PESTILENCE In Process

Jack Waters in collaboration with John Michael Swartz

and the creative team of

Daniel Belquer  Peter Cramer  André Azevedo
Carlo Maria Ampil and Ricardo Horatio Nelson

invite you to join us for

“PESTILENCE” IN PROCESS

Exhibition -Performance- Concert- Public Forum

Open studio showing of a developing opus

A Unique Experiment in Production: A Synthesis of Music, Theater, Art, and Technology.

Thursday October 24 – Saturday October 26

at

Emily Harvey Gallery

537 Broadway, New York, NY 10012

Gallery Hours 1:00 – 7:00 Thursday – Saturday

Event Schedule 

All programs are FREE
(RSVP pestilence@archive.alliedproductions.org)

Thursday October 24

6:00 – 8:00
RECEPTION

Friday October 25

6:00 – 8:00
STAGED READING from the Pestilence Scenario
performed by Devon Gallegos
with
vocal improvisation by Donald Gallagher
live cello by John Michael Swartz

Saturday October 26

6:00 – 8:00

FORUM
Why Opera?

 

Artists will be present during gallery hours 1:00 – 7:00 Thursday through Saturday

The showing will center around a sound installation with musical elements

created at the group’s April 2012 residency at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center

Sound elements include the recordings of the performances of
vocalist Donald Gallagher and sitarist Fabrizio Brua.

THE EVENTS:

The Emily Harvey showing will center around interactive sound and video installations with vocals, tones and instrumental elements created at our April 2013 residency at Harvestworks Digital Media Lab. Electronicllly generated tones are mixed with the recordings of the performances of vocalist Donald Gallagher, sitarist Fabrizio Brua, an an ensemble of pre-columbian whistles. The video images will be affected by the live ambient sound from the interior and exterior of the gallery.
The concept for this sonic sculpture was created in in part in consultation with composer/philosoper Sylvie Degeiz.

On exhibit will be drawings, Illustrations, video stills, and visual works including notes, scores, and masks.

Pages from the texts for the Pestilence scenario will also be exhibited.

The schedule will include a staged reading from the Pestilence scenario.

The public forum topics will focus on opera in relation to social hierarchies, recent shifts in cultural identities, and changes in the momentum of western traditions and relationships to history caused by current trends in contemporary media’s response to developments in global politics.

PESTILENCE CONTACT:

Allied Productions, Inc.

Phone: 212-529-8815

email:

pestilence@archive.alliedproductions.org

EH GALLERY CONTACT:

Phone:(212) 925-7651

http://www.emilyharveyfoundation.org/

ABOUT PESTILENCE

Bread Yeast Reactor by Andre Azevedo and John Swartz projected at HPSCHD

Pestilence Team’s HPSCHD VIDEO

Pestilence is a musical theater work that melds the technologies of science and art in a lyrical expression that considers the brain an organ of sensory stimulation; It’s a primordial, post-apocalyptic opera that tracks culture from its origin as single cell life form to the terminal end of society in the digital age of post information overload.

Pestilence is a cycle in three parts:

The narrative is cyclical, a continuum of conjoining and replication – dissolution and reintegration. At each repetition the story collects another layer while retaining the simplicity at its base. Pestilence is about process.

The music’s motif originates from numerical relationships of wave frequency. Resonance begets a dissonance whose imbalance causes the natural desire to re-establish harmonic balance until that stasis is again undone by the physical propensity for change and development. The score will sample from World music. Classical themes, pop, jazz, rock – every imaginable type of music and sound figures as the opus scans the history of humanity as part of the nature of things.

The Pestilence concept originated in 2006 in a group residency at Emily Harvey Foundation in

Venice, Italy. The scenario was written by Jack Waters in residence at Yaddo in 2009. Pestilence went

into pre-production at Harvestworks Team Lab in April 2013 with the formation of

of a creative team. The visual media that came out of that group residency was immediately

exhibited at the staging of John Cage’s seminal work, “HPSCHD” at Eyebeam (May 3 – 4, 2013).

