A Synesthete's Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise and Fernando Feria
Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
Taller Sociedad
Real-time cartographic improvisations using projected, manipulated digital maps by Eric Theise, in collaboration with sound artist Fernando Feria. A visual wash of street grids, land masses, water bodies, and curiosities from built and natural environments. Orphaned labels. Free-floating symbology. Acoustic roundabouts and cul-de-sacs. Saturated colors and the subtlest of tints. Jittery zooms, pans, and traversals. Glitches from crowdsourced data.
The performance will last 50 minutes and will occasionally introduce strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers.
7:30pm doors, 8pm performance; donations gladly accepted
Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based artist and geospatial software developer. Through video, performance, and works on paper he reinvigorates the perceptual inquiries of structural filmmakers, experimental animators, the Light and Space movement, and 60's light shows – with the occasional injection of letterform experiments inspired by visual poetry – as new possibilities in the realm of digital cartography.
Theise manipulates projected digital maps in performance with musicians and other time-based artists under the title A Synesthete's Atlas. Since its Lisbon premiere in 2022, Synesthete's has been performed in thirty-plus North American and European cities. Throughout February 2024 his animated If Map #5 looped on the eight-story high display that crowns San Francisco's Salesforce Tower, the second tallest building west of the Mississippi River. At the end of 2024, in Amsterdam, Theise editioned a portfolio of screenprinted maps that were in aesthetic dialogue with Eduardo Paolozzi, Corita Kent, and other Pop practitioners from the 1960s.
Theise's earlier 16mm experimental films have screened across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and he’s performed as a vocalist with the Cornelius Cardew and Long Tone Choirs in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lapsed academic, he holds a Ph.D in Industrial Engineering/Management Sciences from Northwestern University, and has written for scholarly and popular publications.
Fernando Feria is a composer, sound artist and educator whose work intersects the studies of the body, improvisation, coding and communal memory. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition from the Academia de Arte de Florencia, studied Cinematography at the Altra Fílmica Film Studies Center, and studied SuperCollider under Dr. Iván Naranjo.
Fernando's work seeks to integrate diverse knowledge and perspectives, often leading him to collaborate with artists and researchers from various disciplines. His practice spans multichannel acousmatic installations, written contemporary pieces, performance, and music releases mixing influences from free improvisation, noise, ambient and glitch; by these means, he investigates ways to encode, transmit, and preserve networks of memory.
He was a recipient of the Young Creators Grant from the Support System for Creation and Cultural Projects (SACPC, formerly FONCA) for 2023–2024. As a composer, his work has been awarded by the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra (2020, NYC) and the Leonardo Da Vinci String Orchestra (2019, Mexico City), and has been presented in cities such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, California, New York, Montevideo, Santiago, and La Plata.
An advocate for interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches to sound practices, Feria founded an independent study space in 2022 focused on exploring sound arts through these lenses. He has taught courses in Semiotics, Composition, and Pure Data programming at the Universidad Libre de Música in Guadalajara and has participated in art and technology colloquiums hosted by the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also an active member of the collaborative projects La Kriego, No Para Siempre, Phi Movement, and OSSMO. (long)