Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn
The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS), along with Green College UBC are launching an exciting new research series, Emerging Visions: Digital Media and Culture.
Digital media are rapidly changing the exploration and creation of arts and culture. Artistic experimentation and cultural research have adopted a dazzling array of digital tools and technologies to make art and examine cultural practices. This series presents innovative artists and scholars from across North America who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary creative and critical practice. They will share their ideas, innovations, and original perspectives.
The first talk, Embodied Sensibilities – Between Research and Creativity, will happen this Wednesday, September 11 from 2-3:30 in CCS 142.
In this talk Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn will reflect on the relationships between tradition, creativity, technology and innovation in their artistic practices. They will discuss how cultural identities are projected through performance and how these identities extended through technology.
Dr. Curtis Bahn’s research interests are firmly grounded in the development of techniques for the performance of interactive music in an intercultural context. His research has established itself in a number of significant outcomes in interactive performance of electroacoustic music; he has developed, performed and written about gestural and motion capture interfaces for dance and movement performance including work as a featured composer and collaborator in the NSF funded Motion project at Arizona State University, performed widely playing his extended electronic sitar with gestural sensor interface, recording 2 DVDs at the Los Angeles Roy and Edna Disney Concert hall as performer and composer for the intercultural robotic “Machine Orchestra,” and conducted research on a number of relevant issues in electronic performance including physicality, haptics and tactile feedback, robotics, acoustics of the sitar and Hindustani musical ensemble.
Dr. Tomie Hahn is an artist and ethnographer and is an Associate Professor in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. She is a performer of shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance), and experimental performance. Her research focuses on the transmission of embodied cultural knowledge, the senses, and creativity. Her wider research interests include the relationship between technology and culture, identity, gestural control, endeavoring to find new vehicles for how contemporary performance can “tap” into embodied knowledge for new forms of expressivity.
For more information on the series, visit our web site: http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/fccs/research/areas-of-expertise/media/emergingvisions.html