NightLife LIVE: Water

MEDIATE and SF Bay Guardian present the Soundwave ((6)) Opening Night Party featuring live outdoor performances by Rogue Wave, Kacey Johansing, art installations in the East Garden, and interactive sonic art exhibits throughout the California Academy of Sciences.

MEDIATE opens the floodgates to San Francisco’s innovative three-month art and music festival, Soundwave ((6)) Water, its newest festival season, with a a tsunami of live music, innovative art and cutting-edge science that explore our most important natural resource: Water. As part of the NightLife LIVE monthly music and art series, local indie faves Rogue Wave storms the party with special guest Kacey Johansing on the outdoor East Garden stage. Surf amongst the fish in the deep, dark coral reef with ‘DataSurf,’ an installation by artists Drew Detweiler and Lyes Bellocine, that allows you to interact with a surfboard and your mirrored self in a barrel of swirling visuals projections. Experience ‘Submerged Turntables,’ artist Evan Holm’s sculpture installation performing with sounds from live underwater records in the center Piazza with special guest Karuna Holm playing the underwater fretless zither and accompanying the turntables with her voice. Interact with ’Oceanic Scales’ artist Gene Felice II’s hands-on art & science installation, inspired by phytoplankton, the first link in the oceanic food chain. Create art prints with artist Travis John’s ‘Hydroprinting,’ a sonographic instrument that measures water currents. Voice your thoughts at ’Speaking Tributaries,’ a memory collection booth of the sea; and, play with water-instruments with instrument builder and artist Edward Schocker. The East Garden also features ‘IDILIO,’ by Gabriel Fontanillo and Leyre Montes, which explores the connections between a sea horse and an anemone, curated by Betty Bigas and projections by All of It Now.

Must be age 21+ to attend NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences.

 

Rogue Wave formed in 2002. The first album, Out of the Shadow, was released on Rogue’s Responsive label soon after. In 2003, with the addition of drummer/keyboardist Pat Spurgeon, bassist Sonya Westcott, and guitarist Gram LeBron, Rogue Wave played shows with the likes of Spoon and Mates of State. Westcott was replaced in the lineup by Evan Farrell, and the revised band began recording a second album. The 10:1 single, released in 2005, displayed a slicker and more produced sound without jeopardizing the essential successful elements of the first record. This was followed by the full-length album, Descended Like Vultures, whose songs appeared on the television shows Weeds, Friday Night Lights, and Heroes. In 2008, they moved to their friend Jack Johnson’s Brushfire imprint and released their third album, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate. With newcomer Cameron Jasper now handling bass duties, the band returned in early 2010 with their second Brushfire recording, Permalight. In 2013, Rogue Wave consisted of Ruge and Spurgeon and released Nightingale Floors, through their new label, Vagrant.

Described by The Bay Bridged as “gorgeous acoustic pop”,  San Francisco based musician Kacey Johansing creates songs with meandering  melodies, lush harmonies and moody aural landscapes. She is a current member of the experimental folk duo Yesway. Johansing has shared the stage and contributed to projects with local talents Tune-Yards, Sean Hayes, Mirah and Thao Nguyen and has collaborated with French filmmaker Vincent Moon. Johansing’s latest release and sophomore LP, Grand Ghosts, evokes the wilderness of the California coastline that she now calls home and the isolated mountain towns in Colorado where she grew up.

Lyès Belhocine (Algeria) and Drew Detweiler (USA) formed their artistic collaboration while learning to surf in Santa Cruz. Their shared interest in remix culture, experience design, and participatory play has resulted in twenty-five exhibitions since 2009. They collaborate across disciplines with dancers, musicians, visual artists, actors, and scientists.Their most recent collaboration, CUEBIT, a multi-user audiovisual mixer is currently featured in the REBOOT:music Exhibition of Digital Music Exploration at The Tech Museum of Innovation. CUEBIT is the latest iteration of their Inspired Performance Mixer cube interface and was a top ten finalist in the Infiniti/Designboom International Digital Art Competition.

