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 Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront

a gathering around movement, science and the environment in New York City

April 17 2015 | 6pm – 8 pm

The South Street Seaport Museum: Melville Gallery | 213 Water Street New York NY

Panel & Discussion | Reception to follow

[Read more…] about iLAND Symposium Panel | April 17, 2015

JUST LIKE THAT | Led by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky

Saturday April 11 1-4pm | Guest Star Ebony Noelle Golden

Kymberle Project: 1332A Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216

 Sunday April 12 1-4pm | Guest Star Nicole Bindler

Tesseract: 22 Midwood St, Brooklyn, NY 11225

How can we use what we know from the dance floor – whether in the studio, at the club, on stage, or in ritual spaces – in street actions for justice? in collective decision-making? in the many spaces we move through as socially engaged inhabitants of our city?  What happens when we take ‘the choreography of social movements’ seriously, and work to develop it as a way of getting things done concretely?

Each afternoon we will explore different aspects of embodied knowledge and political movement, through bodily experimentation in the studio and in public space.  Guest stars Ebony Noelle Golden (Saturday) and Nicole Bindler (Sunday) will guide us through their ongoing work and new experiments.  We’ll try out street tactics for confrontational situations; collaborative approaches to bodily presence in public space that trouble the line between symbolic and material impact; somatic strategies for staying connected to ourselves and our aims; and improvisational tools to cultivate non-verbal group communication and decision making.  We’ll test new hypotheses and adapt old ones to new circumstances.  We’ll articulate what our bodies already know, and develop ways of building on it through both words and movement.

April 11: Ebony Noelle Golden’s Fire/Water: Performance Beyond Protest is an intensive cultural organizing and solo performance workshop for artists and non-artists invested in everyday performances of love, vision, resistance, and renewal. The session, comprised of unique blend of socio-cultural devised performance and creative design, culminates in a sharing of community-sourced tools and boundary-pushing performances for radical community transformation. We will meet at Kymberle Project (1332A Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216). Take the A, C, or S to Nostrand Station.

April 12: Nicole Bindler will facilitate experiments with somatics and improvisational performance practice in the context of political action. We will investigate how the skills of the dance-artist translate into the street. We’ll begin in a quiet studio with a Body-Mind Centering® warm-up focusing on the experiential anatomy of the skeleton. This somatic practice will prepare us for engagement with others. Then we’ll do simple contact improvisation partnering to integrate the skeletal work with another person. We’ll increase the size of the groupings until we are dancing all together in ensemble. Then we’ll go outside and see how we can maintain the grounding and clarity of our studio practice in the street. With more sensory stimulation, we’ll notice when we become saturated and develop strategies to stay connected to ourselves and our underlying purpose. We’ll use the tools of improvisational performance practice to cultivate non-verbal group communication and decision making in the moment. We will meet at Tesseract (22 Midwood St, Brooklyn, NY 11225). Take the Q, B, or S to Prospect Park Station.

Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky is a cultural worker and organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House. Can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them – outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, meals…  Never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone. Multi-generational radical and queer – just another gendertreyf apikoyrus mischling fem dyke who identifies with, not as.  JUST LIKE THAT draws on experience as an on-stage dancer, a going-out-dancing dancer, and a participant in street actions over two decades, as well as puppetry and spectacle theater work. Recent projects have included “Hysterical Translations” (solo work at Dixon Place); “The Greatest Show on Earth in a Cardboard Box” (with Ariel Speedwagon, at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics’ 2014 Encuentro); J Dellecave’s “Angry Women REvisited” (HERE Performing Arts Center & Dixon Place’s HOT Festival); several endeavors with choreographer Abigail Levine; and co-editing “Dreaming In Public: Building the Occupy Movement” with Amy Schrager Lang.  Ongoing work includes continuing the Critical Reperformance series (so far including works by Schneeman, Jonas, Warhol, and Abramović); hitting the streets with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s Tactical Spectacle dance & performance team; creating radical Jewish extravaganzas with the Aftselokhes Spectacle Committee; and Palestine solidarity work with the Jewish Voice for Peace Artists & Cultural Workers Council.

