A Synesthete's Atlas - Eric Theise & upright bassist Ari Smith
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Mills Folly Microcinema
Real time cartographic improvisations using projected, manipulated digital maps by San Francisco-based artist Eric Theise, in live collaboration with local bassist Ari Smith's sounds ranging from warm spectral drones to fragile sparsities, A visual wash of street grids, land masses, water bodies, and curiosities from built and natural environments. Saturated colors and the subtlest of tints. Auditory roundabouts and redirections. Glitches in crowdsourced data. Gerrymandered geographies. Jittery zooms and pans. Acoustic cul-de-sacs. Orphaned information and free-floating symbology.
The performance will last 50 minutes and will occasionally introduce strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers.
Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based artist and freelance geospatial software engineer. His current practice combines strategies from experimental film & animation, color theory, the Light and Space movement, and concrete poetry with open source software and open data to create digital maps that behave in ways never intended by their developers. He projects and manipulates these maps in performance with musicians and other time-based artists under the title A Synesthete's Atlas. After its Lisbon premiere in 2022, Theise performed in Minneapolis and a variety of East and West Coast cities. Early 2023 sees performances in the San Francisco Bay Area, Colorado from Fort Collins to Pueblo, and in Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee. European and East Coast performances are in the works for later in the year. Theise's earlier 16mm experimental films have screened across the United States and Canada, and in France, and he’s performed as a vocalist with the Cornelius Cardew and Long Tone Choirs in various San Francisco Bay Area locations.
Ari Smith is a bassist, improviser, and composer spanning genres of jazz, experimental, and contemporary classical music, currently based in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at UW Madison. In the Wisconsin area, Ari has been a particularly active member of the free jazz and free improvisation scenes, both with his trio Laminal Animil, and sharing the stage with artists such as Hanah Jon Taylor, Vincent Davis, Jim Baker, and Isaiah Collier. In his improvisation and through-composed work, Ari strives to explore the material technologies of performance, such as instruments and scores, as boundary objects/“power tools” that mediate and redistribute agencies across humans and nonhumans, as well as the promiscuous use of academic citation styles as a demonstration of dedication to others and as a creative-expressive practice situating works within interdisciplinary conceptual webs and traditions.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.