The IEA was joined by Blake Marques Carrington for an artist residency over the week of May 22nd. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Blake holds an MFA from Syracuse University and works across a wide range of media including digital printmaking, audiovisual compositions, live visuals to accompany performances, and video installation user self produced custom software – all falling a heading he calls “Speculative Forensics”. Focusing on the question “can information be lost?” Blake often translates his creations from one medium to another, asking the question of how accurately it could possibly return its original form.

During his residency, Blake spent the majority of his time with the Doupfer synthesizers, creating entirely new works as well as mixing and processing his own tracks through the inputs on these instruments. Blake brought in in own recordings and made new recordings here including making use of a prepared piano which happened to be in the studios. These recordings will be mixed for a new album Blake is currently producing as well as used in future performances and collaborations.

“Angels + Noise” 30 second sample (work in progress).

The IEA welcomed Renate Ferro as our artist in residence over the week of May 15th. A Professor of Visual Arts at Cornell University, Renate frames herself as a conceptual artist who toggles between the creative skins of old and new technologies. These are actualized through forms such as installation, interactive net-based projects, digital time-based media, drawing, and text. Often engaging with the concepts of memory and disclosure, Renate’s practice conjoins the making of art out of life’s materials and life’s materials out of art, blending the tactile material world with the networked, immaterial world.

During her residency, Renate explored her archive of video work from her Super 8 film and early low-resolution digital video projections, which she had previously experimented with image making from these sources on older technology via printing on various substrates with dot matrix printers. At the IEA she began work on an artist book derived from these images using our large format printers to print on heavy stock Japanese papers. These prints will ultimately become pages of a small edition of books to be stab bound at a later date.

Below is a selection of images from Renate’s time at the IEA.

The IEA hosted Zorica Colić as a resident artist over the week of May 8th, 2017. Zorica’s work researches how contemporary life is structured and manipulated, with particular emphasis on the implications of the biopolitical management of human life. Through various hybridized forms of display, her works explore the complex relationships between politics, art and consumer worlds, examining how our lives are regulated or defined by taste, by products, and by mass-distributed role models. The goal is to identify new ways to subvert normative mass culture in order to re-contextualize images and signs that have become inflated from over-proliferation.

Throughout her residency, Zorica focused on a new series of work spinning off from her series titled Well-beings. In this new series, Zorica shot video as well as still images of different parts of her body while assuming yoga poses. These clips were then cut up, fragmented, and recombined, in a similar manner as Well-beings, to create figures in these poses with various textures derived from other parts of her body with a lean to grotesque textures and forms. Zorica intends to further process this media in her own studio.

Below are images from Zorica’s residency:

The IEA was honored to host Michael Kempson, Nicky Crayson, Jenny Robinson, and Miranda Metcalf for two weeks spanning January and February 2017. The event, Masters of Intaglio with a Touch of Jazz, brought together an international assemblage of master print makers, a gallery director, and jazz singer for a residency filled with presentations and discussions, workshops, and a multi-media performance.

Michael, of Sydney, Australia, and Jenny, of Los Angeles, CA, are master print makers with extensive experience with intaglio print making techniques. In addition to extensive time on their own work, branching out into laser etched woodblock relief printing, both artists held public workshops to share their knowledge of intaglio printmaking and different methodologies they employ, and Michael held a public lecture to speak about his organization, Cicada Press, its founding, and its efforts to reach out to the Aboriginal communities and open up the facilities Cicada Press has to them, while also allowing for collaboration with the students at the University of New South Wales. Both Michael and Jenny currently have their work from their residencies on display, Michael’s show entitled Work and Play at Chung ya Feng Art Center in Beijing (website is in Chinese) and Jenny’s show entitled Constructs at the Davidson Galleries in Seattle, Washington.

Jenny held two workshops, one on creating inexpensive, non-tocix, dry point plates for intaglio printing, and another demonstrating her techniques for collé printmaking on fine Japanese and Chinese papers. Michael provided insights on how to produce multiple color intaglio prints with proper registration, allowing for CMYK processes which can be difficult to do for beginning print makers.

In addition to Jenny and Michael’s presentations and demonstrations, Nicky Crayson and Miranda Metcalf also presented held events throughout the period of the event. Miranda, the curator of contemporary prints at Davidson Galleries in Seattle, WA, hosted a talk, titled Being Prepared – What to do before Approaching Galleries, in which she spoke about what artists need to prepare before approaching galleries with artwork and how to present their work in a professional environment after leaving school. She also met with students individually to speak with them about their work and how they could make themselves more likely to successfully get gallery representation.

Nicky, a jazz singer from Sydney, Australia, collaborated with NYSCC Electronic Integrated Arts MFA students Matthew Underwood and Jesse Earle, along with musicians Daisy Wu and Ken Maracek to put on Snowing in the Bush, a multi-media performance which involved improvised musical performances between Nicky, Daisy, and Ken, and a final crescendo with Matthew and Jessica contributing with electronic instruments and processing the sound based on a score Matt put together. All of the while there were multiple monitors and projectors with video work by Matt which used images from Michael’s prints as a basis and was processed in real time by the sound produced during the performance. This video work was displayed on monitors after the performance in the Harland Snodgrass Multi-Media Gallery.

