Indeterminacy 2024
GOVERNORS ISLAND
MAY 28 - JUNE 9, 2024
MAY 28 - JUNE 9, 2024
Indeterminacy Festival 2024 Overview
For the 2024 season the New York Arts Program partners the Indeterminacy Festival's artistic director Stanzi Vaubel inviting artists to participate in a network of performances at Governor's Island called Fourteen Porches. These porches, where the opening performance occurs, become the metaphor for the festival in that they mediate between each self-contained structure and the space that surrounds it, each discipline and the artistic territory into which it might expand. Rather than consider the arts as a matter of isolated autonomous structures or disciplines, then, Fourteen Porches explores the way these structures break out of their traditional domains and connect to each other both literally and metaphorically.
Established artists will collaborate closely with a team of apprentices to create new work for the public. Premiers will take place on June 7 and 8 as part of a two-day festival line-up including new work by Melanie Aceto, Emilie Clark, Volkmar Klein, Simon Lee, Eve Sussman, Lili Maya, and James Rouvelle. The Festival, Directed by Vaubel, will open with a site-specific performance, Fourteen Porches, from which it takes its name. With original music by Philip Treuille and Vaubel, involving a community choir, chamber orchestra, youth musicians, and dance, the performance will be set on fourteen porches in Nolan Park. Following the festival, invited artists will participate in an incubator program from June 10th-August 9th focused on developing new work for the 2025 Festival.
Established artists will collaborate closely with a team of apprentices to create new work for the public. Premiers will take place on June 7 and 8 as part of a two-day festival line-up including new work by Melanie Aceto, Emilie Clark, Volkmar Klein, Simon Lee, Eve Sussman, Lili Maya, and James Rouvelle. The Festival, Directed by Vaubel, will open with a site-specific performance, Fourteen Porches, from which it takes its name. With original music by Philip Treuille and Vaubel, involving a community choir, chamber orchestra, youth musicians, and dance, the performance will be set on fourteen porches in Nolan Park. Following the festival, invited artists will participate in an incubator program from June 10th-August 9th focused on developing new work for the 2025 Festival.
Established artists will collaborate closely with a team of apprentices to create new work for the public. Premiers will take place on June 7 and 8 as part of a two-day festival line-up including new work by Melanie Aceto, Emilie Clark, Volkmar Klein, Simon Lee, Eve Sussman, Lili Maya, and James Rouvelle. The Festival, Directed by Vaubel, will open with a site-specific performance, Fourteen Porches, from which it takes its name. With original music by Philip Treuille and Vaubel, involving a community choir, chamber orchestra, youth musicians, and dance, the performance will be set on fourteen porches in Nolan Park. Following the festival, invited artists will participate in an incubator program from June 10th-August 9th focused on developing new work for the 2025 Festival.
Eve Sussman, Simon Lee, and Volkmar Klein riff on the form of quintessential American soap opera, Nolan Place — a new audience activated performance by Simon Lee, Volkmar Klien and Eve Sussman — imagines the tightly knit community on Governors Island to create a circular narrative taking place in and around House 17 in Nolan Park. NYARTs fellows and members of the public use in-ear monitors to receive FM transmissions that communicate their roles in an intrigue that weaves through the house.
Emilie Clark designs Costumes for Survival, a wearable, living sculptural project that anticipates a future in which all we need is carried on our backs: our own personal, fexible spaceship set for living in a more than human world, a world where such material must be repurposed, multi-functional, protective, habitable, and shareable. These wearable constructions are informed by the adaptability of plants and animals, and address the challenges and opportunities of life in water, air and soil in the face of climate change. The sculptures created for the festival are from the category of Air, the domain for hanging and soaring and part of their function will be to give birth to props for the dancers in Fourteen Porches.
Lili Maya and James Rouvelle build a new installation in an abandoned house on Governors Island (17 Nolan Park). Trace Reverb Trace envisions a self-sustaining artiffcial ecology reclaiming its built environment. For this piece, Maya + Rouvelle will be working with a group of Fellows/Apprentices in a collaborative process that explores the concepts of a community and the collective through making. Thus, Trace Reverb Trace will be generated from the oscillation between the parallel efforts of individual members of the community and the integrated efforts of the collective with a common goal.
