culture’s blindly groping technological obsession. Franck holds a B.A. in Conceptual and Information Art from SFSU. Her work has been presented at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, The Lab, Climate Theater, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Artist Television Access, CounterPULSE, Z-Space, Joyce SoHo and other venues. She has participated in art collectives such as Million Fishes, Ardent Heavy Industries, and False Profit. She releases her own software tools, including Rouge, a TouchDesigner programming framework.
Kadet Kuhne is a media artist whose work spans the audiovisual spectrum. With the goal of forming somatic experiences which can prompt visceral responses to sound and movement, Kadet openly exposes the use of technology in her practice by employing fragmented, jump-cut edits and amplifying evidence of sonic detritus. This glitch aesthetic, contrasted with layered ambient reflection, is intended to heighten tensions between motion and stasis: a balanced yet heightened “nervous system” to reflect our own. Trained in jazz guitar, Kadet became attached to the instinctive nature of improvisation which led her to the California Institute of the Arts where she studied Composition and Integrated Media. As an award-winning filmmaker she has numerous shorts that have screened worldwide, and she also creates video & sound installations that involve a combination of motion sensors, customized software and online virtual space exploring themes of communication and control.
Jeff Ray is an artist, musician, filmmaker, short story writer, adjunct professor, curator, festival founder, and arts and food rights activist. Recently, he was a visiting professor at San Francisco State University, Fine Arts Department, Conceptual Information Arts. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival and introduced one of the first Bay Area multimedia performance series, Collision, in 2004. Jeff has won numerous awards, including a Murphy and Cadogan Award from the SF Foundation, and was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He has showcased his work at SFMOMA, Kulturhuset (Sweden), and Eleanor Harwood Gallery (San Francisco), among others. He has been on the Board of Directors, Advisory Board and Programming Committee at The Lab and is currently serves on the Board of Directors of MEDIATE. Jeff received his MFA in New Media Arts from San Francisco State University. He is the lead curator and resident artist of Soundwave Festival 2014.
RE*COLECTIVO is a newly formed arts collaborative founded by local filmmakers Bethynia Cardenas and Kapi’olani Lee. Former crewmates on several local short films, the members of RE*COLECTIVO aim to translate the formal conventions of traditional cinema into playful, interactive digital art installations that explore sound as much as image. Drawing on a shared interest in overlooked and forgotten histories, oral storytelling, sound design, and animation, RE*COLECTIVO brings a uniquely feminist, third and fourth-cinema perspective to contemporary arts performance.
Shane A. Myrbeck is a sound artist, composer and acoustician living in San Francisco. He operates in a variety of sonic contexts, including installation design, composition, architectural acoustics consulting, music performance, lecturing and sound recording. Shane’s work explores the visceral and immersive nature of sound through spatial audio display, architectural form and multi-sensory phenomena. His work has been exhibited at Fort Mason Center, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the Lab, California Academy of Sciences, Proxy, the ODC Theatre, Arup SoundLab, the Whitehaus, IBM Tokyo and on the streets of San Francisco. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium. Shane is an acoustics consultant at Arup, and is currently in charge of the San Francisco SoundLab, an immersive, full-sphere ambisonic sound studio used for composition and acoustic simulation. Emily Shisko is a San Francisco based composer, performer and teacher. Her most current works live in the intersection between traditional compositional methods and experimental and electronic performance and installation practices. She serves as artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, and as Junior Apprentice Director with the San Francisco Boys Chorus. A native of Long Beach, California, she earned her BA in Composition and Theory from her hometown school CSU Long Beach, where she studied under Carolyn Bremer, Robin Cox and Bruce Miller. She was awarded the Paul C. Lindsey III Memorial Scholarship for achievement in composition. In Boston, she earned her MA in composition at the Boston Conservatory where she studied under Andy Vores, Jan Swafford and Osvoldo Golijov. She was the recipient of the conservatory’s 2007 Roger Sessions Memorial Composition Award. Emily was a co-founder and artist with the Whitehaus Family Record, a performing arts collective and venue in Boston.
Jean Tarantino is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and studied at the California College of Art. She has performed at ArtPad Art Fair and Shoshana Wayne Gallery and has been included in exhibitions at Intersection for the Arts and Southern Exposure Gallery. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,and at Intersection for the Arts. Recuperating from a long illness, unable to work and continue with the metal sculpture that made her sick, she had plenty of time to listen in on her body: the breathing, the heartbeat, the whooshing and flowing. Her new works are electro-digital experiments that explore the role of humans in creating the world. In this age of participation and communication, she inquires into the ways that we form our ideas about life through the exchange of information and shared experience. Combining sound, performance, social practice, and installation, her works are participatory, situation-specific, and unfixed, occupying and activating the communicative process of vibrational space.
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