Activating The Medium XV with Maile Colbert, Marielle V. Jakobsons, Holly Herndon, & Andrea Polli

Description

23five Incorporated presents the fifteenth annual Activating The Medium festival
in collaboration with Art Practical, The Lab, and the San Francisco Art Institute

Activating The Medium XV : Chapter Four
Saturday, April 28, 2012 : The Lab
Maile Colbert (Portugal)
Marielle V. Jakobsons (Oakland)
Holly Herndon (San Francisco)
Andrea Polli (Albuquerque) : lecture

Since 1998, 23five Incorporated has produced the annual Activating The Medium festival -- an internationally recognized showcase for the most innovative and visionary practitioners of sound art. Now entering its fifteenth season, Activating The Medium addresses the theme of a 'dark ecology' -- a term which comes from the philosopher Timothy Morton, who argues that the idea of nature and the attitudes surrounding those ideas are the stumbling blocks to environmental thinking. A glance through the lens of dark ecology refuses to idealize nature as a Romanticized other; furthermore, it eschews the notion that mankind has disturbed and transgressed nature through our engineering and manipulation. A dark ecology frames reality that anything has the potential to disrupt everything, with global catastrophes inevitably occurring through such relationships. As such, Morton beseeches an aesthetic that does not forget the murk, the grime, and the filth that are the symptoms, causes, and glue of what might have once been described as 'nature.' It is from this vantage point that 23five is curating the 2012 Activating The Medium festival, seeking works that engage the specter of noise pollution, the melancholy of eco-acoustic blight, the horror of technological chimeras, and / or the altered states that may emerge from such meditations through sound-based composition and performance.

Maile Colbert is an Intermedia and Interdisciplinary artist with a concentration on sound and video, relocated from Los Angeles and living and working between New York and Lisbon, Portugal. She spent the last three years collaborating with the art organization Binaural, and is currently director of Cross the Pond, an organization based on arts and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Portugal, and is a professor at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. She has had multiple screenings, exhibits, and shows, including The New York Film Festival, The Ear to Earth Festival for Electronic Music Foundation, LACE Gallery in Los Angeles, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The Portland International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, the Future Places Festival in Oporto, HOERENSEHEN 2.0 in Berlin, the Störung Festival in Barcelona, the Teatra Municipal in Guarda, the Observitori Festival in Valencia, the 2012 European Capital of Culture, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and the United States. 
Colbert will present Come Kingdom Come -- an intermedia project for projected image and sound concerning millennialism and apocalyptic feeling using VLF, geological, tectonic, and tidal recordings with sounds that seem to hint at voice and human activity far off and out of reach.

Sound artist and violinist Marielle V. Jakobsons creates electro-acoustic compositions of evocative, pulsing drones. Based in Oakland, California she received her MFA in Electronic Music from MIlls College. Prior to Mills, Marielle studied at Centre Creation Musical Iannis Xenakis in Paris. She has published recordings on Digitalis, Mexican Summer, Root Strata, Students of Decay, and Important Records, among others; and has toured across the Americas & Europe. A classically-trained musician and a sound designer by trade, she collaborates extensively in the experimental arts. Together with Gregg Kowalsky, she formed the band Date Palms and with Agnes Szelag the project Myrmyr. From 2007-2011, she performed under the moniker darwinsbitch and released her first solo album Ore on Digitalis. Among other distinctions she has received the Elizabeth Mills Crawford Award in Composition, NEXMAPs Sounding Out California Composers Award, and the American Composers Forum Subito Grant.

Holly Herndon is an artist currently based in San Francisco. Her musical work explores embodied experience in electronic media through experiments with electronically processed voice, extended vocal techniques vocal processing in Max/MSP, and FM synthesis. She received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College and won the Elizabeth Mills Crothers award for Best Composer in 2010 for her vocal generated piece 195. Notable collaborations include projects Hieroglyphic Being, Rene Hell and the Chicago footwork producer Jlin, as well as performances with the streaming new media group and absurdist acid project Total Accomplishment. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Holly was one half of the critically acclaimed electronic duo Electrocute, touring the world from a base in Berlin, Germany. She also started the miserablist noise project Ankoko No Oto with Emma Albury of Leopard Leg, releasing a self titled EP on Turgid Animal in 2007. When not producing music Holly curates exhibits and residencies at The Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco and teaches music technology at the University of the Pacific. She co-founded the +dialog speaker series at Gray Area Foundation of the Arts in San Francisco. 
For Activating The Medium, Herndon will present Taqqiyah - a composition for voice and custom electronics, inspired greatly by the writings of Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Adjacent to the theme of 'dark ecology', this work speculates on themes of telluric intelligence, with the anonymous material of oil portrayed as an ancient, sentient and insurgent agency around and into which global politics and theologies dance and, eventually, decay.

Andrea Polli is an artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology whose practice includes media installation, public interventions, curating and directing art and community projects and writing. She currently is an Associate Professor in Art and Ecology with a joint appointment in Fine Arts and Engineering, the Mesa Del Sol Endowed Chair of Digital Media, and the Director of the Social Media Workgroup at the Center for Advanced Research Computing at The University of New Mexico. She has been creating media and technology artworks related to environmental science issues since 1999, when she first began collaborating with atmospheric scientists on sound and data sonification projects. Among other organizations, she has worked with the NASA/Goddard Institute Climate Research Group in New York City, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and AirNow. She holds a doctorate in practice-led research from the University of Plymouth in the UK.  Her latest book is Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change and the Poles on Intellect Press.

23five Incorporated is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and increased awareness of sound works in the public arena, and to the support and education of artists working with and discussing the medium of sound. 23five was founded in 1993, and secured federal 501(c)(3) status in 1995.

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http://www.23five.org