Melanie Aceto choreographs a new site-specific work for the opening performance Fourteen Porches designed for the central quad of Nolan Park. In the spirit of Indeterminacy, the live music and dance piece employs improvisational structures in relation to the space. Twenty core dancers and fourteen interdisciplinary apprentices animate the historic park creating a visual durational spectacle with movement and over five hundred feet of white parachute silk.
The Indeterminacy Festival was founded in 2016 by performer and media artist Stanzi Vaubel in the grain silos of Western New York, IF is focused on creating exceptional opportunities for lifelong artists. The festival envisions an artistic landscape in which community and professional groups perform side by side in unusual site-specific settings. Working in the disciplines of music, dance, visual, and the performing arts, the Indeterminacy Festival builds an intergenerational experience in the pursuit of making meaning in the 21st Century.
The New York Arts Program is designed to provide those students seriously interested in the performing, visual, and media arts with an opportunity to serve as apprentices and to experience the world of established professional artists. The cultural resources of New York are well known. Less familiar is the artist's milieu - that mix of people, places, and events which constitutes the artist’s environment, world, and immediate audience.
Lead Artists
Emilie Clark
large-scale props/costume
Emilie Clark
large-scale props/costume
Emilie Clark is a New York based interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited her work internationally in museums and galleries. She also works collaboratively and is currently the artist component for a National Science Foundation award that explores the urban subsurface in light of climate change. Different developments in her project “Sweet Corruptions” were exhibited in solo shows at Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY) the Nevada Museum of Art, (Reno,NV), the San Jose Museum of Art and the Lynden Sculpture Garden (Milwaukee, WI) where she continues to work with the local public schools on her science through art project. Clark represented the sin of “gluttony” at the Katonah Museum (Katonah, NY), as part of the Seven Deadly Sins project in 2015. Other exhibitions include Wave Hill (NY), the Royal Hibernian Academy (Ireland), the Children's Museum of the Arts (NY), the Weatherspoon Museum (NC), and the Hunterdon Art Museum (NJ). Clark was the first (of four) artist fellows at The Drawing Center from 2015-2015. In 2010 Clark was the first Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
Clark's work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Bomb, Printed Project, Cabinet Magazine, Art in America, Art Week, and Hyperallergic. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock Krasner and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio fellowship. She was an Artist Fellow at The Drawing Center in New York City from 2013-2015. Clark has also collaborated and published books with poets including The Traveler and the Hill and Hill 1999, and The Lake 2001, with Lyn Hejinian (Granary Books). With her husband, Lytle Shaw, she has published several books and co-edited Shark, a journal of art writing and poetics. Clark has collaborated extensively with scientists, primarily in ecological, environmental and medical science and her work has appeared in many publications including The Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, Journal of Experimental Medicine and Journal of Cell Biology.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Clark received her BFA from Cornell University in 1991, and moved to New York City from the Bay Area in 1998. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2002. Clark is currently the Executive Director of Ohio Wesleyan's New York Arts Program. She lives in New York City with her two boys, Cosmo and Luca, and husband, Lytle Shaw and her studio is in the South Bronx.
Clark's work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Bomb, Printed Project, Cabinet Magazine, Art in America, Art Week, and Hyperallergic. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock Krasner and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio fellowship. She was an Artist Fellow at The Drawing Center in New York City from 2013-2015. Clark has also collaborated and published books with poets including The Traveler and the Hill and Hill 1999, and The Lake 2001, with Lyn Hejinian (Granary Books). With her husband, Lytle Shaw, she has published several books and co-edited Shark, a journal of art writing and poetics. Clark has collaborated extensively with scientists, primarily in ecological, environmental and medical science and her work has appeared in many publications including The Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, Journal of Experimental Medicine and Journal of Cell Biology.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Clark received her BFA from Cornell University in 1991, and moved to New York City from the Bay Area in 1998. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2002. Clark is currently the Executive Director of Ohio Wesleyan's New York Arts Program. She lives in New York City with her two boys, Cosmo and Luca, and husband, Lytle Shaw and her studio is in the South Bronx.
