Koumaria Residency Participants 2012
We are pleased to announce the results for Koumaria Residency 2012:
These Years Koumaria Residents are
Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia / dance artist who works with video, audio, painting and performance. After extensive training in professional ballet & contemporary dance Freya chose to complete an MFA in New Media from the Transart Insitute in cooperation with the Donau Universität (Austria) in 2007. To date she has created three evening-length performance works which have toured extensively to venues such as SECCA – The SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), OchoYmedio / Alas de la Danza (Quito, Guayaquil and Manta / Ecuador), and Sequences Real Time Media Arts Festival (Iceland). In July 2010, her solo performance AVATAR received the Buddies In Bad Times Vanguard Award at the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto. Most recently in June 2012 Freya spent three-weeks in residency at EMPAC -
is a pianist-accordionist who’s music focuses on the evocation of alternative timbres from these instruments, making use of both extended and prepared techniques. Her work is influenced by the combination of these alternative techniques with more traditional methods; the immediacy of physical gesture; and the collaborative nature of improvised music.
Her work throughout Canada, the United States and Europe have led her to collaborations with various international musicians, including: Fred Frith, Jean Derome, Joane Hétu, Lori Freedman, Joëlle Léandre, Rosoe Mitchell, Marco Eneidi, Han Bennink, Damon Smith, Weasel Walter, Alexander MacSween, Lan Tung and Michel F. Côté. Recordings are available on the labels Innova Records, Mills College Records, Tzadik, Carrier Records, and Ambiances Magnétiques. She is the subject of a recent series of video works by Sylvia Safdie, which been exhibited at Les Flaneries Musicales de Reims. Charity holds degrees from McGill University, Mills College and Princeton University
Charged with the task of spiritually preparing the human race for the coming of the singularity, The Night Bears masquerade as a New York City based media and performance collective. The group investigates narrow sense-apertures to locate the spaces where the divide between biology and technology will eventually dissolve. The Bears tell stories with subtle light in darkness, small indications of depth in flatness, tiny sounds in silence, near-stillness in stillness. They tell timeless tales of sex and death, human-machine collaboration and conflict, and universal journeys of self-discovery and transcendence. The group’s founding members — John J.A. Jannone, Daniel Munkus, and Sophia Remolde — forge their work from the interplay of their seemingly polar and contradictory, and often extreme, physical and philosophical practices. They knit their work from Butoh, Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, martial arts, and contact improvisation; and weave in shiny threads of media, robotics, coding, music, and puppetry.
Members: John J.A. Jannone, Daniel Munkus, and Sophia Remolde
studies cooperation, coordination, and collaboration with a particular interest in collective art-making and live performance. He is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and designed and directs the College’s M.F.A. program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). He teaches courses in music composition, collaboration, computer programming, performance, multi-camera television production, and television aesthetics. He is an avid musician, martial artist, and athlete, and has recently taken an interest in contact improvisation. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation and CreativeIT grants.
is a musician and interdisciplinary artist. He splits his time between songwriting and recording, composing electronic music, and working with various collaborative ensembles. Skills acquired during his years spent investigating Wing-Chun, Tai-Chi, Zen meditation, and the visual arts at UC Berkeley are frequently used in his ongoing collaborations. His own songwriting collaborative ensemble Old Robes is releasing a new album late August 2012, and can be found here: http://oldrobes.bandcamp.com. Examples of his sound design are currently being used in improvisational workshops and experimental theater productions, and can be found
here: http://danielmunkus.bandcamp.com.
is a multimedia creator and performer in theatre, film, dance, puppetry, and robotics. She is trained in Suzuki, Viewpoints, and Butoh, and works as an actor, puppeteer, and fight choreographer. She is Associate Director of Puppet Junction Productions, founder of art-science collective Hybrid Kaleidoscope, is member of the performance duo Darth&Lobster, and collaborates with Silent Infinite (a photography, video, and animation collective), The South Wing (an Suzuki-based experimental theater company), and SEE (the SITI Company’s Extended Ensemble). She is collaborating with PhD students in the field of robotics and computer vision at City College, CUNY on a large-scale dance work for humans and quadrotor flying robots.
Ferrari’s works investigate the sounding possibilities of the human body.
Through the use of DIY contact microphones, modified medical tools and sensors she develops live performances in which all the inaudible sounds, the invisible, hidden and forgotten of the human body is put in the foreground.
the human body is in her practice a musical instrument and is treated as such.
Arianna Ferrari studied Contemporary Music in Brescia and Sound Arts in London. She is part of the international network LIMINAL BODIES.
The questions surrounding how we act together are at the core of Lucy Pawlak’s practice. She works reflexively with others to examine how and why we conform to systems and what the possibility of breaking with a pattern might offer. Her work examines the potential for interaction and expression within existing social and cultural apparatus in combination with the potential for developing alternative self-organising structures.
Pawlak is involved in ongoing practical research into structuring events and workshops that open up spaces for critical exploration of a subject by those present. She is keen to develop forms that offer the potential for collective research into how computer mediation is instrumental in the production of social space.
Lucy Pawlak studied Graphic Design in Bristol, Painting at the Royal College of Art, and Cinematography at the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Lodz; she was a member of the Lux Associate Artists 2011. She mostly lives in Warsaw.
Katerina Undo is an audiovisual artist, theremin player and performer, mostly concerned in creating intermedia works with a particular interest in exploring the acoustics frontiers. Her work is introducing a conceptual turn toward a ‘plugged ear sonic art’ by using the head instead of the ears for hearing. The most intimate sound space is the head and the conductive perception of sound is an act of consciousness.
Katerina is also developing light sensitive miniature robots, the ‘Creatures’ that live autonomously, getting energy from solar cells and producing a variety of sounds. Every Creature is unique as it is impossible to build exact equal modules. Relatively cooperative Creatures are ‘trained’ for performing live together with human beings. Their last performance took place at the Time Inventor’s Kabinet Festival, Brussels (12.05.2012, OKNO, Q-O2) with a Creatures Sextet.
Katerina Undo lives in Athens and Brussels.
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