ROOSEVELT – Something unexpected, strange and artistic will happen in Roosevelt this weekend.
Roosevelt residents Brad Garton, Wiska Radkiewicz and Vicotoria Estok will collaborate with a handful of other New Jersey and New York artists to present “Digital Art in Unexpected Places” at 8 p.m. on May 17 at the grounds of the Roosevelt Public School. The event will feature 3-D videos, sound and projection performances and video and audio installations.
“I like bringing lots of random elements together and seeing what happens,” Estok said. “I think Roosevelt is a place that is receptive to old and new ideas mixed together.”
New York artists and Columbia University students Victor Adan, Daniel Iglesia, Sam Pluta and Jeff Snyder will come bearing many rare gifts, including performances on dot matrix printers and plotters. They’re also descending with 1,000 pairs of 3-D glasses in tote.
Adan considers a dot matrix printer to be the most limited musical instrument.
“It is a one-bit instrument where the only thing that can be controlled is the time at which a printing head is triggered, a bit like a piano with a single key and without the possibility of controlling loudness,” he said.
How much music can he actually make within these limitations?
“This is what I explore in a live performance for dot matrix printer,” he said.
Adan may also perform with Snyder on plotters. In the 80s, plotters were commonly used to draft engineering and architectural plans. Today,Adan and Snyder perform as The Draftmasters in a revival of these obsolete machines. By directing and amplifying the machines natural sounds during the drawing process, The Draftmasters convert these robots into audiovisual instruments.
Snyder will also perform with Pluta in an electronic drummer band called exclusiveOr, which makes audio and video using a combination of old and new technologies. The band focuses on making sounds with physical gestures while simultaneously harnessing the power of computers and algorithmic real-time performance systems.
Iglesia creates improvisational 3-D videos by developing musical systems that simultaneously control graphics.
“Instructions are sent to the computer’s graphic card to render shapes in a virtual 3-D space, with the proportion of red and blue causing one’s eye to perceive them at a depth,” Iglesia said. “I manipulate various parameters that affect the musical and visual surroundings.”
Estok said the artists involved are those who collaborated for the successful art installation in the woods at last year’s Roosevelt Arts Project anniversary event.
“We’re hoping to make this an annual thing,” she said.
Saturday night’s performance is expected to be a happening with lots of room for improvisation but the experiment will be family-oriented, according to Estok.
She said people of all ages should bring blankets and enjoy the performances, which will be projected on the school’s handball court wall. In the event of rain, the event will take place in the gym.