Ebony Noelle Golden believes “we are the ones, we have been waiting for,” as June Jordan’s prophetic line of poetry continues to remind us.  Golden, a Houston, Texas native, works at the intersecting pathways of arts, culture, and education with individuals and organizations pushing for community-powered cultural change. Ebony is a cultural strategist, facilitator, performance artist and poet.  She has been awarded fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Cave Canem Foundation, to name a few.  Her creative work has been anthologized, staged, and taught nationally and has recently been presented and produced by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre and Bronx Academy of Art and Dance. After a stint as a literature and creative writing professor in Durham, North Carolina, she decided her talents as an organizer, public scholar, and creative artist would be better spent activating “radical expressiveness with community.”  In 2011, Ebony funneled her passion for entrepreneurship, youth development, culture shift, justice, education and the arts into Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC, a cultural arts direct action group based in Harlem.

BDAC specializes in cultural and performance art curation, dramaturgy, devising, and staging of theatrical works for stage and public spaces, as well as offering a wide range of organizational and community development support.  The company is named after her now retired mother, professor, and community organizer, Dr. Betty Ann Sims.  The group boasts an impressive roster of collaborators that includes some of the nation’s most forward-moving institutions which includes: Alternate Roots, 651 Arts, MAPP International, Urban Bush Women, National Black Theatre, The Highlander Center for Research and Education, Youth Development Institute, The Laundromat Project, Cool Culture, and Camille A. Brown and Dancers.

Ebony Noelle Golden earned a B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Texas A&M University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Poetry from American University, and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. www.bettysdaughterarts.com.

Nicole Bindler is a body-based performing artist whose work is inspired by her training in new dance, dance-theater, Contact Improvisation, Butoh, Body-Mind Centering®, Yoga, and Feldenkrais. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Berlin, Tokyo, Beirut, Mexico and Quito, Ecuador. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (through Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts), the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, FringeArts, Philadelphia Dance Projects and the Community Education Center. Bindler holds a B.A. in Dance and Poetry from Hampshire College, a degree in Muscular Therapy from the Muscular Therapy Institute and certificates in Embodied Anatomy Yoga, Embodied Developmental Movement and Yoga and Somatic Movement Education from the School for Body-Mind Centering. She is on the adjunct faculty at University of the Arts and Temple University in Philadelphia. She is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Artist Council, a member of Mascher Space Cooperative, a writer for thINKingDANCE and one half of the duo The Dance Apocalypse. http://www.nicolebindler.com

Collect Pond: The Urban Backstage
Led by Elliott Maltby and Theo Barbagianis
Saturday June 20, 2015 from 2:30pm-4:30pm
Lower Manhattan, meeting at Capsouto Park

The walk will explore the Urban Backstage in the context of the history of Collect Pond and NYC’s water infrastructure. We will examine the inter-connection of ecological and social histories, the changing perspectives and strategies in relation to water, and the notion of the backstage as it relates to both of these themes. The backstage is where urban residents can rehearse, rather than perform; where proscriptive programming is minimal, allowing for a more individually defined, and perhaps more intimate, use of public space. The backstage is the counterpoint of branded public space, a space to be found and explored, to wonder about, to wander around, a place to speculate. It is a provisional place, one for testing ideas, to practice imperfectly. A survey of New York City backstage spaces demonstrates a common pairing of productive spontaneous ecologies and aging infrastructure. This has led to thinking of the city’s urban infrastructure as another kind of backstage space, where the mechanics of how the city works are generally hidden.

Please bring water and comfortable walking shoes.

Elliott Maltby is also a founding partner of thread collective and an Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program at Pratt Institute. She believes that art and design can improve the sustainability and vitality of urban public space; she is particularly interested in how communities co-opt and transform derelict and peripheral sites throughout New York City.  Working both in academic settings and within a collaborative design firm , she is actively engaged in the dialogue of theory and practice. thread’s current work includes lowlands, a design proposal looking at improving the social and ecological performance of the Red Hook Houses’s open space through green infrastructure. Additionally, she has been an active board member of iLAND [interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Design] since 2009.

thread collective is an multi-disciplinary design studio in Brooklyn, NY with a strong commitment to sustainability. thread explores the seams between building, art, and landscape, stitching the diverse elements of the built environment to their ecological and social context through innovative design and research. Elliott Maltby has a Master’s in Landscape Architecture with a concentration in urban design; Mark Mancuso and Gita Nandan received Master’s degrees in Architecture. Hybridization is integral to their practice, and the studio has served as a platform for collaboration with a broad range of designers, artists, scientists, and policy makers.

