An evening of software performances and human-machine communions, drawing lines between the worlds of immersive sound, performing arts, and experimental extended reality. The familiar, the bearable chaos and illusions of order unfold across technologically mediated hyper-realities, temporalities, and mnemonic worlds. Performances where interactions and reactions occur across choreographies and spatial arrangements, binding the virtual with the real in unexpected knots and impossible behaviors.
Featuring immersive multimedia works and collaborative performances by Laura Luna Castillo, Daniel Peterson, Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina and Ewa Trębacz.
Laura Luna Castillo - VR environment design, extended reality programming, visual spaces
Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina - movement artists
Daniel Peterson - live Ambisonic sound processing and coding
Ewa Trębacz - violin, Ambisonic sound sources
PROGRAM
Daniel Peterson
Vanishing Portals (2024) - part 1
Ambisonic soundtrack
Laura Luna Castillo, Ashley Menestrina,
Daniel Peterson, Ewa Trębacz
Recontre 1 (2024)
Collaborative immersive performance
Laura Luna Castillo, Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina
Enclavados Todos Juntos (Enfolded all together) (2024)
Multimedia Performance
Laura Luna Castillo, Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina,
Daniel Peterson, Ewa Trębacz
Recontre 2 (2024)
Collaborative immersive performance
Daniel Peterson
Vanishing Portals (2024) - part 2
Ambisonic soundtrack
PROGRAM NOTES
Vanishing Portals (2024) - Daniel Peterson
Vanishing Portals is centered around the idea of the imagined, uncanny, and impossible realities that are no less real than the unimagined. They mirror the books within books, manuscripts within manuscripts of Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, and the pseudo-academic manuscripts with fractured narratives spiraling down the impossibly horrific labyrinth of corridors (pages) of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. They are inspired by the multilayered narratives of One Thousand and One Nights and the unfathomable two suns above the impossibly unattainable yet un-hyperbolically perfect love mystery in Casares’ The Invention of Morel. These realities confound and confuse yet make perfect sense.
In Vanishing Portals these realities are turning inward, spiraling into the labyrinth of being, traversing the discontinuities of consciousness and identity, “buried in the nameless black of a name.” The piece travels through the corridors of the mind, becomes suspended in the ephemeral space of memories, forever seeking the portals in space and time that lead to the misweaves, the places where things break down, the outliers, the discarded data. It is a labyrinth of musical memory, simultaneously musical and idiosyncratic.
Recontre 1 & 2 (2024)
- Laura Luna Castillo, Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina, Daniel Peterson, Ewa Trębacz
Enclavados Todos Juntos (Enfolded all together) (2024)
- Laura Luna Castillo, Carolina Marín, Ashley Menestrina
A metafiction told in varying patterns of rhythms and intonation, passing through multiple perspectives and degrees of modernity, slowly conforming an epic of the ordinary which unfolds within and throughout an erratic embodied interface as a complex memory Mise-en-scène.
This project builds upon a bittersweet preoccupation, spanning several years, around the mediated rhetorics of the home as a politic and ambivalent space that fosters a myriad of experiential, cultural, and affective paradoxes. Identifying emerging hyperreality platforms, as a means to enact a dilated and complex exploration of home, this project seeks to immerse and invite the audience to embody an ever-changing narrative that unfolds in real-time at the intersection of live performance algorithmic theater and mixed reality cinema.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Laura Luna Castillo is a Mexican multimedia and new technologies artist and composer. Through convergences of time-based media, music, sculpture, and generative storytelling Luna explores personal and collective identities shaped by political and intimate spaces. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, Luna Castillo has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and hybrid works for festivals such as MUTEK Montréal, CYNETART Festival, and EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center).
Website: https://www.lauralunacastillo.net/
Carolina Marín's work focuses on research and experimentation on the dynamic movement of humans and other species. Advancing towards new territories on the transdisciplinary, in collaboration to understand, expand, and show these studies and experiences.
"Being available to listen and observe the biodiversity of the places I travel and inhabit is a complementary challenge to my line of work. It opens the possibility of reimagining and reconfiguring the idea of dynamic movement in relation to space and time. In this way my artistic work uses tools and concepts belonging to dance, science, architecture, sound, digital technologies, video and nature. I am currently working on the practice of walking as a basic action of locomotion, in relation to the landscape, the paths and the footprint, and how these are writing a story. In the same sense, I found the action of weaving and sewing as a way to connect, unify, build and make shapes on the way to building a story."
Website: https://kescena.art/
Ashley Menestrina is a movement artist with deep ties to improvisation. Her repertoire of solo works: "Always a Creature", "The Human Condition: Absent Presence", and "Combative Echoes" have been performed in eight countries and received numerous awards from festival juries. She has further worked as a collaborator/choreographer for the following artists: Alice Gosti, Gonzaga University, Anna Mlasowsky for the Amazon A.I.R program, Emily Schoen Branch, and Maia Melene Durfee since moving to Seattle in 2021.
Website: www.ashleymenestrina.com
Daniel Peterson is an acousmatic composer working with ambisonics. He completed a Master of Music in Composition at the University of Washington working with Juan Pampin and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department for Digital Arts and Experimental Media working with Richard Karpen. His compositional interests include spectral analysis, ambisonics, and the exploration of the relationships between literature, philosophy, and music.
Ewa Trębacz is a Polish-American composer, violinist and an interdisciplinary artist. Collaboration, understood as exchange of creativity, is essential to her work. Exploring the unique interaction between the human subjects and their acoustic environment, she often uses space as a catalyst for improvisation, working through Ambisonic recording sessions in acoustically impelling spaces. Her works have been presented at major international festivals and conferences such as Ars Electronica Festival, ICMC, NYCEMF, CIME/ICEM, “Warsaw Autumn” and many others. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington's DXARTS program, where she currently works as Research Scientist.
Website: https://ewatrebacz.com/