Author: james and lili

flickr set

Our installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibit curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps.

The individual glass pieces were made at a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, a residency at Pilchuck Glass School and at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn.

In addition to kinetic and sonic qualities produced by electromagnetism, this new installation includes a haptic section where visitors can touch the glass and feel resonant frequencies pulsing through specific objects.

Inspired by the translucence of glass, our work embodies invisible forces indexed in the shapes, behaviors and sensual qualities of each object. Electromagnetism and code influence the movements of round neodymium magnets inside some of the pieces. The resulting sounds reveal unique acoustic properties.

from the exhibition label:

“Inside two display cases are glass volumes in the shape of cones, domes, and droopy tubes. Tiny metal spheres roll around inside the vessels, tapping lightly against the glass. These little spheres are powerful magnets. Installed underneath the tabletop are electromagnets. The tiny spheres change direction when the electromagnets switch their polarity from north/south to south/north. Created by Lili Maya and James Rouvelle, the piece sounds delicate and irregular, like falling rain.

Some glass shapes are exposed on the tabletop. Artists Lili Maya and James Rouvelle created this special touch component of their piece especially for this exhibition.”

Our work is also featured in the exhibition catalog.

the live performance.

video from inside the VR environment during the performance.

flickr set

River and State was commissioned by the ICOA Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Feng, Conductor, as part of their New World/New Music series. The piece is in honor of the 125th anniversary of Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, From the New World, and was premiered at the Bohemian National Hall in NYC. The accompanying composition is Dvorshock by Bruce Adolphe – also commissioned by the ICOA. The premiere of River and State featured a live performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski, on stage with the orchestra, interacting with the VR environment we developed.

Our concept for this virtual cinema performance is about the promise of a new world in both the late 19th and early 21st centuries, with its unlimited potentials, personal freedoms and inevitable progress, and how technology (the subway, opened in NYC in 1904, and the recent VR fascination, as examples) has always played a role in complicating these fantasies.

Our performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski traversed the membrane of our shared environment of lived experience and the fantasy of virtual, illimitable, dream-space.

The VR environment features renderings of Lower Manhattan, Inwood Hill Park, Ellis Island, and an amalgam of different Subway stations. The piece is also inspired by observing flash floods on certain Manhattan streets built above drained streams. whose resulting chaos suggest the transposed, consistent presence of foundational forces occluded by the trappings of contemporary material culture.

The Tulips are a reference to the Tulip tree of Inwood Hill Park where the initial meeting, and subsequent purchase of Manhattan from the Native population occurred. The tree died in the 1933. The sculpture of the Tulips encountered during the capsule scene is a rendering of a currently infamous Jeff Koons sculpture that has a connection to the Statue of Liberty.

The metronome seen at the beginning on the shore returns in the final scene as a monument sized rendering of Man Ray’s “Indestructible Object”. The character in front of the metronome in the final scene is a rendering of the actor.

The translucence of glass – the ability to see through a solid form, has always interested us. In our previous work with glass we explored sound as another less visible aspect of the medium – but a quality with enormous physical resonance and emotional power. The invisibility of sound waves, their coupling with the physical realities of the objects that create them, and the translucence of glass are, for us, situated at the border of understanding and imagination.

Curated by Benjamin Wright, our new work for Pushing Buttons @ UrbanGlass can be understood as a tableau — a portrait, but a portrait absent of a specific, human subject. Yet the evidence of a presence, the things that would be around a person, or a group of persons, are all there. An absence is perceived in an act of both observation and imagination. This is a kind of transparency of a foundational structure that to us is analogous to glass.

The relationship of Artifice and the natural world is at the center of Caesura. Yet the natural world, represented by replicas, appears authentically only in video on tiny screens. The electronics, glass and other manmade components are presented in various contradictory situations as if the persons who inhabit this world have lost a clear sense of a conflict between organic and inorganic, between reason, and fantasy.

Caesura is not a synthesis, it is an amalgam. The irregular rhythm of the metronome, placed within the tableau at the scale of a monument and covered in a large symmetrical glass bell with a funky handle, suggests that one’s reason is prone to produce mysteries and data in equal measure. Perhaps pitting these aspects against each other is obscuring a perception of the invisible, formative structures of which we are a part, and within which conflict is an illusion.

Full Flickr set/video here.

flickr set

This video is from the first performance at the Mercedes-Benz arena and was recorded and edited by Shanghai Television

This video is from the second performance at the Shanghai Theater Academy and was recorded and mastered by Grammy nominated recording engineer Matthias Erb.

Conceptualized by maya+rouvelle, with a composition by Weilu Ge, Woven was created for the Shanghai New Art Festival 2017, whose theme was “East/West, Scenery in a Mirror”.

The piece was performed twice in Shanghai at the Mercedes Benz arena and twice at the Shanghai Theater Academy in October, 2017.

Scored for Glass instruments, Bass, Percussion, and Pipa. The staged version included an actress and live video.