James Rouvelle
sound/visual media
James Rouvelle
sound/visual media
i taught myself how to write music as a child as a means to recreate improvisations i made at the piano. in retrospect my early works were in a style similar to Morton Feldman, whom i had never heard. i soon began to compose works of written and improvised parts for unusual combinations of instruments, including electronics in what is now termed circuit bending. i attended a performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck as a teenager and dedicated myself to studying Western Art Music. i abandoned my earlier efforts and became a more traditional composer and performer.
that phase lasted over a decade until i realized that the experiences i wanted to investigate were not sufficiently available to me in the timespace of that genre. that's not to say i don't love a lot of that music, but i had to move elsewhere.
i'm now an artist collaborating with lili maya as maya + rouvelle.
we work with emerging and traditional media, processes and concepts, including robotics, computation, custom optics, sound, sculpture, installation and drawing.
most of my creative actions are intended to foster a free relationship with one's environment while rendering the contemporary world imaginable.
that phase lasted over a decade until i realized that the experiences i wanted to investigate were not sufficiently available to me in the timespace of that genre. that's not to say i don't love a lot of that music, but i had to move elsewhere.
i'm now an artist collaborating with lili maya as maya + rouvelle.
we work with emerging and traditional media, processes and concepts, including robotics, computation, custom optics, sound, sculpture, installation and drawing.
most of my creative actions are intended to foster a free relationship with one's environment while rendering the contemporary world imaginable.
Lili Maya
sound/visual media
Lili Maya
sound/visual media
For the past few years, I've been collaborating with artist James Rouvelle as part of the Maya + Rouvelle artist duo.
Maya + Rouvelle began in 2009 in New York. We integrate traditional and emerging media into objects and installations that change over time often in response to environmental variables. Electronic and computational media, fixtures of contemporary culture, add material and conceptual dimensions to our work. At present, sound and performance play prominent roles in our collaboration.
Personally, I enjoy working with fragments, with the edges of things and what they suggest about systems (psychological or physical / natural or constructed). Edges bring the work closer to gaps where binaries collapse/blur/integrate/oscillate — where ambiguity may reveal truth.
Maya + Rouvelle began in 2009 in New York. We integrate traditional and emerging media into objects and installations that change over time often in response to environmental variables. Electronic and computational media, fixtures of contemporary culture, add material and conceptual dimensions to our work. At present, sound and performance play prominent roles in our collaboration.
Personally, I enjoy working with fragments, with the edges of things and what they suggest about systems (psychological or physical / natural or constructed). Edges bring the work closer to gaps where binaries collapse/blur/integrate/oscillate — where ambiguity may reveal truth.
Lee Boroson
Lee Boroson
Lee Boroson is an artist whose practice has focused primarily on large-scale relational and experiential works sited in interior spaces. Often textile based and sometimes using inflated structures, these temporary works have been exhibited in museums and galleries, including, Mass Moca, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. His work presents a nuanced take on our perceptions of nature. For the artist, “landscape” is positioned between man-made cultural constructs and wilderness. To explore this, he creates immersive installations, which emulate “natural” experiences for his viewers, based on ineffable elements in nature: air, fog, smoke, fire, matter and emptiness in outer space. Boroson's installations are both embodied and ephemeral; they transform material and experience.
In his most recent project, Boroson approaches the experiential in a much more personal and intimate way, investigating both what and how we eat through a flatware project. Design is a primary focus as this project memorializes sterling silver objects that are recycled/melted down to be hand forged into forks and spoons for everyday use. The flatware is simple, ergonomic, and unornamented. The project approaches the place that art occupies in our domestic lives, creating an intimacy between the viewer/user and the art. Lee Boroson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
In his most recent project, Boroson approaches the experiential in a much more personal and intimate way, investigating both what and how we eat through a flatware project. Design is a primary focus as this project memorializes sterling silver objects that are recycled/melted down to be hand forged into forks and spoons for everyday use. The flatware is simple, ergonomic, and unornamented. The project approaches the place that art occupies in our domestic lives, creating an intimacy between the viewer/user and the art. Lee Boroson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Eve Sussman
performance/interactive media
Eve Sussman
performance/interactive media
Eve Sussman (born in 1961) incorporates film, video, sculpture, and architecture in her work. In 2003, she founded Rufus Corporation, an ad hoc think-tank of collaborators whose video installation 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004) premiered to international acclaim at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The twelve minute looping video is an imaginative recreation of Velázquez's painting Las Meninas (1656). Other works by Rufus Corporation include The Rape of the Sabine Women (2006) and an experimental algorithm-generated movie, whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir (2011). Sussman's work has been shown internationally in exhibitions at the Bass
Museum of Art, Miami; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, London, UK; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Museum of Art, Miami; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, London, UK; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Simone Lee
performance/interactive media
Simone Lee
performance/interactive media
Volkmar Klein
performance/interactive media
Volkmar Klein
performance/interactive media
Growing up in Vienna Volkmar Klien (*1971, Hollabrunn, A) spent his childhood engulfed in the city's rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background Volkmar Klien today strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. He works in various areas of the audible and occasionally inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.
