July 18, 2000
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rapid Fire
at The Kitchen
presented by Franklin Furnace in collaboration with the NetArt Initiative!
Friday, July 28 doors open at 8 PM
performance at 8:30 PM
512 West 19th Street, New York
and netcast live online at Franklin
Furnace
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Rapid Fire is a technological invasion of the body's vulnerability, creating an emotional connection between silicon and flesh!
In the age of Big Brother, unblinking cameras survey our every movement. Rapid Fire turns the voyeristic lens back on itself by amplifying the 'virtual fire' of vision. Rapid Fire is a collaborative project focusing on the exploration and implementation of Intuitive Ocusonics, a process in which voluntary and involuntary eye movements control a soundscape that is at times piercingly hypnotic and at other times shockingly violent.
Intuitive Ocusonics is the four-year effort of Andrea Polli, an experimental programmer, sound artist, and technologist who takes social implications of new technology to the extreme. She sees herself as a neo-concretist, merging and re-framing ideas of concrete art, music, and poetry. Intuitive Ocusonics melds visual and aural information through high end data transfer and tracking technology first developed by the US military. She has worked for two years in musical collaboration with improvising vocalist Carol Genetti, whose non-verbal sound palette combines jazz scat, Bulgarian Folk singing, and extended vocal techniques. They are joined by San Francisco percussionist Jerome Bryerton, whose innovative technique combines Chinese and traditional American drums with gongs, cup chimes, and indiscriminate objects lain atop each drum.
Rapid Fire concretizes the thought process, invading and amplifying subtle movements of the eye in real time through sound and image, examining the search for meaning through a biological lens. Animated and interactive visual poems and maps created by digital designer Seun-Ju O and interactive artist Lourdes Costa are used as musical scores and visual accompaniment for musical improvisation between ocusonist Polli, experimental vocalist Carol Genetti, and percussionist Jerome Bryerton.
Rapid Fire activates the audience's experience through live video interaction created by Lourdes Costa. Costa's work alters the audience's experience by creating several temporal and spatial projections over the space that register the reaction of the audience's distributed perspective in the environment.
Andrea Polli is one of ten artists selected by Franklin Furnace to participate in THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT 2000, a residency program to create live art on the Internet, in collaboration with Parsons School of Design, Digital Design Department, and the NetArt Initiative.
THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT 2000 is made possible by the faith and foresight of Jerome Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc., the Heathcote Art Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts' Technology Initiative, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.