The CHAT Digital Arts FestivalPosted by admin on February 12th, 2010

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my piece, ‘Opening/Unknowing’ is going to be played at the CHAT (Collaborations:  Humanities, Arts & Technology) Festival at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  The piece will be presented as part of a live music series called, ‘Festival on the Hill’ and will be played next Thursday night, February 18th at 5pm.

I am disappointed that I will not be attending the festival because there are many interesting workshops and performances on the schedule.  Here’s a few that caught my attention:

Carolina Performing Arts Presents STREB: Brave Collaborative Performance

From the CHAT Festival Website:

STREB’s virtuosic, daredevil performers combine extreme sports with dance. With backgrounds in ballet, modern dance, martial arts, acrobatics and circus skills, they use experimental technologies such as “smart” prostheses, personal robots and a human-sized yo-yo to create a new vocabulary of performance. In this performance, the collaborators will investigate physical concepts such as ways to occupy traditionally unoccupied surfaces—ceilings, walls and trusses; challenge gravity; and investigate high-speed vertical motion in the face of centrifugal force.

The Art and Culture of the DJ is a work for turntables and Latin ensemble from composer Raúl Yañez, to be performed by UNC’s Charanga Carolina and turntablist DJ Radar.

The February 18 performance in Gerrard Hall will be an open rehearsal, during which Yañez, DJ Radar and Charanga leader professor David Garcia will perform and discuss the piece.

Bathysphere is an underwater opera and an interactive game: a musical narrative in which the audience triggers events.

Imagine: you enter Gerrard Hall; you see an underwater world floating by and hear its gentle sounds. You also see a few real objects around you. Pick up a beach ball, and toss it. An octopus appears! You notice that as you move your beach ball, the octopus moves correspondingly, projected on three of the walls.

It is as if you are inside an aquarium. The octopus also has different musical phrases, depending its situation. Say that another person in Gerrard Hall picks up a fishing rod. It is re-projected as a school of fish, with its own musical phrases.

Wow, this is some REALLY cool stuff… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s much more to check out at the website:  www.chatfestival2010.com