His works have been widely recognized, exhibited, performed and presented. He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien (Vienna, A) he composed music to a full evening ballet, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.
Throughout his career he has collaborated with his choreographer brother Michael on numerous performative projects exploring relationships between sound, bodily movement and human communication. Works stemming from this ongoing collaboration have been produced and presented at the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ballet Frankfurt, the Hayward Gallery London, and - most recently - by the Martha Graham Company in co-operation with the New Museum (NY).
Volkmar Klien's work has been awarded numerous prizes and awards, amongst these are the Media Arts Prize of the City of Vienna, State Scholarships for Composition of the Republic of Austria, an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, the Max Brand Prize for Electronic Music, the Scholarship of the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra, the Alban Berg Stipendium and the Gustav Mahler Prize for Composition.
In his artistic work Volkmar Klien can draw on experience gained in academic research. Having received a PhD in electroacoustic composition from the City University London he has held research positions at the Royal College of Arts in London, the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He is a professor for composition at the Anton Bruckner University (Linz, Austria).
His works have been widely recognized, exhibited, performed and presented. He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien (Vienna, A) he composed music to a full evening ballet, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.
Throughout his career he has collaborated with his choreographer brother Michael on numerous performative projects exploring relationships between sound, bodily movement and human communication. Works stemming from this ongoing collaboration have been produced and presented at the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ballet Frankfurt, the Hayward Gallery London, and - most recently - by the Martha Graham Company in co-operation with the New Museum (NY).
Volkmar Klien's work has been awarded numerous prizes and awards, amongst these are the Media Arts Prize of the City of Vienna, State Scholarships for Composition of the Republic of Austria, an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, the Max Brand Prize for Electronic Music, the Scholarship of the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra, the Alban Berg Stipendium and the Gustav Mahler Prize for Composition.
In his artistic work Volkmar Klien can draw on experience gained in academic research. Having received a PhD in electroacoustic composition from the City University London he has held research positions at the Royal College of Arts in London, the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He is a professor for composition at the Anton Bruckner University (Linz, Austria).
Melanie Aceto
choreography
Melanie Aceto
choreography
Melanie Aceto is a dancer, choreographer, educator and researcher whose creative interests are in interdisciplinary solo and large group works. Melanie's choreography has been performed internationally in Toronto, Guatemala City, Guatemala and Bogotá, Colombia, nationally at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and at venues in Philadelphia, North Carolina, Atlanta, Virginia, Kentucky, and in New York City at The Kitchen, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Ailey CitigroupTheater, The Duplex Cabaret and John Ryan Theater, among others, and in Buffalo, NY at venues including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. She regularly collaborates with composers, designers and poets presenting work in non-dance venues including silos, warehouses, moving barges, museums, and store front windows, among others. Notable works include Cloud, a piece conceived and created in collaboration with architect/designer Michael J. Rogers, for six dancers using over 3,000 square feet of plastic to create a fluid and fluctuating environment, and Liaison, a work for piano and dancer conceived by and made in collaboration with composer Megan Beugger.
Melanie's research interests include investigating models for teaching dance composition and modern technique and creating resources for both. Her work has been published in The Journal of Dance Education and Dance Education in Practice, and has been presented at National Dance Education Organization conferences, the Joint Society for Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance conference, and the Women in Dance Leadership conference. Current projects include Choreographic Lineage, a web-based resource presenting the lineage of dance artists www.choreographiclineage.buffalo.edu and the Digital Dance Access working group.
Melanie earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo.
Melanie's research interests include investigating models for teaching dance composition and modern technique and creating resources for both. Her work has been published in The Journal of Dance Education and Dance Education in Practice, and has been presented at National Dance Education Organization conferences, the Joint Society for Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance conference, and the Women in Dance Leadership conference. Current projects include Choreographic Lineage, a web-based resource presenting the lineage of dance artists www.choreographiclineage.buffalo.edu and the Digital Dance Access working group.
Melanie earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo.