Auksalaq Complete version announced for October 29, 2012

May 18th, 2012

The complete version the award-winning telematic opera Auksalaq has been announced for October 29th at 5 pm EST, to be performed simultaneously between The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the University of Alaska Museum of the North, Lu Magnus Gallery in New York, Tavel Center at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, CIRMMT at McGill University in Montreal, Grieg Academy of Music in Bergen Norway, and the OpenGrounds Studio and Clemons Library at the University of Virginia.

Auksalaq, the Inupiat word for “melting snow/ice”, provides an in-depth journey into the vast and remote, yet rapidly changing arctic regions of Alaska and Canada. Created by composer Matthew Burtner and producer/media artist Scott Deal, the work integrates artistic expression, scientific information, and social/political commentary into an interactive, multi-dimensional collection of narratives that provide a stirring and sobering commentary on the transformation of the Far North as a result of global climate change.

Performance ensembles will include Bit20 (Norway), UT Knox Ensemble (USA), McGill Percussion and Chamber Ensemble (Canada), EcoSono Ensemble (USA), and Telematic Collective (USA). An interactive audience-participation software called NOMADS enables engagement with the performance in real-time across all the stages. Audience members are encouraged to attend the concert with their mobile devices in order to participate. In October 2011, Internet2, the nation’s most advanced networking consortium, presented the Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award to Scott Deal and Matthew Burtner for their creation of Auksalaq, which was described as “the single best and most important realization of meaningful opera for today’s world”.

OCTOBER 29 WORLD PREMIERE VENUES
Grieg Academy,
Lars Hilles gate 3, 5015
Bergen Norway

McGill University
MultiMedia Room, 527 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec H3A 1E3

The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street Northwest, 20009, Washington DC:
www.phillipscollection.org/events/2012-10-29-music-auksalaq.aspx

University of Virginia
OpenGrounds Corner Studio/Clemons Library
Corner Studio: 1400 W. Main Street
Clemons Library: Newcomb Road North
Charlottesville, VA

University of Alaska Museum of the North
907 Yukon Drive Fairbanks, AK 99775

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Campus Center Theater
420 University Blvd Indianapolis IN

Lu Magnus
55 Hester Street (Between Ludlow and Essex)
New York, NY 10002; http://lumagnus.com/

PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS

 

Bit20 Ensemble
Founded in Bergen, Norway in 1989. BIT20 is regarded as one of the foremost Nordic contemporary music ensembles. Consisting of 15 musicians, the ensemble has been directed by Baldur Brönnimann since January 2011. The ensemble has performed at many major international venues for contemporary music, including Festival Agora (IRCAM Centre Pompidou, France), Festival Précences (Radio France), Soundstreams (Canada), Transart (Italy), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, at the Barbican Centre (England), and in Moscow and St Petersburg (Russia). BIT20 has also appeared at major Norwegian festivals – Ultima, Borealis, Ilios and the Bergen International Festival. BIT20 Ensemble is involved in concerts, educational work, radio productions, CD recordings, international tours and modern opera. It has commissioned and premiered nearly 100 works and released 23 albums. On a daily basis the ensemble is located in the Grieghall, Bergen. A Majority of the BIT20 musicians hold positions of Solo and alt. Solo in the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra.
On the web: http://www.bit20ensemble.no/

Bergen Center for Electronic Arts (BEK)
Bergen Center for Electronic Arts is a non-profit organization situated in Bergen, Norway, functioning as a national resource centre for work within the field of arts and new technology. BEK works with both artistic and scientific research and development and puts into practice an amount of mixed artistic projects. It also practices an educational program that includes courses, workshops, talks and presentations. BEK runs its own server and hosts several mailing lists and web pages for cultural organizations, artists and artistic projects.
On the web: www.bek.no

 

Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), Montreal, Canada
CIRMMT is a multi-disciplinary research group centred at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.  It unites researchers and their students from three Quebec institutions – McGill University, l’Université de Montréal, and l’Université de Sherbrooke.  The CIRMMT community is interested in interdisciplinary research related to the creation of music in the composer’s or performer’s mind, the performance of music, its recording and transmission, and the reception of music by the listener. It is also interested in the ways in which vision, haptics and touch interact with music and sound, as well as in the development of new materials and new musical instruments.  CIRMMT seeks to develop innovative approaches to the scientific study of music media and technology, to promote the application of newer technologies in science and the creative arts, and to provide an advanced research-training environment. McGill Percussion Ensemble was founded in 1969 by Pierre Béluse, Professor of Percussion in the Faculty of Music at McGill University. In 1979 the group’s first recording titled Percussion and produced on the McGill University label, won the Grand Prix du Disque-Canada for chamber music. In 1992, the ensemble won the Darius Milhaud Prize at the Concours d’interpretation de Musique Francaise de Montréal. Since 2006, the McGill Percussion Ensemble has been co-directed by Aiyun Huang and Fabrice Marandola, both professors of the Schulich School of Music of McGill University.On the web:http://www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca/

Donald Louis Tavel Arts And Technology Research Center
The Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center provides a forum in which to explore frontiers of music-related, multimedia and cross-disciplinary networked projects in the fine arts, education, health sciences, business, and computer science. As Tavel Center associates collaborate with researchers in these areas, new modes of creative thought innovation and expression emerge. The locus of work at the Tavel Center is network communications on Internet2, the next generation web currently in use by universities and institutes worldwide. Due to Internet2’s ultra-high speed bandwidth, researchers are empowered to create scenarios of unprecedented complexity and convergence. The Center is home in the Department of Music and Arts Technology, School of Engineering at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). On the web: http://music.iupui.edu/tavel/

