Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of live sound and visual performances by foci + loci (Chris Burke & Tamara Yadao) and MV Carbon as the 9th of 10 performance events taking place as part of our exhibition “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)”.
foci + loci’s collaborative works involve live manipulation of the Sony PlayStation game “Little Big Planet”. The duo, composed of New York-based artists Chris Burke and Tamara Yadao, uses instruments, machines, and scenery among others that they build within the platform and code to operate within a range of broad and randomized possibilities. Burke and Yadao state: “The machine becomes a player in a sense.” “Affordable Machines: Bramble” is a new expanded version of their 2015 “Bramble”, involving 2-channel video and featuring extended opportunities for machine and human hand to “collaborate”.
In her new performance “The Muscle to the Woods and Back”, MV Carbon builds a dense sonic texture from repetition generated by magnetic tape loops, her modified cello, as well as amplified found objects. The artist utilizes video to activate the audience’s participation in mimicking the visuals, as she moves around and projects onto walls, sculptures she made and other elements installed in her environment.
foci + loci
“Affordable Engines: Bramble", (2015-2019)
This newest iteration of foci + loci's "Bramble", is a two-channel custom video game environment which the artists operate in live performance. A ghostly musical instrument rises out of the shell of a broken down player piano in the desert. A bush made up of electrical wires and circuit boards grows algorithmically nearby. Day and night pass at an accelerated rate. As the performers navigate through and around the bramble, it blooms and evolves, while its underlying code makes as many choices as the musicians.
foci + loci's practice is reliant on proprietary digital tools. We test a game engine's limits by prodding, poking and breaking the system. The idiosyncrasies of the tested code allow us to create systems with high levels of machine agency, affording a relationship between the machine and the player/performers. This relationship emphasizes codified connections to events in a responsive numerical space, played out through an improvised, musical conversation with the system. — foci + loci
MV Carbon
“The Muscle to the Woods and Back”, 2019
The Muscle to the Woods and Back is a performance and sound piece that accumulates rhythm through repetitive motion created by swinging objects, disembodied cello bodies, and amplified vessels. Video projection is applied to various objects and the audience is encouraged to participate in the memorization and replication of the sequences of events. Sculptural objects become part of the sonic environment. Cello, tape manipulation, and amplified objects, sweep the listeners into a torrent of sonic waves. — MV Carbon
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foci + loci evolved through a fascination with the malleability of virtual space paired with an interest in electroacoustic improvisation leading the duo (Tamara Yadao and Chris Burke) to design spaces that could be “played” as instruments. foci + loci received a NYSCA grant for 2013 to develop their full scale game art performance installation ‘Bal(l)ade’. Tamara received an American Composers’ Forum grant in 2015 commissioning the music for foci + loci’s “Another Kind of Spiral” which premiered at Cluster Festival in Winnipeg with a performance at Centre Georges Pompidou following soon after. Other performances and exhibits include GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY in the 21st Trienniale of Milan, Vector Festival in Toronto, Rethinking Affordances at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Babycastles, The Stone and Joe’s Pub in NYC, among others.
MV Carbon’s intention is to heighten our sensory awareness, while amplifying the level of ritual, rhythm, and momentum in sound and movement. Embracing non-traditional approaches to “music”, she uses cello, magnetic tape, gongs, amplified objects, electronics, extended techniques, and crafted artifacts. Her current work crosses and connects media such as film, installation, music, painting, performance, sculpture, and text; while exploring subjects such as interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, and the empirical force of nature. MV Carbon lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.