Description:

Throughout the performance the actress is accumulating wearable artifacts that embody the binaries of past/present, male/female, east/west. These artifacts are arranged in specific groupings at different locations on stage. Each group of artifacts embodies a different mix of binaries and the performer is tasked with integrating the materials and their concepts into her evolving character throughout the performance.

The audience is understood by the performer as a mirror upon which she tries to organize and understand her multilayered persona.

At the conclusion of the piece the actress joins the audience, takes a seat, and photographs the scene that she has recently departed.

Program note from the festival:

We change as we adapt to our environments, and through that process we become amalgamations of each other. If we allow ourselves to see and be seen as these unusual reflections across space, time, and cultures we allow ourselves to learn through empathy, and cultivate wisdom. There is an essential human force that connects past and present, male and female, East and West, the known and the unfamiliar. Its goal is to weave us together into a stability of change.

Our project is about this energy. Spanning binaries, it is a force that builds social cohesion as it fosters individuality.

But we must do our part, to both weave and to allow ourselves to be woven, to permit the process to live within and around us. Without it things unravel, and we become lost in a pile of tangled threads.

The ensemble:
Actress, Ni Yingying (Mercedes-Benz Arena)
Actress, Wenling Zhao (Shanghai Theater Academy)
Pipa, Yiming Feng
Glass Instruments, James Rouvelle
Electric Bass, Jiawei Zhang
Percussion, Tianyi Zhang
Live video/PTZ Camera, Lili Maya
Electronics, composer, Weilu Ge
Recording Engineer, Matthias Erb
Concept, Maya+Rouvelle
Composition, Weilu Ge

“…But heaven is where it always was…”

Footage from Lascaux, the launches of MUOS V, and Saturn V, an abandoned stone dwelling in Matera, Italy, the The Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, Spain, and St. Eustache Rupestrian Devotional Church in Parco Della Murgia, near Matera.

FIGURE GROUND is a movement and media work performed at Eden’s Expressway in SoHo NYC as part of movement research’s Open Performance Series. This video is documentation of its first performance.

The work is based on the Second Tableau (The Sacrifice) of the Joffrey Ballet/Millicent Hodson’s 1987 reconstruction of the “original” Nijinsky choreography/Roerich costume and set design for the 1913 Ballet Russe production of Le Sacre du Printemps.

At the core of this piece is a cyclical dynamic of transitioning figure and ground relationships. Ritual, sacrifice, mystery, earth, the heroic, politics of gender and technology, death and renewal are embodied by the integration, camouflaging, and collision of different musics, times, materials, cultural forms, and media.

Materials: original and found sound and video, paper, string, choreography and dance.

Found Video:
Festa Della Bruna

Les 100 ans du Sacre du Printemps par le théâtre Mariinski

My second best SuperHyperCube run, so far

US soldiers getting manicures

Len Lye’s Tusalava

Found Audio:
Beethoven Op. 132, Budapest Quartet

Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles

Burial, Come Down to Us (Hyperdub 2013)

Ambient music for Len Lye’s Tusalava by Andrew Pask

FIGURE GROUND is a movement and media work performed at movement research’s Open Performance Series. This is the video component of the performance. Documentation of the performance is available in a separate post.

The work is based on the Second Tableau (The Sacrifice) of the Joffrey Ballet/Millicent Hodson’s 1987 reconstruction of the “original” Nijinsky choreography/Roerich costume and set design for the 1913 Ballet Russe production of Le Sacre du Printemps.

At the core of this piece is a cyclical dynamic of transitioning figure and ground relationships. Ritual, sacrifice, mystery, earth, the heroic, politics of gender and technology, death and renewal are embodied by the integration, camouflaging, and collision of different musics, times, materials, cultural forms, and media.

Video Materials: original and found sound and video.

Found Video:
Festa Della Bruna, Matera, Italy

Les 100 ans du Sacre du Printemps par le théâtre Mariinski

My second best SuperHyperCube run, so far

US soldiers getting manicures

Len Lye’s Tusalava

Found Audio:
Beethoven Op. 132, Budapest Quartet

Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles

Burial, Come Down to Us (Hyperdub 2013)

Ambient music for Len Lye’s Tusalava by Andrew Pask

Realized in a re-purposed bank in Detroit, Place and Borrow is an interactive performance work for actor and media. The piece was developed for G. Louise Cooper, who gave the performance and installed the work in the multidisciplinary art space Grand on River as part of MicroMacro Art Biome (catalogue pdf). The video was shot by Remi Slade-Caffarel.

The basic premise of the piece is that somehow, through the process of installing the exhibit, the formerly abandoned bank has woken up to find itself an art space. It channels its dual nature through a head teller/performer and attempts both to continue its business as a bank and performance venue. This is America, 2016.

The media includes bismuth, lead, paper, string, bio-plastic, a wireless, head-mounted camera, projector, and a remote control vehicle.

A detailed description of the piece, script, and other relevant materials can be found here.

Photos of the piece can be found here.

found footage
original text and audio

original footage.