Theo Barbagianis is a Project Engineer for eDesigns Dynaimcs, NY. He performs calculations, modeling, and analyses relating to hydraulics and hydrology and manages the design and construction of green infrastructure projects throughout New York City.  His projects include assisting in the design and managing the construction of a treatment wetland in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, designing a bioretention facility in Bronx River Park in The Bronx, and designing over 20 right-of-way bioswales in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Theo performed research as a graduate student on the use of green infrastructure in urban stormwater management as well as on the spatiotemporal impact of wastewater point sources on nitrogen pollution. Theo has also worked for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Wastewater Treatment, where he managed the design and construction of pumping station upgrades throughout the five boroughs.  Theo holds a B.S. in Chemical (Environmental) Engineering from the University of Southern California and an M.E. in Civil Engineering, with a focus in environmental engineering and water resources, from The City College of New York.  He is also a licensed professional engineer in New York and Connecticut.

Community Examines Itself / Somatic Sense Collection with Typewriters
Led by Andrea Haenggi and Robert Neuwirth
Saturday April 25 1-4pm & Sunday April 26 1-4pm
The corner of Franklin Avenue & Fulton, Brooklyn 

Join choreographer Andrea Haenggi and writer Robert Neuwirth for a 2-day research workshop in which participants acts as “somatic sensing poet scientists” of the public realm, noticing and engaging with the Crown Heights community’s social choreographic patterns to find its hidden narratives.

On Saturday, April 25, we will ask, “What do we want to collect and how do we want to collect it/embody it?” As we explore these questions through movement and play with manual typewriters we touch on time, space, atmosphere, character, actions, obstacle, and objects. On Sunday, April 26, we will return to the street to record, reconcile, and deepen our observations and discoveries. Our somatic writing documentation of this historic multi-ethnic neighborhood, whose diversity is being threatened by gentrification and development, will be compiled into an e-booklet, which will be available online under a creative commons license.

Meet at 1pm at the corner of Franklin Avenue & Fulton in Brooklyn, across from Dunkin Donuts at 1149 Fulton St. Take the C train to Franklin Avenue Station.

Andrea Haenggi (Swiss born) is a Brooklyn dance-based interdisciplinary conceptual artist, choreographer, performer, and teacher. Her current creative practice investigates the medium of the body, the visual culture and the site, giving each project the freedom to take diverse forms and evolve as its own ecosystem. Her live-performance projects aim to go beyond ”production” with a sense of participatory engagement and are concerned with issues such as power/powerlessness, consumerism, identity in diversity, and “why are we alive?” From 1998-2009, her company, AMDaT, deconstructed movement, visual design, site specificity, and technology to gain a new language of expression. Starting in 2010, she initiated Direct Action Flâneurs, a series of public performance interventions to question authorship and ownership. In 2013, she embarked on the 5-year project ‘1067PacificPeople’ by creating a place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for live-interactions to search for the value and diversity of the ‘body’. Her projects have been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, LMCC Sitelines Festival, World Financial Center Arts & Events, MASS MoCA, Boston Cyberarts Festival abroad at Tanzhaus Zurich, the New Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the SPAN (Lagos, Nigeria) among others, and in many public places in New York City. Honors include the Solothurn Dance Award (Switzerland, 2008), a Digital Fellowship (DTW, NYC, 2006), and a Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant (2005). She has taught somatic-dance workshops in the USA, China, Nigeria, and Switzerland and as a Certified Movement Analyst is on the faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.

Robert Neuwirth is a writer whose books on society and economy are helping to frame a new conception of equitable development. His most recent book, Stealth of Nations, explored the rise and promise of the underground economy. Shadow Cities, published in 2005, argued that shantytowns are normal urban neighborhoods and that governments should engage with the residents of these informal communities. His TED talks have been viewed by more than half a million people and his work has been featured in films, on radio and television, and in many publications. He has taught in the college program at Rikers Island, New York City’s jail, and at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a community organizer and studied philosophy. He is currently at work on a new book that probes the power of community to rein in the excesses of the free market.

