Kate Ladenheim

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This work is a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Kate Ladenheim and the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where Ladenheim is currently in residence. The RAD Lab engages in interdisciplinary research bridging the areas of robotics, high-level control, movement representation, Human-Robot Interaction, and dance. This collaboration involves an evolving collective of artists, engineers, dancers, and scientists using movement, design and machinery to create performance. Our team aspires to a truly interdisciplinary collaboration, where we disrupt and challenge traditional approaches, prioritizing interdependence over discrete project roles. For example, our choreographer knows how to wire the circuit board; the technician responsible for breath research and costume fabrication is a skilled dancer who knows the choreography; our lead engineer has a deep understanding of the challenges of performance settings; and our lab director is obsessed with details, like the amount of tape we use to secure connections on the prototype.

 

Ladenheim, as an independent artist, makes work that explores the interaction of bodies, media, and digital interfaces. She leans heavily into stereotype and archetype, embodying them through gesture, body language & spatial arrangement as well as highly designed scenic environments. She uses her work to demonstrate the ways that feminine bodies are disproportionately affected by technology and social pressure.

 

LaViers

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LaViers, as director of the RAD Lab, leverages her experience as a female in engineering, working close to the machine, drawing on the kind of bravery that is required to put oneself up against a device that spits out correct and incorrect answers. LaViers’ dance practice reflects her understanding of how machines and bodies work, often aiming to lift the curtain and explicate the inner workings of technology and highlight the audience’s own power over them. The artists have both been called “cute” in personal and professional contexts — an externally defined characteristic that can strip away the power to lead, influence, and decide, veiled in the form of a culturally perceived compliment. Thus, they have built Babyface, an installation with live choreography and audience interrogation that that attempts to make this experience literal and re-live-able for their audience. Together, their work explores how the interaction of bodies and machines can sharpen and/or subvert expressions of identity, specifically expressions of gender. They center motion- human and artificial- as an essential underlying factor of that expression, embodying a vocabulary of performed femininity broadcast in exaggerated tones by interactions with machines. In standing next to machines as performers, and inviting audiences to participate, they are responding to a certain sensationalism that occurs as a result.

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Courtney Brown

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Courtney Brown is a sound artist, researcher, computer engineer, and tango dancer. She creates new musical interfaces in which the act of creating sound is transformative in some way. People become dinosaurs by blowing into a hadrosaur skull, creating their own roar. Social dancers become musical ensembles. Her work has been featured and performed in North America, Europe, and Asia including Ars Electronica (Austria), National Public Radio (NPR), Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), International Computer Music Conference (Korea), ACM Movement and Computing Conference (Italy), Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) Conference (Salt Lake City), New Interfaces for Musical Expression/BEAM Festival (London), Frequency Festival (Chicago), the Telfair Museum (Savannah) and Modified Arts Gallery (Phoenix). Her interactive sound installation and musical instrument, Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls received an Honorary Mention from the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica. She also received a Fulbright Fellowship to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she began work on her ongoing project, Interactive Tango Milonga, creating interactive Argentine tango dance. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Center of Creative Computation, Southern Methodist University. She received her D.M.A in Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University, her M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and her B.S. in Music and Computer Science from Loyola University New Orleans

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Chantelle Ko

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Ko grew up in Victoria, BC, and is a classically trained violinist and a premier highland dancer. She graduated from UBC, with a BA Double Major in Music and English Literature, Minor in Applied Music Technology. During her undergrad she was in the UBC Laptop Orchestra and collaborated with musicians, dancers, visual artists, and engineers to make interactive works. At the University of Calgary, she continues to study the relationship between gesture tracking and sound for her Master of Music in Sonic Arts degree. She has also been involved in other academic studies such as augmenting props for improvised theatre, improvising intercultural Turkish music, and assessing the accessibility of music hacking events. She also currently teaches violin in person and online.

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Momilani Ramstrum

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Momilani Ramstrum is a composer, singer, visual artist, PD programmer, and interface designer. As a vocal improviser she performs with live electronics using her patented MIDI glove that she designed and created. She authored a DVD-ROM entitled "From Kafka to K...." documenting and analyzing Manoury'selectronic opera K... published by IRCAM. She wrote a chapter in Simoni's Analyzing Electroacoustic Music published by Routledge. Wave Media LLC has published her 7 music theory textbooks with interactive website drills and tournaments that create and evaluate student learning based on gaming theory rather than traditional academic models. Dr. Ramstrum is Professor of Music at Mesa College.

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