The Gateway Project: BIOGRAPHIES

Ansuman Biswas ( London) and Miya Masaoka(San Francisco) are both interdisciplinary artists and musicians using traditional instruments and digital technology to create multimedia performances. Miya Masaoka is a composer, kotoist, interdisciplinary and performance artist. A member of the Asian American music scene in San Francisco, she has brought the koto to the realms of electronic music, jazz, improvisation, and new music. Her performance art work is infused with political inquiry and investigates the nature of ethnicity, gender, and technology. For the last four years Masaoka has been working with insects, investigating their sound, behavior and social relationships to form music compositions, videos, and performance art pieces. Ansuman Biswas was born in India and trained in Theatre and in Music in Europe. He is currently based in London and works internationally as a musician, teacher and performance artist. His practice ranges across a variety of media and is centered on the relationship between modern scientific rationality and the ancient technique of vipassana meditation. As key collaborators in the LONDON/SF project, Masaoka and Biswas are engaged in a dialogue about their work. As an artist-in-residence at The Headlands Center for a period of five weeks, Biswas will develop new work in collaboration with Masaoka, to be presented in June at The LAB.

Interdisciplinary performance and installation artists Hayley Newman (London) and Nao Bustamante (San Francisco), having met on the fly at a performance festival somewhere in Northern Europe, have agreed to participate in an experimental collaboration with each other for the SF/London Project. Hayley Newman completed postgraduate studies in 1994 at The Slade School of Art in London. In 1995 she was awarded a DAAD scholarship to study with Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule Fuer Bildende Kuenste in Hamburg. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Media Department at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Since 1994 Newman has performed extensively within Europe, Canada and the UK. Work made during this period has predominantly been an investigation into the expression of idea and emotion formalized through performance strategies and schema. In 1999 she both curated and participated in Small Pleasures , a weekend performance program that took place in the context of the Sensation exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. In 2000 she was shortlisted for the inaugural Beck’s Futures award at the ICA, and in 2001 her work was included in the exhibition Century City at the Tate Modern in London. Nao Bustamante is a performance pioneer born in San Joaquin, a small town of the Central Valley in California. Her body and sexual/cultural identity function as both primary sources for her imagery, and also as the canvas on which she mixes, magnifies and distorts her pictures before throwing them out to her audience. Bustamante has lived and worked in San Francisco for 16 years. Her work spans video, installation as well as performance art. Bustamante has been presented in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Jakarta, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and of course the United States.

Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica are three artists exploring cultural and somatic mutations caused by the implosion of advanced information technology. Amid the tensions of the fast-paced mythologies of the Information Age, Los Cybrids have emerged to challenge notions that purport a friction-free market, a one-world community and global access at our fingertips; they employ performance, burla , and high-tech art to undermine the uncritical, passive acceptance of the overarching social, cultural and environmental consequences of Information Technologies. Los Cybrids is a junta of polyethnic cultural diggers of the Latino sort dedicated to the critique of cyber-cultural negotiation via artistic activity. As a junta, Los Cybrids instigate a critical dialogue around access and desire in cyber-culture, considering multiple issues of economic equality, cultural transformation, social reorganization, educational imperatives, and environmental impact. Los Cybrids is a collaborative project with Galería de la Raza funded with a generous grant by the Creative Work Fund.

Los Cybrids are: John Leaños, born and raised in Los Angeles in a Mexican-Italian-American family. His work centers on an investigation of the symbols and politics of memory and forgetting through digital photography, public art and installation. A New York/Colombian multi-disciplinary artist, Praba Pilar has worked on multiple projects in the public sphere through site installations, public art, performances, and websites. René Garcia is a Mexican born in California who utilizes performanceand digitally interactive multi-media to explore themes of stereotyping, racial dynamics and the convergence of body and electronic technologies.

Also visit: http://www.cybrids.com

Interdisciplinary artist Kathleen Rogers has contributed to many exhibitions that examine the relationship between art, technology and science. In recent years she has worked on themes that draw on anthropological sources and scientific consciousness research. As an artist she has presented at many international electronic art symposia and conferences. Her artworks reflect and are central to the current scientific discourses on the body, cross-cultural consciousness research and multi-sensory cognitive modeling using old and new technologies. For the past two years Kathleen Rogers has carried out research in the maize growing community of Chiapas, Mexico, working with senior maize experts in the UK and Mexico and examining the cross-disciplinary symbolism of maize in genetic science, Mayan mythology and art. Carl Stonewas hailed by the Village Voice as "one of the best composers working in the country today." He was born in Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. He has composed electro-acoustic and computer music exclusively since 1972.

