Tenzin Choegyal, Simone Giuliani, Tsering Dorjee Bawa, Christiana Polites, Victoria Vesna
The quintessential text, attributed to the eighth century Buddhist Vajra master Padmasambhava, provides insight and direct instructions on how to navigate through the stages of the Bardo, the intermediary state between life and death. According to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo journey offers practitioners a precious opportunity to awaken to their true Buddha nature and find liberation from suffering.
Internationally acclaimed Tibetan singer/songwriter Tenzin Choegyal will be joined by award-winning composer Simone Giuliani on piano and actor, musician, and dancer Tsering Dorjee Bawa, performing the rare Black Hat masked ritual dance. The concert is narrated by Christiana Polites, director of Tibetan Medicine & Buddhist Center Pure Land Farms, with visuals produced by media artist and director of the UCLA Art | Sci Center, Victoria Vesna in collaboration with John Brumley and Dillon Bastan.
About the Artists
Tenzin Choegyal is a world renowned musician in the Tibetan tradition. The son of Tibetan nomads, he feels a particular connection to the music of the high Himalayan plateau. While proudly continuing the unbroken nomadic lineage which is central to his repertoire, Tenzin also embraces opportunities to take his music into more contemporary, uncharted territory, both in the studio and on stage. Tenzin has opened for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and collaborated with Philip Glass, Patti Smith, Anoushka Shankar, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alongside Jesse Paris Smith and Laurie Anderson, he recorded the 2021 Grammy-nominated Songs from the Bardo, released through Smithsonian Folkways. He also has nine independent albums, three with his fusion band Tibet2Timbuk2.
Tsering Dorjee Bawa is an award-winning artist who has been a Tibetan music and arts performer for almost three decades. He earned his master’s degree studying Tibetan secular dance and music at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), Dharamsala, India, where he was privileged to study under legendary artists. He has since traveled the world sharing his knowledge and performing Tibetan Opera, central Tibetan Step Dance, and Cham, a series of colorful, masked ritual dances. In addition to performing onstage from Seattle Children’s Theatre to Lincoln Center in New York, he has acted in several notable films, including the 1999 Oscar-nominated Himalaya, and My Son Tenzin (2017). Tsering resides in the Bay Area, where he has established a community school program to preserve Tibetan language, music, and dance for a new generation.
Simone Giuliani is a director, producer, and composer born in Florence, Italy, and based in New York and Los Angeles. He has worked with such artists as Andrea Bocelli, Wu-Tang Clan, Cibo Matto, Bebel Gilberto, and many more. He has collaborated with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and directed a live concert for Pope Francis inside the Roman Forum. Giuliani is director of programs for MOMENT NYC, a music education non-profit presenting the history of music in New York City through performances in public schools. He is co-founder of Yangchenma Arts & Music, a community organization celebrating the richness and diversity of human cultures through their artistic and musical traditions.
This program is co-sponsored by the UCLA Art | Sci Center and supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Victoria Vesna’s work has long focused on immersing her audiences in installation spaces that are meant to slow down time and take us into other dimensions. This led her to work in close collaborations with musicians, sound artists, nanoscientists, biologists, neuro-scientists and buddhist monks among others. Some examples of work in the past two decades are the NanoMandala, Water Bowls, Blue Morph, Octopus Brain Storming, Bird Song Diamond and most recently the Noise Aquarium. In this new work, together with her collaborators from the UCLA Art Sci collective and Harvestworks, she takes us on a meditative journey to outer space.
Premiering with the support of Harvestworks, this work is meant to be experienced as a guided meditation bringing to life the sensations of meteorites and micro-meteorites falling on all continents and mixing with the anthropogenic dust falling on our planet from many dimensions. Layers of sounds from inner and outer space with animations of dust and data driven by corona deaths are presented with the intent of honoring those who left their bodies without preparation and all who are suffering.
This online version was created as a meditation that is guided by the artist following the extra-terrestrial, terrestrial, and human-made dusts traveling far and wide and creating complexity that is part of an invisible reality. Most go about their daily life without being aware of ever thinking about the extraterrestrial dusts that could be on their kitchen floor, right here on earth. The alien signal is lost in the human noise and the group meditation reclaims our vision of planetary citizenship.
We are created from stardust by nuclear fusion, like our myriad siblings – animals, plants, insects, plankton, bacteria, and viruses, and we all function together in vibratory fields – bottom up just as nature and nanotechnology works. [Alien] Star Dust rains on us every day and this piece brings these particles to our attention and reminds us of our interconnected heritage in the larger cosmos. Dust knows no borders.
