A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise and Trē Seguritan Abalos
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Creative Coffee & Supply
Real-time cartographic improvisations using projected, manipulated digital maps by Eric Theise in collaboration with Trē Seguritan Abalos improvising soundscapes with flutes, samples, and looping electronics. A visual wash of street grids, land masses, water bodies, and curiosities from built and natural environments. A sonic wash of winds. Orphaned labels and free-floating symbology. Elusive melodic lines. Saturated colors and the subtlest of tints. Rhythmic textures. Jittery zooms, pans, and traversals. Glitches in crowdsourced data.
This performance will last approximately 50 minutes and will occasionally introduce strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers.
Backstory
Since its Lisbon premiere in April 2022, Eric Theise has performed A Synesthete's Atlas in collaboration with local musical improvisors in dozens of East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, and Rocky Mountain cities. He combines visual strategies from experimental film & animation, the Light and Space movement, 1960's light shows, and visual poetry with open source software and open data to create digital maps that behave in ways never anticipated by their developers. Theise's performances have been described as anti-cinema, post-cinema, and pre-cinema, as well as truly radical cartography.
NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society, brings its annual meeting to the Sheraton/Station Square from 11-14 October 2023. Dovetailing lecture and performance, Theise will speak in the meeting's session, Outside the Neatline: Maps in Any Medium on Thursday, 12 October at 4p, and perform with Trē Seguritan Abalos at Creative Coffee & Supply on Saturday, 14 October at 8p. Nothing can surpass an audience made up of cartographers plus enthusiasts of expanded cinema, avant garde music, and experimental typography.
Bios
Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based artist and geospatial software developer. Through video and realtime performance tools he reinvigorates the perceptual inquiries of structural filmmakers, experimental animators, the Light and Space movement, and 60's light shows, occasionally injecting letterform experiments inspired by visual poetry, as new possibilities in the realm of digital cartography. 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.
Theresa Seguritan Abalos / Trē is an improviser and sound artist based in Pittsburgh. She creates experiences of sound and language to explore themes of belonging, body, and identity.
As a collaborative flutist, Trē improvises with artists, poets, and dancers including electronic musicians BusCrates and Adam Kantz, poet Chiwan Choi, artists Likha Jae and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. Most regularly she improvises with the Pittsburgh Sound Preserve, where she is also Communications Director. She performs around Pittsburgh at venues such as Telephone, The Government Center, Spirit Lodge, Mr. Small's Theater, City of Asylum, Bottlerocket Social Hall, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
As a writer, Trē has a blog on topics from classical training and free improvisation to personal essays and creative writing about identity, body, and diaspora.
As a teaching artist, Trē offered workshops on creative expression & entrepreneurship through Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra & Youth Chamber Connection.
Trē graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 with a BXA degree in Flute Performance & Global Studies. In 2019 CMU published an article about her research on the meanings & roles of música folclórica in Argentina, which she presented at the Society of Ethnomusicology in Buffalo, NY.
A daughter of Filipino immigrants, Trē deeply grateful to her parents, to Alberto Almarza and many others.