His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. A winner of numerous awards for his compositions, including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken , Carl Stone is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts.

Visit Kathleen Rogers' site at: www.kathleenrogers.co.uk

Anne Bean has presented solo and collaborative projects incorporating static and time-based visual art, sound, and performance extensively at art venues, festivals, and unique sites throughout Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan since 1970. Highlights of her career include a performance art presentation at a banquet for Chancellor Shmidt and Henry Kissinger as a representative of British experimental art; a sculpture residency in Holland involving disabled adults; and performances and installations at literally hundreds of venues including the Gilbenkian Institute, Lisbon; and Pompidou Centre in Paris. Her video collaborations have been shown on the BBC and ITV as well as in many international venues and festivals. In 1983 she co-founded the Bow Gamelon Ensemble with P.D. Burwell and sculptor Richard Wilson. In 1992, in collaboration with sculptor Peter Fink, Bean realized Light Year, the largest temporary public art project in the UK, which used Britain's tallest building Canary Wharf as a canvas for a monumental light sculpture. O Degrees, a permanent laser installation along the Greenwich Meridian Line, involved a large-scale opening event in the Thames using a choreographed flotilla of boats, fireworks and special effects.

Chiara Giovando is currently working on 4 music-making projects. Prism From Marin is a new age noise band duet for processed vocals (look for their album plankton, p.s. whale songs heal). Black Theory, a solo project for computer music, has just home-released "Fucked Up Music Vol. 1". qUEEN aMBASSADOR is the story of a fascist queen protecting nature, all told with music. She curates, presents and composes for Sound Structures, an ongoing series of performances dedicated to indeterminancy scores, which have been performed at Southern Exposure gallery, The Lab and the New College of Callifornia. Chiara Giovando also composes scores for electronics and acoustic instruments, two of which will be performed at The LAB.

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. The sound of her work varies from sparse ambiance to dense, lush textures and rich, polyrhythmic structures, created from live and sampled vocalizations, text and a variety of sampled concrete sounds. Pamela Z has done solo performances in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1984 and has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Pamela Z produces "Z Programs", an ongoing series of interdisciplinary events in which her own work has been featured along with that of other artists doing experimental work in various genres. She is a member of the electroacoustic ensemble sensorChip and the interdisciplinary performance ensemble The Qube Chix. She is a recipient of the American Composers Forum's "McKnight Visiting Composer Fellowship", and she is the 1998 music recipient of the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. Pamela Z holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

For further information please visit www.pamelaz.com.

Moti Roti is a London-based organization whose work is grounded in the contemporary, with an embedded cultural understanding. The work has been developed with a strategic approach to space, scale and audience. The organization is artist led, with the two key artists, Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi, instigating and developing projects. Their varied cultural backgrounds (Trinidad and Pakistan) have led them from Carnival, in Khan's case, and Indian Cinema, in Zaidi's, to create a range of fresh, vibrant projects.

Moti Roti's work is either huge and encompassing, or intimate and personal. Flying Costumes, Floating Tombs, was presented by London International Festival of Theatre and the Arnolfini, and involved 300 performers and was seen by 7,000 people. Moti Roti, Puttli Chunni, a reworking of Indian Cinema using a mixed media presentation, was originally presented at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, and then subsequently toured throughout the UK, and to the Harbour Front Center in Toronto, Canada. Other venues for which Moti Roti has created site specific pieces include The Royal Albert Hall (Madhurasha), The South Bank Centre (Coming of Age), and The Royal Court (Maa), all in the UK. Key projects created for intimate presentation include Wigs of Wonderment, presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Ikon Gallery (UK), Kannonhallen (Denmark), DeBeweeging Festival (Belgium). Also Build, an installation presented at the Tate Modern, and Fresh Masaala, an installation at Warwick Arts Centre (UK). The Company has been instrumental in developing international links with artists of color, which has resulted in them guiding projects in South Africa, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Trinidad and India.

For further information about Moti Roti please visit www.motiroti.com.

Aaron Wolf Baum, Ph.D., AKA Dr. Friendly (www.eternalnovelty.com), builds custom software and hardware enabling collaboration and coevolution between people and complex, continuously evolving ecosystems of sound and moving image. These systems are based on the logic of living systems; organic audiovisual texture grows from a seed while the interactor/creator performs live genetic engineering. Dr. Baum has created performances and interactive installations in a wide variety of settings. He graduated summa cum laude in physics from Harvard University in 1991, and received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1997. Michael Christian is a sculptor from Texas who has been living and working in the Bay Area for seven years.

For more information visit his website, www.michaelchristian.com.

 

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