Margaret Lancaster, Greg Niemeyer, and Chris Chafe: A Day in the Sun
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A Day in the Sun (2019)
A Day in the Sun is performed by Margaret Lancaster, flute, as a video and includes a video of the Sun along with computer-generated sound. The Sun's life-giving energy emanates from its ever changing surface, day by solar day. Margaret's playing is accompanied by a stunning animation created by stitching together a flip book of images from NASA's solar observatory over the course of several years in which what we actually see tells us as much about ourselves as it tells about the Sun.
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“New-music luminary” (NY Times), Margaret Lancaster (flutes) also works as an actor, dancer, amateur furniture designer and has built a large repertoire of interactive, cross-disciplinary solo works that employ electronics and mixed media. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe New Music, Art Basel/Miami, Edinburgh Festival, NIME/Copenhagen, Tap City, and the 7-year global run of OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse (Helene). A member of Either/Or, Ipse, and Fisher Ensemble, guest appearances include American Modern Ensemble, Argento, Ghost Ensemble, and the New York Philharmonic. She presents solo and chamber music events worldwide and has recorded on New World Records, Mode, World Edition, Innova, Naxos and Tzadik. Recent collaborations include projects with Jean- Baptiste Barrière and Kaija Saariaho, Stockhausen’s KLANG cycle, and touring Morton Feldman’s 5 hour epic For Philip Guston.
Born in Switzerland in 1967, Greg Niemeyer studied Classics and Photography. He started working with new media when he arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1992. He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center. In 2001 he was appointed at UC Berkeley as a Professor for New Media in Art Practice. He co-founded and directed the Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. Greg Niemeyer’s work focuses on mediations between individuals, communities and environments. These mediations rely on data manifestations. Data manifestations are materializations of abstract data in the way people can feel. Sea water levels can become compositions for Carillons. Climate data stored in the Vostok Ice Core can become an audio tour. The myriad ways in which nodes in networks can connect to define emergent ways of life can become a gallery exhibit or a multimedia concert. Niemeyer's work includes collaborations across disciplines and across media from gravure etchings to VR, always with an eye for the poetic foundations of technical protocols.
Chris Chafe makes his compositions alongside computer-based research into sound and music. A composer, improvisor, and cellist, he is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, computer-mediated music performance and real-time internet collaboration. His team's online low-latency software project "jacktrip" is in use worldwide and research continues into latency factors affecting musical syncronization. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his work reaches audiences in dozens of countries and sometimes at novel venues, for example, a simultaneous five-country concert hosted at the United Nations a decade ago. His gallery and museum “musification” installations employ datasets from collaborations with scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes "Gnosisong" (brain waves, Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City), "PolarTide" (sea level rise, Venice Biennale), "Tomato Music" (ripening tomatoes, transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China) and "Sun Shot" played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.