To conclude the event, Michael, Nicky, Jenny, and Miranda were joined by New York State artist and recent IEA resident artist Cassandra Hooper for a presentation or their work and discussion on their working practices, inspirations, their residencies, and the current world of contemporary print practice. This presentation, as well as Michael and Miranda’s talks, can be viewed on the AU Division of Expanded Media’s YouTube page.

The IEA was delighted to host Chad Latz as our artist in residence over the week of April 3rd, 2017. Chad, who received his art degree from the NYSCC at Alfred University, is the chief innovation officer a the Cohn & Wolfe design film. Chad has spent more than 17 years in the agency world developing award-winning, integrated marketing and communications strategies for some of the most respected, admired and engaged brands. He was recognized in 2010 as one of PRWeek’s 40 under 40 and his insightful perspectives on digital and social media are frequently highlighted in industry publications and at international events and conferences. Outside of Cohn & Wolfe, Chad spends much of his time in his cabin in the Catskills working on personal art projects ranging from print media to printmaking.

During his time at the IEA, Chad worked across our print media facilities combining multiple processes into each of his images. The inspiration for his prints came from photos and documents that belonged to his grandfather, a principle art director and one of the founders of Esquire magazine, whom Chad never met. Additionally, to further pursue his family history, Chad participated in a 23andMe analysis and took a course in bio-engineering to sequence his genealogy back 500 generations. The data, charts, and graphs from these tests were combined with the photos of his grandfather, overlaying screen-printing on photo-polymer prints and burning text into digital prints, to create prints as layered as his genealogy.

Below are images from Chad’s residency:

The IEA was joined by Heejin Jang, from New York City, over the week of April 10th, 2017. Heejin received her MFA in painting at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea in 2011 and an MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. Her work manifests itself in the forms of experimental video art and live performance. Distorting ambient field recordings and found footage from the Internet, Heejin creates reverberating forces that gets one lost in the echoes of invisible itineraries to the outer world.

During her time at the IEA, Heejin spent much of her time in our time media studios gathering new resources for her work. In particular, Heejin processed a lot of recordings from her library and live video through the MVIP and edited these compositions through the Panisonic 4K mixer. A duckling also made a cameo in her recordings. Heejin was able to put together a single channel piece with the work she recorded here and plans to use the raw recordings in future work.

Below are some images from her residency:

The IEA welcomed Scott Stevens, Lee Somers, and Elisabeth Pellathy for a residency over the week of March 27th. Scott, Professor of Printmaking at the University of Montevallo, Lee, Professor of Three Dimensional Design at the University of Montevallo, and Elisabeth, Professor of New Media at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, came together to collaborate on a project centered around Alabama’s Cahaba River, a free flowing river that connects Birmingham to Montevallo and contains some of the greatest biodiversity and historic significance in the South. The primary themes of interest in the Cahaba River centered around the natural environment, the human history that stretched from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, and its ecological and geological features that fed local economies, such as coal, limestone, and iron ore that were key components to the foundation of the iron industry in the area.

Throughout their residency Scott, Lee, and Elisabeth collaborated on laser etched acrylic plates which could then be used for both relief and intaglio printing. Each produced images from their own research on the Cahaba River and layered their images on top of each other to produce a series of prints. Each print contained multiple layers of the history and environmental features of the watershed and the hand of each artist, with photographic, CAD generated, and images from 3D models contributing to each piece. Additionally, a presentation and discussion was held where each artist spoke about their artistic backgrounds and work, how they came together to collaborate on this project, and their research they did to contribute to the Cahaba River Watershed Project.

Below is a sample of photos from their residency:

The IEA was joined by ray ferreira of Brooklyn, NY, for an artist residency over the week of March 13th. ray, who received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016, uses Englishes, Spanishes, and body languages to explore ways, which her body is manifested and manifests worlds, and ways her body aims to create a different ontoepistoethics. She views her texts as modular, pieces coming into and out of existence, stretching across spaces, times, and matters.

Below are images from Ray’s residency:

The IEA welcomed Laura Splan, of Brooklyn, NY, for a residency over the week of February 20th, 2017. Laura, an alum of Mills College in Oakland, CA, explores the intersections of art, science, technology, and craft who explores the material manifestations of our mutable relationship with the human body. Much of her work is inspired by experimentation with materials and processes (blood, cosmetic facial peel, digital fabrication), which she mines for their narrative implications and untapped potentials. Her recent work uses biosensors (electromyography, electroencephalography) to create data-driven forms and patterns for digitally fabricated sculptures, tapestries and works on paper.

During her week at the IEA, Laura focused on creating 4K digital animations derived from bio-metric data, specifically EMGs and EEGs. These took the form of colored, moving lines that starts out with only a few onscreen and gradually amassing to the point where only tiny movements can be seen if one looks close enough. These animations were created by entering the bio-data into code created in Processing which read it into animation files that would sometimes take up to seven hours to render a 30 second clip. Laura also composed a three channel animation that spanned across the three 4K displays in the TSI/Harland Snodgrass Gallery and gave a small, informal presentation to Professor Barbara Lattanzi’s Interactive Media class.

Below are some images from Laura’s residency: