A Synesthete's Atlas - Eric Theise & Carl Ritger
Denver, Colorado, United States
Counterpath
Real time cartographic improvisations using projected, manipulated digital maps by Eric Theise, in live improvisatory collaboration with Denver-based guitarist and sound artist Carl Ritger, whose prepared lap steel and modular sampler approach will provide a deeply textural counterpoint to the visual wash of street grids, land masses, water bodies, and curiosities from built and natural environments. Saturated colors and the subtlest of tints. Aural grit and shadowy resonance. Glitches in crowdsourced data. Jittery zooms and pans. Liminal drones. Orphaned information and free-floating symbology.
The performance will last 50 minutes and will occasionally introduce strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers.
The evening opens with Jose Antonio Villarán reading from his recently published Open Pit.
Doors: 7:30p. Reading/performance: 8p
A Synesthete's Atlas premiered in Lisbon in April 2022 and has since been performed in a dozen-plus East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, and Front Range cities.
Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based artist and geospatial software developer, in Denver for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. Through video and realtime performance tools he reinvigorates the perceptual inquiries of structural filmmakers and the Light and Space movement, occasionally incorporating letterform experiments inspired by concrete poetry, as new possibilities in the realm of digital cartography.
Carl Ritger, FKA Radere, is an improviser, composer, and sound artist hailing from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Currently living and working on Colorado's Front Range, his work spans the shadowy gulf between drone, noise, and musique concrète, compositing guitars, electronics and location recordings into densely textured sonic environments. His recordings have been published via many independent labels, including Great Circles, Full Spectrum, Moodgadget, and Going In, among others.
Jose Antonio Villarán is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (2006) & el cerrajero (2012); one book of translation, Album of Fences (2018); and creator of the AMLT project, an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship. Villarán holds an MFA in Writing from UCSD and is a PhD candidate in Literature at UCSC. He lives in Davis, California, with his son.