Oct. 08: Ken Ueno

For the next colloquium of the semester, held on Oct. 08 (Tuesday), we are pleased to welcome composer, vocalist, improviser, and sound artist Prof. Ken Ueno who will speak on the topic of “Spatializing Anthropology”. Please note that seating is limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Date: Oct. 08, 2019 (Tuesday), 16:00

Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic:  Spatializing Anthropology

ABSTRACT:

Ueno will present some of his recent works that incorporate anthropological fieldwork in his installation performances, creating a kind of hybrid performance space, which narrativize architectural spaces. 

Biography:

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

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Sept. 24: Verina Gfader

For the next colloquium of the semester, held on Sept. 24 (Tuesday), we are pleased to welcome artist researcher Dr Verina Gfader who will speak on the topic of “New Moon visions”.

Date: Sept. 24, 2019 (Tuesday), 16:00

Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic:  New Moon visions

ABSTRACT: 

Ideas around the book as a character/actor, and printed matter as a ritual and celebration, shall initiate a conversation here. From within a practice–organised as fields of research aided by drawing and animation, printed matter, text performance and fabulations, and fictional institutions–lines are drawn to how the (artist) book performs or to ask: Is there something like an infinite space of a book, as a relation between performance/the choreographic and print? Can we reverse the temporal dynamic of private print process or invisible production – and publication?

Biography:

Verina Gfader is currently affiliated with the City University of Hong Kong (Meaning and
Narrative in Abstract Animation research project) after having concluded work for the
V&A Museum of Design Dundee (publication project). She is also Creative Director of EP, a book series across art, architecture and design, from Sternberg Press, Berlin; and Co-Director of the international animation network, Animate Assembly (with Esther Leslie, Edgar Schmitz, Anke Hennig). Her recent postdoctoral fellowship on The Contemporary Condition at Aarhus University, Denmark, follows from doctoral studies at Central Saint Martins, London, and a prior research residency at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai) to explore the structural coherence between independent Japanese animation and geographical, institutional and social ideas. Her interest and expertise at large covers two fields: Publishing and Fine art animation/time-based media (including performance), with extensive material being out in the public sphere.

As an artist, she orchestrates her practice as organised fields of research aided by drawing and animation, printed matter, text performance and fabulations, and fictional institutions.

Sept. 17: Robert Seidel

For the first colloquium of the semester, held on Sept. 17 (Tuesday), we are pleased to welcome Berlin-based artist  Robert Seidel who will speak on the topic of “Expanded Image Spaces: Animation as an Artistic Practice”.

Date: Sept. 17, 2019 (Tuesday), 16:00

Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic:  Expanded Image Spaces: Animation as an Artistic Practice

ABSTRACT:

The Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel dissolves boundaries of genre by extending the clarity of the drawing – through the flow of painting, the spatiality of sculpture and temporal elements into an abstract-organic film narrative. Besides the silver screen, conceptual, as well as real visual projection surfaces include architectural and sculptural forms.

The material for these medial interlacings frequently originates in nature and in the abstract gaze of science on nature, for example in the form of 3D scans, Motion Capture Data or MRI images. Through subsequent deconstruction with digital tools, it becomes possible – before the eyes of the recipient – to condense these fragments into a rhizomatic memory structure independent from physical space and linear time. The filmic image conserves the whole creation process in abstract-organic tableaux vivants. In the process, temporal sequences or movements become not only imagined – as frequently attempted in the history of drawing and painting – but actually represented.

Examples of his artistic practice include the visualization of split seconds of a car crash (_grau, Diploma Bauhaus University Weimar, 2004); virtual sculptures made of city fragments (vellum, Art Center Nabi Seoul, 2009); environmental performances and installations (magnitude, Epicenter Projects, 2015; tempest, Digital Graffiti Festival, 2017, mue, Palais des Beaux Arts Lille, 2018), projection-based sculptures (folds, Lindenau Museum, 2011; grapheme, Museum Wiesbaden, 2013) and experimental films (vitreous, 2015 and husby-klit bk., 2017). 

Biography:

Robert Seidel (*1977) began his studies in biology before transferring to the Bauhaus University Weimar to complete his degree in media design. His projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals, as well as at galleries and museums such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Center Nabi Seoul, Young Projects Los Angeles, Museum of Image and Sound São Paulo and MOCA Taipei. His works have been honoured with various prizes, including the KunstFilmBiennale Honorary Award and the Visual Music Award Frankfurt. In his work Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science. By the organic interplay of various structural, spatial and temporal concepts, he creates a continuously evolving complexity. Out of this multifaceted perspective emerges a narrative skeleton, through which viewers connects to the artwork on an evolutionary-derived and phylogenetic-fixated symbolic level. Seidel lives and works in Berlin and Jena as artist as well as curator.