Installation Performances, Night Two

Soon/ Now/ Gone with Erik Ruin & Rosie Langabeer
Asimina Chremos and Hua Hua Zhang. 6:16 (sunset)–9 p.m.

Aspect 281 with Carolyn Healy & John JH Phillips
BEEP, directed by Adam Vidiksis. 6–6:30 p.m. / 7–7:15 p.m. / 8–8:30 p.m. / 9–9:30 p.m.

Transonic Orchestra, featuring Miya Masaoka (koto and electronics), Layale Chaker (violin), Dan Blacksberg (trombone), gamin (saenghwang and piri), Shinjoo Cho (bandoneon), Nick Millevoi (e-guitar), Kinan Abou-Afach (cello and oud), Adam Vidiksis (electronics and percussion), and Gene Coleman (musical direction). 6:30–7 p.m. / 7:30–8 p.m. / 8:30–9 p.m.

Audio-visual work from John JH Phillips. 7:15–7:30 p.m.

Moon Viewing Platform (Waxing Gibbous Moon) with Nadia Hironaka, Matthew Suib, & Eugene Lew
6:26 (sunset)–9 p.m.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. 

Anaïs Maviel. 

Bismuth Quartet, performing “lens flare from Alpha Centauri” (composed by Joshua Hey). 

​Asimina Chremos​
Asimina Chremos is a Philadelphia-based dance artist with the remarkable ability to transform the ordinary into the ineffable. Her wide-ranging career is a work of art in and of itself, having evolved from beginnings as ballet dancer with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater to femme-drag performance art, experimental improvised music and dance collaboration, and freeform crochet art exhibition. As a performer, her poise, integrity, and fearlessness is utterly captivating. 

Using costume and light, Chremos will perform a series of solo processions along Shamokin Street (whose name means “place of eels” in Algonquin); meditating on the past, present, and future of the throughway and the movement of time, energy, and matter along its corridor. She is inspired by the life-giving flow of local tributary waters now hidden underneath area streets; as well as the reverberations of industry in the area, particularly the massive Baldwin Locomotive Works which once dominated the Callowhill district.

Hua Hua Zhang
Hua Hua Zhang is an internationally acclaimed puppet artist trained in both Ancient Chinese tradition and Western puppet art. Born and raised in China, Hua Hua came to the United States in 1996, and her artwork reflects the diverse influences she has experienced on her journey from East to West. Zhang’s impressive 30-year career to date includes creating original experimental puppet art productions with her own installations and theatrical works. She has had solo exhibitions including Dragon Boat Dream at the Philadelphia Airport. She has been traveling around the world to perform for composer Tan Dun’s orchestra IV “The Gate,” and as a visual artist with Kunyang Lin/Dancers for several of the company’s shows.

Zhang has created a large, evocative paper puppet woman inspired by the river that flowed through the site prior to the railway. She will be performing a site-specific piece multiple times throughout the evening along Shamokin Street.

Transonic Orchestra
Is it possible to understand the complex process we call globalization through the arts? Is it possible for people from different cultures and traditions to understand each other better through artistic experiences? And how are those experiences shaped by ideas about innovation, tradition and new media?

In 2003 and 2004, composer and Site/Sound curator Gene Coleman was the artistic director of the festival “Transonic: New Sound Experience,” which took place at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

This was an ambitious effort to examine the ideas and work of bold musicians who challenge what the words “contemporary” “traditional” and “experimental” mean in the context of a rapidly transforming global landscape. In the ensuing 15 years, Coleman has continued his exploration of hybrid, transcultural music, collaborating with musicians from Japan, China, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Germany, Italy, and other countries, often combining live music, electronics, and video. After working recently with groups in Europe that explore similar terrain, Coleman has launched the Transonic Orchestra, which is made up of great musicians based in Philadelphia and New York, all of whom have very impressive careers as musicians and composers. These musicians come from a diverse, wide range of musical practices and traditions and seek to create a new kind of music in a new kind of way. The musicians live and work in the United States, but originate from many points around the world, illuminating the ways in which immigration enriches our society every day.

For the debut performances in the Site/Sound festival, the group takes images of signal architecture (including brain wave data in the form of visual and sound patterns) and re-purposes them as a musical score. They will also create musical dialogues with elements of the installation Aspect 281, bringing together sight and sound in unexpected ways.

BEEP (Boyer Electroacoustic Ensemble Project), directed by Adam Vidiksis
Founded in 2013 by Adam Vidiksis at Temple University, BEEP embraces a variety of aesthetics and styles, from EDM to the avant-garde. They function in varied forms: from a laptop orchestra, to fusion of computers and traditional instruments, to an electronic music band. BEEP uses the laptop orchestra model, an ensemble of computer-based meta-instruments, as but one of many possible modes of music making using computers and other electronics.

For their performances at Aspect 281, Vidiksis and BEEP are creating special compositions that relate to railroad communications systems, which anticipate the computer-based communication systems we use today. They will use some of the same source material as artists Carolyn Healy & John JH Phillips have used to create Aspect 281.

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is an artist and multi-instrumentalist who works with voice in the realm of spontaneous music, often under the moniker Lichens. Most recently, he has created patch pieces with a modular synthesizer, and singing to these pieces has been a focus of live performances and recordings.

Anaïs Maviel

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer, and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. Involved at the crossroads of mediums—music, visual art, dance, theater, and performance art—she has been an in-demand creative force for an eclectic range of artists. She is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction of cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing and transformative act. She performs and teaches extensively in New York, throughout North, South and Central America, and Europe.

Bismuth Quartet

Bismuth Quartet plays improvised string quartets, with Carlos Santiago and Gabe Miller on the violin, Veronica Jurkiewicz on the viola, and Carolina Diazgranados on the cello. “lens flare from Alpha Centauri” is comprised of five short movements, each played attacca to form one continuous whole. The title conjures a symbolic web associated with the cinematographic technique as applied to the closest star system to our sun: dislocation, darkness, infinity, cold, the expressivity of distortion, space, light, weightlessness…

Joshua Hey

Joshua Hey is a composer living in Philadelphia as a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been performed by musicians such as the Daedalus Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Dal Niente, PRISM, Omaha Symphony, Quatuor Bozzini, and soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain. Festivals and venues which have presented his music include IRCAM-Manifeste, Nokia Bell Labs, MATA, Time of Music, RED NOTE, and the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. He is the winner of the 23rd Martirano Award and a Copland House Residency. In 2014–15, he was a visiting scholar at the Sibelius Academy with a grant from the American–Scandinavian Foundation.