Building Visions: Photon/Pixel/Photon
Advance Beauty (Video Sound Sculptures) and Live Performance by Nate Boyce
Thursday, April 9, 2009

Part of Exploratorium After Dark
Thursday Evenings Mix Cocktails, Conversation and Adult-Oriented Programming on Science and the Arts

Bar opens at 7pm
Screening runs 7-9:30pm; Performance begins at 8pm

Advance Beauty (Video Sound Sculptures) and Live Performance by Nate Boyce make up the Photon/Pixel/Photon event at the Exploratorium, a performance-screening that takes place on Thursday, April 9 at 8pm as part of new extended Thursday evening hours at the Exploratorium in April that mix cocktails, conversation and adult-oriented programming on science and the arts. Programs are playful, unusual, content-rich, and often involve cutting-edge media. Not a theater, not a cabaret, not a gallery—but involving aspects of all three—After Dark has a mood unlike anywhere else in the city. Where else can you find an intellectually stimulating playground for adults—with free parking? This event is included in the price of admission.

Advanced Beauty
7-9:30pm

An ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators, and architects, Advanced Beauty is a series of digital artworks inspired and influenced by sound. In these video sound sculptures, computer algorithms create moving images that react to changes in the volume, pitch, or timbre of music.

The films in Advanced Beauty were made using a visual programming language called Processing, high-end audio analysis, and fluid dynamic simulations alongside traditional, hand-drawn cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters: their work must start, finish, and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, a shared environment wherein a single, floating pixel could be as engaging as a multicolored explosion.

Curated by Universal Everything and the musician Freeform, Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration, taking in a family of artists from London, Russia, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Glasgow, and San Francisco. Online at http://advancedbeauty.org

Performance: Nate Boyce
McBean Theater
7:30pm

Artist and musician Nate Boyce presents an audiovisual performance fusing digital and analog materials into a phenomenologically anomalous continuum. Oscillating between highly formalized permutations and raging turbulence, his real-time manipulations of extremely complex audiovisual timbres are simultaneously hypnotic and disorienting.

Nate Boyce is a video artist and musician who lives and works in San Francisco. His videos explore the thresholds of perceptual ambiguity. Through a wide range of customized analog and digital tools, his work explores the inherent plasticity of electronic sound and image. He has performed and exhibited at galleries and film festivals such as the New York Underground Film Festival, Deitch Projects, Center For Contemporary Art Glasgow, the Wattis Institute, Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, the Aurora Picture Show, Club Transmediale, Scope Art Fair, Monkeytown, The Stone, Galerie Alt Neu Brukte, and Queens Nails Annex.