Evan Holm is an Oakland based artist who assimilates obsolete and abandoned technology into his installations and wall pieces. He studied art and engineering at UC Santa Cruz, where he made large-scale sculptures exploring the intrinsic grace and beauty found in nature. Upon graduating in 2002 he committed himself to continuing research in the field of sculpture. With the addition of motors, pulleys, electronics, and speakers, his formal and static sculptures soon evolved into moving and sensitive machines. His engineering background continues to inform current work as he pushes the limits of how technology can interface with poetic themes of loss and transmigration. Geologic evolution, material excess, and cultural loss underpin and create a foundation for Holm’s current work. Recent kinetic sculptures utilize found sound as cultural artifacts. With these machines, Holm generates elusive soundcapes woven with forgotten music and misplaced recordings from decades past.

Travis Johns is a composer and sound artist currently active in the United States and Costa Rica. Using processed field recordings, prepared instruments and home-built analog electronics, he creates pieces that blur the lines between performance, composition and installation, often using the environment and biological processes as inspiration for his works. He holds a B.M. in Technology in Music and Related Arts from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (where he studied with Tom Lopez), and an MFA from Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media (where he studied with Chris Brown, Les Stuck and Hilda Paredes). Selected residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts and RPI’s Create @ iEar. His work has been featured at el Museo Centroamericano de Arte Video (MUCEVI), the Electronic Music Foundation, Ear to the Earth, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), el Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, Espacio G (Guatemala City), and Bienarte 8 (Costa Rica). In 2013 he represented Costa Rica alongside visual artist Paulina Velazquez-Solis at the BAVIC 8 Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American Isthmus, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Panama City.

Gene A. Felice II currently splits his life into three directions: art, design, and education. In the art world, he is an interactive artist, examining relationships between himself and the outside world. His art is a lens through which he develops balance between himself and other living systems. Design is an outlet for sharpening his ability to communicate visually while constantly pounding his way through the walls of the latest technology available. This includes interactive web design, photo/video, 3D modeling and compositing. In education, he attempts to give to the greater good while simultaneously dipping into the well of fresh creativity. As a graduate student in the Digital Arts and New Media Program at UC Santa Cruz, he balances being a student and teacher, an act that produces unique and fresh results. Digital arts and new media form a fluid nexus for his work, providing a point of intersection to evolve new hybrids of nature and technology. Through motors, sensors and microcontrollers such as the Arduino or Raspberry Pi, he is able to interact directly with the viewer. Video and animated imagery, viewed through projection mapping and alternative screens, give him the ability to transform 3D space and surface through the vehicle of light.Through 3D modeling, rapid prototyping and interactive installation design, he encompasses all these passions into one symbiotically creative system.

The Speaking Tributaries project is the work of artists Ana Labastida, Jesus Landin-Torrez, Kate Lee Short and Sadie Harmon. Ana Labastida’s practice spans site-specific installation, social practice, mixed media sculpture and projection. Jesus Landin-Torrez III is a multi-disciplinary, time-based artist who explores ideas of ritualistic practice and intimacy around memory and death. Kate Lee Short’s work weaves together space, light, sound, and objects to challenge the viewer to be the ultimate arbiter of their experience.Sadie Harmon’s recent work examines the ways in which social, architectural and linguistic change relate to aging and death.

Edward Schocker is a composer and performer who creates music with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. He holds an M.A. in composition from Mills College, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and independently with Lou Harrison. At Mills, Edward founded The Music For People & Thingamajigs Festival, an annual event in The Bay Area devoted to unusual instruments and tunings. He was an artist-in-residence at the  European Dance Development Center in Düsseldorf where he took part in and conducted workshops in instrument building. Edward’s select residencies and commissions include Stanford Lively Arts with Brenton Cheng, and Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. In 2006 he was awarded The NEA/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship to research Japanese musical instruments and tuning systems, and in 2010 received a 6-month residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Currently, Edward is an ensemble member of the Thingamajigs Performance Group, creating works in a group process with Dylan Bolles, Suki O’Kane and Zachary Watkins. The group recently completed a summer-long residency at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.