Creating Habitat – One Year Later

Led by Kathleen McCarthy and Paloma McGregor

Thursday June 25 10am-2pm

Soundview Park

A year after the laboratory at Soundview Park’s new salt marsh restoration, join us to examine the water quality of the Bronx River at this site. This iLAND laboratory will explore the function of wetlands in improving water quality and providing habitat. The event will include background readings, a walk through the site discussing the processes and functions of the four ecosystems present, physical interaction with the site by adding to or subtracting from the restoration at various scales, and creating movement which responds to the site physically and conceptually. Additionally, this year human impacts on the restoration may be evident. We will explore evidence of the human footprint and the challenges to protecting biodiversity in an urban environment.

Participants should plan to get dirty. Wear long pants and bring socks to wear with rubber boots (provided). Hats and sunscreen are necessary. Please also bring snacks and/or lunch and water.

Van transportation for 12 people will be leaving from Manhattan. Meet at El Museum del Barrio (1234 Fifth Ave between 104 & 105 St.) at 9am. Please email projects@ilandart.org to reserve a spot!

We encourage you to review these readings about salt marshes and estuaries before Thursday:

https://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/pub/seascience/dynamic.html

Wildlife of NY-NJ Esturary

This workshop is supported by and in partnership with the Natural Areas Volunteers (NAV) of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (http://www.nycgovparks.org/registration/nav). The Soundview Salt Marsh Restoration is funded in part by the New York State Department of State under the Clean Water-Clean Air Bond Act and the City of New York.

Kathleen McCarthy is a restoration ecologist working with the Natural Resources Group (NRG) of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Kathleen plans, manages, and oversees the implementation of wetland, riparian, and aquatic resource restoration projects. She received a Master of Science in Ecology and Evolution from Rutgers University with a concentration on urban ecology. The natural areas in New York City range from renowned habitats of Jamaica Bay to natural areas that are severely impacted by humans. Understanding the complexities of these ecological systems, and how to conserve biodiversity by maintaining or restoring ecosystem functions is the focus of Kathleen’s work. She believes that stewardship of our natural areas helps to inform our understanding of ecosystem functions, the larger environment, and our place within it. Before working as a full time scientist, Kathleen was an award-winning visual artist in New York City. Her work has been published, exhibited internationally, and commissioned for permanent public sites. Her most recent work was an investigation of animal vision.

Paloma McGregor is a choreographer, writer, and organizer living in Harlem. An eclectic artist, she has structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River, choreographed an Afro-futurist pop opera at The Kitchen and devised a multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at UC Berkeley. She is director of Angela’s Pulse, which creates and produces collaborative performance work dedicated to building community and illuminating bold, new stories. Paloma’s work has been supported by grants and creative residencies from the Jerome Foundation; iLAND; Earthdance; Wave Hill; Voice & Vision; Dance Exchange; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Foundation for Contemporary Art. In 2012-13 she collaborated with Bronx-based environmental educator Damian Griffin on Follow the Water Walks, supported by an iLAND residency. Together, in consultation with ecologist Becky Boger, they developed interdisciplinary methods for engaging communities with their natural and man made landscapes using mapping, science, and dance. Paloma is a 2014-15 Artist In Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, where she will develop a solo iteration of her iterative performance project, Building A Better Fishtrap. The project, rooted in her 89-year-old father’s vanishing fishing tradition, examines what we take with us, leave behind and return to reclaim. Paloma toured internationally for six years as a dancer with Urban Bush Women, and continues to perform in her own work as well as project-based work with other choreographers, including Liz Lerman, Cassie Meador and Jill Sigman.

Photograph by Meredith Talusan

Kayak Expedition in Pelham Bay Park
Led by Charles Dennis
Sunday June 7 9am -12pm
Pelham Bay Park (Orchard Beach)

The expedition will begin at the kayak launch site at the northwestern end of Park Drive on the Orchard Beach parking lot. We will kayak from this point around Hunter Island, at the northern tip of the park, east around Courtney’s Bay Island, and back. Participants will be encouraged to take photos and videos during the expedition and Charles Dennis will combine these into a video document of the expedition.

