NOWNET ARTS FESTIVAL 2018

NowNet Arts Festival premieres contemporary works for live performance via the internet. The program featured internet artist Daniel Pinheiro streaming from Portugal, and “Interconnections for Peace: A Telematic Concert in Seoul, San Diego, and New York City” with compositions by Michael Dessen, Mark Dresser, Yoon Jeong Heo, Nicole Mitchell, Stephanie Richards, and Sarah Weaver for an international large ensemble. The technology incorporated performance-quality multichannel audio and video conferencing on high-bandwidth internet. Audiences were present in each location and online via webstream.

New York Location
June 8 at 9:30pm-1:00amEDT
DuArt Media Building, 245 W 55th St, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019

San Diego Location
June 8 at 7:00pm-10:00pmPDT
Conrad Prebys Music Center Experimental Theater, University of California San Diego

Seoul Location
June 9 at 11:00am-2:00pmKST
Seoul National University, College of Music, Concert Hall, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826

Live Audio Webcast Online: LiveStream
10:00pm-1:00amEDT

Program
9:30pm Daniel Pinheiro, Internet Visual Artist and Performer
i-mediate(d) body (2018)
A participatory networked experiment between two remote locations, Portugal and U.S., as part of the NowNet Arts Festival 2018. "i-mediate(d) body" aims at investigating the possibilities of the Internet as an aggregatory space where bodies are called to complement each other. Connecting directly with the audience attending the festival, remotely – broadcasting via a video-conferencing platform – it asks of participants to complement the artist body, or parts of it… a visual setup that depicts the electronic connective tissue that builds the space of the Internet as whole, through combining our interactions within it. can we be one, while connected\together?

10:00pm-1am Interconnections for Peace: A Telematic Concert in Seoul, San Diego, and New York City

Embody in Seoul - Mark Dresser
Transforming Totality - Sarah Weaver
Distance of Stare - Yoon Jeong Heo

Intermission

What Peace Can We Hear - Michael Dessen
Cross-dimensional Pollination - Nicole Mitchell
Orbits - Stephanie Richards

Composers: Michael Dessen, Mark Dresser, Yoon Jeong Heo, Nicole Mitchell, Stephanie Richards, Sarah Weaver
Performers:
New York -- Yoon Sun Choi, voice, Jane Ira Bloom, soprano saxophone, David Taylor, bass trombone, Satoshi Takeishi, percussion, Sarah Weaver, conductor
San Diego -- Nicole Mitchell, flutes, Stephanie Richards, trumpet, Michael Dessen, trombone, Mark Dresser, bass
Seoul -- Black String: Yoon Jeong Heo, geomungo, Jean Oh, electric guitar, A Ram Lee, daegeum, Min Wang Hwang, percussion, voice, with Seoul National University professor Ji Young Yi, gayageum
Technologists:
New York -- Ben Manley, Charles Dennis, Sarah Weaver, Michael Ikonomidis, Woramon Jamjod, Anna Wotring
San Diego -- Trevor Henthorn, Jessica Flores, Daniel Ross, Stella Ko, Michael Dessen, Juan David Rubio, Felipe Rossi, Victoria Petrovich, Nancy Chao
Seoul -- Zeon Seung-hoon, Song Min-seop, Kim Young-moo, Yunnyoung Choi
Site Directors: New York - Sarah Weaver, San Diego - Mark Dresser and Michael Dessen, Seoul - Yoon Jeong Heo

NowNet Arts Festival was made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement / Creative Learning, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond. LMCC.net

Program Notes:

Embody in Seoul - Mark Dresser
Perhaps there is nothing more musically disembodied than a telematic music performance in the sense that the medium is a virtual shared space. Yet a telematic performance takes so much planning and determination, that the result can be extraordinarily intimate, due to its hybrid nature, even more than traditional performance. The title of this piece, though a pun on the jazz standard, “Body and Soul,” has a projection of intent for peace in Korea. The piece serves several musical agendas; it both celebrates our distance by highlighting the individual musicians and locations, and then slowly joins the three locations in cascading duets and trios. Eventually three planes of tempo between the three locations becomes the backdrop for a theme that is introduced, phrase by phrase, city by city, and then re-performed in a three city heterophonic augmentation, celebrating distance, delay, congruence, and diversity of theme and intent.

Transforming Totality - Sarah Weaver
Reflecting on telematic music concepts for peace amidst current events led me to compositional ideas on roots of oppression within totalitarianism. Personally I encountered related ideas last summer when I had Bell's Palsy, a temporary paralysis on one side of the face. At the time I read philosophical concepts about paralysis as liberation, as a means to overcome itself, as a meditation on borders, as a crossroad between totality and infinity, and with infinity as a breach of totality. Totality as paralysis resonated on many real and metaphorical levels. The piece "Transforming Totality" is about the breach of totality, transforming into authentic evolving realities for peace. Musically the telematic medium is appropriate as a new model that transcends local reality into a multiplicity state. The piece includes devices such as harmonic transformations, time progressions of pauses and continuations, vibrato as transforming agent, extensions and timbral shifts, compound textures and alignments, spatial explorations, and abstract planes for emergence synthesis. Together with the intuitive processes of performance, "Transforming Totality" is intended to manifest this real and metaphorical transformation.

Distance of Stare - Yoon Jeong Heo
This piece is music about DMZ. We have been staring each other for a long time in this  distance and the world looked at us. There is only irony and peace in this DMZ. Birds and beasts, rivers exist and one of the most unspoiled lands in Korea. The peaceful space outside the DMZ is not so peaceful. But we have good opportunity these days, so our dreams come close.

What Peace Can We Hear - Michael Dessen
This composition is somewhere between a song and a sonic bath, and features densely overlapping expressions across 3 sites and ensembles. The harmonies, melodies and rhythms were composed with the latency of this specific event in mind: The delay across the sites is high enough to be perceived as a tactile reminder of the distance between us, but is also low enough that (along with what we hope will be high-resolution sound quality) we can feel a shared macropulse and vibrational unity within the co-located ensemble. The music is a meditation on peace, the theme of tonight’s concert, and the title is derived from 2 important recordings that influenced me in different ways as I composed it: What Reason Could I Give, by Ornette Coleman, from the album Science Fiction, and Peace on Earth, a work that John Coltrane recorded live in Japan toward the end of his life. Thank you for listening.

Orbits - Stephanie Richards
This piece aims to elaborate upon the inherent differences of sonic environments between the locations of Seoul, South Korea, New York City, NY and San Diego, CA. While each location experiences their own sense of time, space and sound, it is the ability to mitigate these divergences and create a mutually coherent and meaningful musical dialogue across vast physical distances that I find most remarkable. This piece aims to highlight and embrace these variances of time lapse and sonic location with three musical sections that are rhythmically and harmonically interchangeable, staggered and layered such that each location functions within their own "orbit", circling independently within a greater universe of sound.