Jakub Ciupinski Composer/Performer is a Polish composer living in New York City. Although his music is often associated with electronics and interactive performances, he has written numerous pieces for traditional acoustic forces, varying in scope from solo miniatures to an hour long Oratorio for symphony orchestra and double choir. At the age of 18, he signed a contract with Sony Music Poland and since then has been recording electronica-infused world music under the stage name Jakub Żak. The release of his third studio album is scheduled for 2011. Jakub Ciupinski’s concert music has been commissioned by various institutions and ensembles including Metropolis Ensemble, The New Juilliard Ensemble, The New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, as well as the world-famous violinists Anne Akiko-Meyers and Philippe Quint. His works have been performed around the world, including prestigious venues such as Tonhalle in Zurich and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York. Ciupinski is a co-founder of Blind Ear Music, New York based group of composers and instrumentalists performing improvised, real-time compositions, using wirelessly connected laptops as musical score displays. He has also designed his own instrument for performing electronic music using hand gestures. He has collaborated with a variety of artists, musicians, choreographers and film directors, including Oscar winning director Andrzej Wajda, and scored the music for United Nations documentary “Opening Doors”. Ciupinski studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse at The Juilliard School, Zbigniew Bujarski and Krzysztof Penderecki at the Cracow Academy of Music, and with Edwin Roxbrough and Joe Cutler at the Birmingham Conservatoire.
Ian M Colletti Composer is a New York City born composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, artist and curator of art. He records, performs and operates out his arts studio better known as the venue “Vaudeville Park”. His most recent projects have been his Noir Night, and live scoring/ soundscaping for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, New Dance works, Film and Video works. Currently, Ian is preparing to release and perform his 2012 highly anticipated return record “On the Hudson” under his newest incarnation “Vaudeville”. The coldest wave of new vocal music, inspired by a lifetime along the Hudson River’s deepest and darkest blue. Ian has collaborated, written music with, scored for or played showcases with Jandek, members of The Residents, Sonic Youth, TV on the Radio, Akron Family, Pattern is Movement, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Glenn Branca’s Orchestra, Movement Research, Trisha Brown Choreographers, and Martha Colburn among others. For past bands, releases, itunes and more info visit www.ianmcolletti.com
Paul D’Agostino Artist is a painter, writer and translator living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he also curates art exhibits at Centotto, housed in the living room of his shared loft. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian Literature and is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at CUNY Brooklyn College, where he also works in the Art Department as a writing advisor. D’Agostino writes in and translates among a number of different languages, primarily Italian, German, French, Spanish and English, and he is Contributing Art Editor at The L Magazine, Assistant Editor of Journal of Italian Translation and co-founder of an art blog, After Vasari. His poetry and prose have appeared in several different Brooklyn-based magazines, and his mixed-media, often language-based artworks have been featured in many group exhibits, mostly in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. His solo-show Appearance Adrift in the Garden was recently exhibited at Norte Maar. D’Agostino’s contribution to The Brodmann Areas is a video projection, Motivi esteriori e così via, in which the artist splices together variably altered still images from several bodies of artwork to create a pastiched montage of color fields, patterns and excavated details.
Denis Pelli Collaborator is the Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University and Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge University (2011-2013). Pelli studied applied math at Harvard (BA ’75 magna cum laude) and vision at Cambridge (Physiology PhD ’81), with Campbell and Robson. Since 1995, he has been Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. “I have worked on the visual requirements of reading and mobility, on visual testing (e.g. the Pelli-Robson Contrast Sensitivity Chart), and on characterizing the limits of visual perception. I am now studying object recognition, especially sensitivity and crowding.” Pelli was awarded the Optical Society of America Leadership Award/New Focus Prize, 2000.
Lawrence Swan Collaborator, aka “Lars,” is a Brooklyn-based neo-folk artist painter, etc. He had been underground for decades and involved with poetry, performance and self-publishing. He has a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he primarily studied with Julian Stanczak and Edwin Mieczkowski. After art school he was offered an assistantship at Cleveland State University’s philosophy department, where he earned an MA. His paintings were recently exhibited in a two-person show with Lori Ellison at Valentine Gallery, Ridgewood. He is the author of two blogs: Panic in The Zero Decade and New Clean Blog, which is a kind of online sketchbook and studio visit. His Art Bum Comics was available online for a while and is now in a clay jar hidden in a cave near the Dead Sea. He contributes text and vocal apparatus to the Audio Artists electric music combo. Swan recently participated in an evening of Norte Maar’s Cage Transmitted performing Prepared Text In At Least Four Dimensions (2012). This is his first ballet production. “Julia told me we are not here to solve problems, but to create them, and I think the problem of choreographing a theory of neuroscience is a special instance of the mind-body problem. Brodmann Areas, everybody gotta dance.”
Audra Wolowiec and Margo Wolowiec Collaborators are sisters and both interdisciplinary artists collaborating for the first time. For their contribution to The Brodmann Areas the pair using gestures of line and language, translating a thread drawn across a page into a call and response of shorthand writing and spoken word. Incorporating ideas that link movement with neurological activity, parallels are drawn to Broadmann Area 6. Activity within this region is critical to the sensory guidance of movement and control. This area also contains cells called mirror neurons: neurons that activate both when a person acts and observes the same action performed by another. These neurons “mirror” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, the line of thread currently joins the two sisters from New York to California. Audra is based in Brooklyn and received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and Margo is currently in the MFA program at the California College of Arts in San Francisco. Audra has shown work at Magnan-Metz (New York), Pocket Utopia (Brooklyn), and the Museum of New Art (Detroit). Art in General commissioned an audio work in 2010 and her sound score was featured in Norte Maar’s multi-media collaborative ballet In the Use of Others for the Change in 2011. Margo has shown work at BAC (Brooklyn), Root Division (San Francisco), and Uri Gallery (Seoul, South Korea). She was recently a visiting critic at the Textile Art Center in New York and co-directed Janus Project, an alternative gallery space in Brooklyn.