Please meet us at the Orchard Beach Parking Lot on Park Drive. Kayaks will be available for participants to use through a generous partnership with HarborLAB. Participants can also bring and use their own kayak. Attendees should wear clothing that can get wet – shorts or a bathing suit are recommended as well as a hat and sunscreen. Appropriate footwear is also important – sandals, sneakers or water shoes to protect feet when walking in the water. Additionally, attendees should bring water and a sandwich or a snack; as well as any documentation materials they desire including sketchpads, cameras, and/or journals.

Attendance is limited to 10 people, dependent upon kayak availability. Please RSVP below to reserve a space.

Above Middle Below

Led by Athena Kokoronis, Chris Kennedy, Leila Mougoui Bakhtiari, and Jan Mun

Sunday May 17 1-4:30pm

Fort Greene Park

Above Middle and Below is a three-part laboratory dedicated to formulating ideas for an Open Movement score through collaboration facilitated by Leila Mougoui Bakhitiari (urban ecologist), Christopher Kennedy (teaching artist), Athena Kokoronis (choreographer), and Jan Mun (artist-scientist). Part One is dedicated to presenting and mapping Fort Greene Park’s social and ecological relationships. Part Two focuses on formulating and performing in an Open Movement score. Part Three is dedicated to conversation and archiving our collaboration together.

We will meet at the top of the hill at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park (look for the large quilt). Call Athena (347) 831-4051 to confirm location if weather is questionable. Please wear comfortable shoes and clothes to move in. Participants are welcome to bring a paper, writing instruments, and drawing tools if desired. Please RSVP below. 

Christopher Lee Kennedy is a teaching artist who works collaboratively with schools, youth, and artists to create site-specific projects that investigate queer identity, radical schooling, and material culture. These projects generate publications, research, performances, and ongoing exchanges that celebrate the collective knowledge of a place and its forgotten histories. Recent projects include an intergenerational free school in North Brooklyn called School of the Future, an ongoing dance project using fungi as a material and metaphor for connectivity (StrataSpore), and the Queer Explorers Club, a publishing platform for queer youth, designers and artists. Kennedy hails from the shores of Ocean County, New Jersey and has lived/worked for the past 4 years in Greensboro, NC where he served as the education curator for Elsewhere, a living museum and artist residency program set inside a former thrift store. Kennedy is currently living in Brooklyn, NY where he is an Assistant Professor in art and design education at Pratt Institute. Kennedy holds a B.S. in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a M.A. in Environmental Education from NYU, and a PhD in Education Studies from the University of North Carolina. http://christopherleekennedy.com

Athena Kokoronis is a cross-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. Her works are usually collaborative, research-based and involve food, dance, and cloth. Her current project is the opening of a performance space, The Domestic Performance Agency, which will be launching this winter. Athenakoko@gmail.com

Leila Mougoui Bakhtiari is an urban ecologist currently working as a research assistant with the Natural Resources Group of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.  She received a B.S. in Environmental studies with a focus on urban ecosystems from The New School. Her work with Parks focuses on urban forest health studies, and restoration efforts in NYC natural areas. She is also the co-chair of the urban forestry committee with Gowanus Canal Conservancy.

Jan Mun is a NYC-based media artist that creates social sculptures. Using a combination of artistic and scientific processes, Jan is an amateur mycologist, microbiologist, and beekeeper working in collaboration with communities to innovate ways to communicate with each other and the larger public.

Mar Sea Sol

Led by Meredith Drum, Grisha Coleman, and Estrella Payton

Sunday June 21 4-7pm  & Sunday June 28 4-7pm

Pelham Bay Park

Mar Sea Sol will take place on two Sundays, June 21 and June 28, starting at 4pm and ending at 7pm in Pelham Bay Park. We will meet at the Salsa Sunday dance event on Orchard Beach, then stride along the famous beach, circumnavigate Hunter Island and engage in place-centering exercises at points along the way. We will hold mid and post activity discussions about the place immediately before us, discuss overlapping thoughts regarding personal, political and social representations of this location, and consider correlations to other seaside spots, particularly in the Caribbean. We will ruminate on perceptions of home and holiday; familiar and strange; city and country; belonging and nonconformity. An area of interest is in investigating the colonial history of the Bronx and that of various Caribbean Islands. What impacts of our colonial past are still in motion? Are these histories physically evident in our natural and cultural landscapes? Large bodies of water have surfaces impenetrable to our eyes; the sea can seem unknowable and intractable. Is this what keeps drawing us to it? How does this impact our time at the seaside and our sense of the history of these sites?