Eco Sono Ensemble
EcoSono EnsembleThe EcoSono Ensemble creates a nexus of experimental sound art and environmental preservation through the performance of ecoacoustic concert music. This unique ensemble features virtuosic instrumentalists performing creative compositions with new technologies for environmental activism. The group pursues commonalities between innovative musical creation and ecological awareness. EcoSono challenges social assumptions about music by encouraging sonic nonconformity. The ensemble embraces a creative philosophy of human expression in symbiosis with the natural world. EcoSono projects include interactive ecologies, human-computer-environment interaction, ecoacoustics, and experimental multimedia. The EcoSono organization creates audio-visual publications, concerts, actions, and an educational Institute.  On the web: http://www.ecosono.org

The Grieg Academy
Bergen, Norway
The Grieg Academy comprises both artistic and scientific disciplines, and offers study programmes on Bachelor, Master and Ph D levels in performance for international students. The Grieg Academy is the music research and artistic wing of the University of Bergen, and attracts an international student body from Europe, North America, and Asia.  On the web: http://www.uib.no/grieg

Lu Magnus
New York City
Lu Magnus is a salon-style gallery that seeks to expand upon the functions of a traditional art gallery. Creating a platform for emerging and mid-career artists, founders Amelia Abdullahsani and Lauren Scott Miller are dedicated to showing works and curating exhibitions that possess a deep conceptual basis and a strong aesthetic impact.  An art laboratory + salon, Lu Magnus is a space for creation and exchange as much as viewership. Building a community of creatives from varied art forms – film, music, dance, fashion, design, and food – Lu Magnus is an incubator for cross-collaborations and provides a platform that both facilitates and participates in the constant evolution, questioning and exploration of the idea – what is art? On the web: http://lumagnus.com/

OpenGrounds, University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia

OpenGrounds programs, places and people are catalysts for forward-looking research and curricular initiatives that will redefine the public research university for the new millennium. The fundamental changes that are taking place globally reflect an unprecedented speed of technological and social transformation. They are coupled with the explosive impact of new models of thought and tools for understanding that suggest parallels with the Renaissance in Europe and the rise of global industrialization. Universities, among the most enduring institutions of the last millenium, transform as well during these periods of rapid change. OpenGrounds is accelerating the University of Virginia’s leadership in taking on the challenges of this new era, to develop the knowledge, tools and behaviors that will shape the future. On the Web: http://opengrounds.virginia.edu/

The Phillips Collection
Washington, DC
The Phillips Collection invites visitors to experience an extraordinary collection ranging from masterpieces of French impressionism and American modernism to art of the present day. Today, the museum’s collection includes over 3,000 works by American and European artists—among them, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Klee, Homer, Whistler, Hopper, Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, Calder, Rothko, and many others. New pieces continue to be added, including a significant number of photographs in recent years.The Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art (CSMA) was founded to enhance the experience and interpretation of art in the intimate setting of the Phillips family’s former Carriage House, located in Hillyer Court behind the main building of The Phillips Collection. It serves as an interdisciplinary forum for scholarly discussion, research, and publication on issues of production, exhibition, conservation, and theory of modern and contemporary art. Scholars, including curators, faculty and students of art and art history and related disciplines of the humanities and sciences, as well as leading contemporary artists animate our study and discussion of art. On the web: www.phillipscollection.org

 

Telematic Collective
Indianapolis, Indiana
The Telematic Collective creates original artistic works that interweave aesthetic expression with information technology and computer interactivity. Since 2007, the Collective has been coordinated through the Donald Tavel Arts Technology Research Center at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The group consists of creative working in music, dance, drama, literature, visual arts, videography, software development, information technology, scientific inquiry and computer science. Together these collaborations, focused on computer interactivity and artistic use of telecommunications, create new and original media-enriched works for the performing stage. The Collective engages issues of culture and thought through funded research, production and education in collaboration with arts, humanities and research institutions. Both location-based applications (media, performance, and installation events) and distribution-based formats (Internet2 high-speed bandwidth) are employed. On the web: http://telematiccollective.org/main/

University of Alaska Museum of the North
Fairbanks, Alaska
The museum’s research collections, consisting of 1.4 million artifacts and specimens, represent millions of years of biological diversity and thousands of years of cultural traditions in the North. The collections are organized into 10 disciplines (archaeology, birds, documentary film, earth sciences, ethnology/history, fine arts, fishes/marine invertebrates, insects, mammals, and plants) and serve as a valuable resource for research on climate change, genetics, contaminants and other issues facing Alaska and the circumpolar North. The museum is also the premier repository for artifacts and specimens collected on public lands in Alaska and a leader in northern natural and cultural history research. On the web: http://www.uaf.edu/museum/

University of Virginia Interactive Media Group (IMRG)
Charlottesville, Virginia
The IMRG (interactive media research group) develops new technologies for artistic engagements and actions in the creative and academic spheres. Chief areas of development include human/computer interface design, interactive sound synthesis and network technology. The group invented and develops the NOMADS system for audience participation used in Auksalaq. Chief developers include David Topper, Steven Kemper, Paul Turowski, and Director Matthew Burtner. NOMADS has been featured in events and performances by electronica duo Matmos with the MICE Orchestra, OpenGrounds at UVA, The Charlottesville Fringe Festival, The ZeroSpace conference at UWM, RAT of the University of Missouri Kansas City, Technosonics, and the Virginia Rural Health Conference. IMRG NOMADS apps are available in the iOS and Android stores. On the web: http://nomads.music.virginia.edu