The Pestilence team’s contribution to HPSCHD was described in the NY Times review:

“On three walls and a curved screen draped from the ceiling, a wide variety of images played and

converged: planets (frequently); pornography (briefly); President Lincoln; and more. Crystalline

prisms twirled; paint blobs swelled; digital spheres coiled and danced in delicate lattices,

responding to chemical reactions in tubes of sourdough bread batter. (Yes, really.) Audience

members constantly broke through projector beams, making impromptu cameos in silhouette”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jack Waters and Peter Cramer are the director/creators of “The Ring OUR Way” their

treatment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The ten year work in process toured internationally. Its

culminating apotheosis was an evening-length multi projection performance at Anthology Film

Archives for the 1992 NY Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (Now MIX NYC).

In her Washington Post review Marion Jacobson described “The Ring OUR Way” as

a “…fashionably jumbled set of Wagnarian Cliff Notes [which like Syberberg’s] “Parsifal film”

presents Wagner as a collage of information…, but unlike Syberberg…Waters is a juggler of

signifiers…”

Waters later extracted the elements of the Ring in a reconstructed sound and media installation at the MIX festival in 2011.

THE TEAM:

John Swartz

André Azevedo

Daniel Belquer

Carlo Maria Ampil

Ricardo Horatio Nelson

Donald Gallagher

Fabrizio Brua

Devon Gallegos

Sylvie Degeiz

OUR SUPPORT

“Pestilence” is a project of Allied Productions, Inc. a non-profit umbrella that incorporates many artists and organizations. Allied’s support has been essential in the establishment of pioneering non-profits like ABC No Rio. Allied’s current primary project is Le Petit Versailles, which Allied transformed from an abandoned lot into an extraordinary community garden and multipurpose arts space. Allied Productions, Inc. is supported in part with funds from the New York State Coucil On The Arts, The NYC Department Of Cultural Affairs, Materials For The Arts, and by individual contributors such as Mary Jo & Ted Shen.

The Emily Harvey Foundation is a not for profit foundation created in 2004 which operates between New York and Venice. The EHF Venice comprises a residency program open to artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, videographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, curators, art historians, architects, and other creative thinkers, who are engaged in a project of change, and who work the leading edges of their disciplines. At its New York base the EHF has developed an ambitious and comprehensive contemporary art/event program that draws on its rich history, art collection, and archive grounded in Mail Art, Concept Art, Fluxus, and Early Video Art. The Emily Harvey Foundation concerns itself with supporting ideas resistant to frameworks of easy legibility. Our emphasis is on giving voice, and momentary material form, to discursive and process-based practices. In this singular historical moment, much of what we do would be impossible, and unfeasible at almost any other site. Our aim is to nurture collaborative and crossdisciplinary approaches, while generating a spectrum of alternatives to other more solid contexts for contemporary practice.

Harvestworks is a nonprofit Digital Media Arts Center that presents experimental artworks created in collaboration with our Technology, Engineering, Art and Music (TEAM) Lab. The Harvestworks TEAM Lab is an environment that provides project expertise from consultants, technicians, instructors and innovative practitioners in all branches of the electronic arts. Our programs are made possible with funds from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, the Jerome Foundation, mediaThefoundation, New Music USA Cary New Music Performance Fund, The Edwards Foundation Arts Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Rockefeller Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Materials for the Arts, and the Friends of Harvestworks. To learn more visit:www.harvestworks.org

Our Generous Contributors:

Mary Jo & Ted Shen
Carol Mullins
Coral Short
Barbara Hammer
Devon Gallegos
Judith Glantzman
Stephen Kent Jusick
Barry Frier & Stefani Mar
Charles Corbett
Donald Sheehan
Gervaise Chin-Lee
David Powell
Lauren Sumida
MxCnormous Desdemona
peter d weathers
Jose Cuevas
Ezra Nepon
Andy Hamlen
Shelley Marlow
Susan Salinger
Brad Taylor
Arleen Schloss
Lynne Sachs
DASEXILKABARETT
carol love md
Patrice Panis
Robert Croonquist
reroot
Davina Cohen
Jesse Sanford
Judith Canepa
Quito Ziegler
Lucia Maria Minervini
James Hubbard
Ryan Rogers
Carlo Maria
Helen Jamieson
Shane O’Neill
Marc Arthur
Frank Susa
Anonymous (4)
LINKS TO THE PROJECT:

PESTILENCE IN DEVELOPMENT

VIDEOS:

PESTILENCE HARVESTWORKS TEAMLAB

WORKSHOPS IN BERLIN AND MANHATTAN

MORE “STUDIES” (incl. EMILY HARVEY FOUNDATION VENICE)

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