Jocelyn Ho in collaboration with Margaret Schedel and Matthew Blessing
Women’s Labor repurposes old domestic objects laden with functionalities traditionally pertaining to women to become new musical instruments using emerging technologies. At its heart, it is a feminist initiative to revalue traditional women’s work. Throughout the project, the public will interact with the domestic-object-turned instruments as installations and in workshops. Female-identifying composers will write new compositions with the instruments, to be feature in concert performance with works by past female composers. Domesticity is recast in a new light through public engagement and performative spectacle. The ironing instrument will be showcased in this preview.
Women’s Labor interrogates the pressing issue of gender inequality by jolting the audience’s perspective of gendered activities. Moreover, in a city such as Los Angeles with a staggering socio-economic divide, domestic activities in affluent households are often exclusively done by female house-workers from poorer families. Women’s Labor democratizes domestic activities where people from all walks of life—not only women or domestic workers—engage hands-on with these domestic-object-turned instruments. While a feminist agenda of breaking the glass ceiling in traditionally male-dominated industries is important, the validation of traditionally “feminine” skillsets and their adoption by men are equally crucial to pay equality.
Artistic director, project creator, composer, performer: Jocelyn Ho
Collaborators: Margaret Schedel (composer, technical consultant) and Matthew Blessing (technical director)
Image Credit: Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer, "Breton seamstresses in a shop" 1854
"Sonata Machine, Sewnata Machine, I will be the Maestro of my own fate” is a live concert performance by Nicole Cooke. Performing in drag as a classical musician, Cooke will “play” a converted Singer sewing machine as the principle musical instrument.
Wednesday, 10 January 2018 - 5:00pm to Sunday, 14 January 2018 - 10:57pm
Exhibitors / Artists:
Victoria Vesna + Mark Cohen
BRAINSTORMING: EMPATHY
by Victoria Vesna
A performance/experience work created in close collaboration with neuroscientist
Mark Cohen.
Exploring the possibilities of brain to brain communication as a part of a larger area
of research into the physical associates of mental processes such as emotions and
feelings, this has evolved to include the idea of embodied intelligence in the form
of an octopus crown worn by participants.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 12 @ 3:00pm
DIALOG: Art & Science Collaborations: Being in Between
SPEAKERS: Victoria Vesna, Director, UCLA Art I Sci Center.
MODERATOR: Marisa Caichiolo
LOCATION: Dialogs Booth
LA Art Show
Presented by Building Bridges Art Exchange and UCLA Art|Sci
Curated by Marisa Caichiolo
SYN CITY is a one night only exploration of merged perception. A pop-up event immersed within the installation Synaesthesia: what is the taste of the color blue? at Building Bridges Art Exchange, SYN CITY melds creative expression with scientific inquiry, inviting the audience to experience cross-modal perception through sculpture, performance, interactive installation, photography, and visual art. Produced by the UCLA Art | Sci Center in collaboration with Building Bridges Art Exchange and the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists, SYN CITY is a benefit / fundraising celebration focused toward the publication of a catalogue documenting this inaugural large-scale synaesthesia exhibition, symposium and accompanying performances and author readings -- the first of its kind in the United States.
Victoria Vesna, Artist and director of UCLA Art | Sci Center will present on this occasion Octopus Brainstorming: Synesthesia – a performative installation created in collaboration with neuroscientist Mark Cohen. This work utilizes real-time EEG brain waves, video, color, and sound in an illustration of brain-to-brain communication. Performers featured at Building Bridges Art Exchange gallery are Appelusa and Marcos Lutyens, synaesthete artists who currently have their works installed at Building Bridges Art Exchange.
Featured works also include Pathless Woods by artist Anne Patterson, a touchable, walk-through sculpture, and Tim Thompson's The Space Palette, an instrument that combines sound with color, pattern, and light, providing visitors to SYN CITY with the chance to experience colored music of their own creation.
Building Bridges Art Exchange
2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit F2
Santa Monica, CA 90404
6pm
Image Credit: Appelusa Photography: www.appelusaphotography.com
Syn City: a multi-sensory imaginarium of scientific delight + artistic inquiry + synaesthetic confession is co-curated by Building Bridges Art Exchange founder Marisa Caichiolo and Victoria Vesna, Director of the UCLA Art | Sci Center.
Produced by IASAS, CC Hart, Sean Day
Produced by BBAX, Marisa Caichiolo
Produced by UCLA Art | Sci Center, Victoria Vesna
Creative content contributors: Michael Becker, Andrew Ortiz, Portrait XO, Appelusa
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS + SCIENTISTS
Jon Adams works in a variety of mediums, is a trained geologist and considers himself to to be an 'Outsider Artist'. Adams has synaesthesia and Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. The artist's work explores sense and sensitivity through the 'hidden' and plays with perceptions of normal and the inaccessible.
Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris individually and collaboratively engage both simple elements with engineering to create experiential art. Their work is intertwined with science, utilizing a fusion of commonplace and made objects fused with high level electronics which Brian invents and develops for camera and robotics along with Raewyn's olfactory scientific research and art practice. In Turner and Harris's collaborative work they create multisensory experiences and manifestations of unsensed data and invite the audience to sample, taste, smell and participate.
Anne Patterson has chromesthesia; when she hears sound, she sees color. Trained as an architect and theater production designer, this unique combination of senses combines to create an artistic practice, hovering somewhere between the theatrical and the experiential. She continues to explore creating synesthetic environments with site- responsive installation, Pathless Woods, an investigation that began with her acclaimed 2013 installation Graced with Light, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
James Wannerton is an Englishman with an incredibly rare ability to taste sound. Even as a young boy, James always experienced an involuntary taste on his tongue every time he heard a sound. Hearing the name Anne Boleyn in history class, for example, gave him a strong flavor of pear drops. He associated most of the British monarchs with a specific taste, making it easy for him to remember facts and events.
Appelusa is a world champion artistic roller skater, and also an accomplished actor, writer, voice-over artist, photographer, mixed media, and performance artist. As a visual artist, she strives to depict how synaesthesia affects her perception of daily life by combining technology, roller dance, photography, and music. She is a founding member of the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists (IASAS), and serves as the organization's Dance Curator.
M.J. Cordoba, Doctor of Fine Arts (1994), has been researching on the synaesthesia field since the 80's. In addition, she also researches in other topics such as engraving on new materials and illustration systems on synthetic polymers (piece of work published by the Institute of Science and Polymer Technology, CSIC, in the year 2005). Forerunner of the study and promotion of synaesthesia in Spain, she has managed to organize four International Congresses on Synaesthesia, Science and Arts, which are unique in Europe due to their multidisciplinary character, These congresses bring together the highest level of researchers among universities from 40 different countries.
Marjan Vayghan informs her life experiences through multiple forms of synaesthesia, Marjan Vayghan's creative practice is shaped by her flexibility and relationship with colors, sounds and cross-pollination of senses and the multiple realities these sensations engender.
Tim Thompson is a software engineer, musician, and installation artist. His wide-ranging artistic work includes a programming language for MIDI, interactive installations at Burning Man and other festivals, musical performances with Playstation dance pads and QWERTY keyboards, and realtime video looping and processing with a handheld security camera. The Space Palette is a collaboration with Paul Sable, who created the woodwork.
Christine Söffing, born in Dortmund, Germany, studied the history of art, German language and literature, computer science, psychology and art in Münster, Germany. She has committed herself to working as an artist, while also giving workshops for drawing, painting, sculpture and video for children, young people and adults. Since 2010, Christine Söffing has served as head of the EMU-Ensemble, which offers experimental music and art through the Musisches Zentrum Ulm University concerts and sound-installations uniting art and science.
Marcos Lutyens's practice has centered on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor's embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. His investigations have included research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds.
Dr. Richard E. Cytowic, MD, MFA, currently Professor of Neurology at George Washington University, is a pioneer in synaesthesia research and, as an author, his books are considered the foundation for much of what we now understand about inherited synaesthesia. Dr. Cytowic and artist Marcos Lutyens often collaborate to create an ongoing dialogue between science and art.
Thursday, 19 October 2017 - 6:00pm to Saturday, 21 October 2017 - 7:00pm
The International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists will host its first ever synaesthesia symposium at UCLA in conjunction with the Art|Sci Center, and in collaboration with Building Bridges Art Exchange. The full schedule of events may be found below:
Thursday, October 19th, 2017, 6pm: Reception, reading and book signing with Dr. Joel Salinas, author of Mirror-Touch: Notes from a doctor who can feel your pain
Wednesday, 6 September 2017 - 8:00pm to Monday, 11 September 2017 - 6:00pm
Exhibitors / Artists:
Victoria Vesna + Xin Xin
Curated by Victoria Vesna (UCLA ArtSci Center + Design Media Arts) and Xin Xin (voidLab), the works on view, “Feminist Climate Change” explores the relationship between issues in feminism and those in environmentalism, and reflects the dynamic network of UCLA Design Media Arts, which includes faculty-driven research labs and centers that enable students and faculty to work collaboratively across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
WHERE
Splace
Kunstuniversität Linz
Hauptplatz 6
4020 Linz
Austria
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