Activities will include somatic exercises – simple and accessible for all people – which will ground participants in body and in place. We will tune ourselves to the unique location and engage in sense mapping: colors (bathing suits, beach toys, birds); sounds (radios, cooking, playing); smells (suntan lotion, salty water, cooking); and skin sensations (temperature, heat, cool, wind, damp, dry). We will draw en plein air, observing human and non-human life, and the interchange between the two. Part of the walk will center on the beach, another on the nature trails. There will be a choice of activities, yet we will encourage all participants to salsa at our meeting spot – the Salsa Sundays dance floor at Orchard Beach.

Participants can take public transportation to Pelham Bay Park by taking the 6 train to the Pelham Bay Park station and walking to Bruckner Blvd and Wilkinson Ave. Take Bx12 Bus to Orchard Beach. Meet the group at Salsa Sundays at Orchard Beach at 4pm. We will have a bring-your-own picnic at the Orchard Beach picnic tables. We will supply simple basics: chips, fruit, cookies, water. Participants can either bring a protein or buy something at concession stands. 

Estrella Payton is an artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Her current work focuses on making visible the invisible barriers between people. Payton is an observer of people, especially their interactions with each other in a space. Her research on power and privilege, racial formation in the U.S., cultural conditioning, and systemic inequity combined with her lived experience as a Stateside Puerto Rican, drives her motivation to complicate physical spaces to reorient a viewer’s experience and perspective in an institutional space. Formally trained as a printmaker, her artwork explores the use building materials, drawn gestures, text, and collaged images to create physical barriers, constructed spaces, and installation experiences. Payton has exhibited nationally and has been the recipient of several non-traditional artist residencies. She was a participant of the Itinerate Summer, a 21-day walk along the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico, organized by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz of Beta-Local. Payton earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri (2007) and is expected to receive an MFA at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ (2015).

Grisha Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Dance at Arizona State University [http://ame.asu.edu].  A dancer, composer, and choreographer in performance and experiential media systems, she is the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts in Media grant for the development of her current project, echo::system, recently presented at ISEA 2013, ArtxScience in Los Angeles and the New Media Art Triennial at the National Art Museum in Beijing, China. An invited research fellow/artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry [2008], she was commissioned by the Robotics Institute at CMU to create a public, site-specific robot in Pittsburgh’s downtown. Reach! Robot, a public sound sculpture, a kinetic installation and a domain for public interaction and participation inspired by the conduction techniques of Butch Morris. A graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, with an MFA in Composition and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, she danced as a member of the acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women [1990-1994], and subsequently founded the music performance group HOTMOUTH, which toured extensively nationally and internationally, and was nominated for a 1998 NYC Drama Desk Award for “Most Unique Theatrical Experience.” She is a member of the Board of Directors for Society of Dance History Scholars.

Meredith Drum makes linear documentaries, short fictions, experimental animations, interactive exhibitions, and mobile media projects. She has recently exhibited her work in New York City, Dubai, Mexico City, Rio, Brighton, Paris, Copenhagen, and Valencia. She regularly collaborates with artist Rachel Stevens. They have been commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to produce Fish Stories: community cookbook and environmental resource as part of the 2015 summer programs at Pier 42 in New York City. She and Stevens are also producing Oyster City – a constellation of projects and events that draw attention to the relationship between urban life and marine ecology, especially in relation to the history and future of oysters in NYC. One component of Oyster City is an AR walking tour and game featuring 3D objects and text in real space visible with an iOS device. Meredith’s research considering augmented reality, somatic communication and social critique has been published in scholarly journals including Media-N, spring 2012 (New Media Caucus), and AR(t) Magazine, winter 2013 (Royal Academy of Art, Netherlands). Drum is an Assistant Professor, School of Art, Arizona State University. She has also served as a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Originally from North Carolina, Drum lived in New York City for 14 years before moving to Arizona in 2013.