LIVE WIRES
Currents 2022: Circuits
Immersed in the shifting light and two-stepping along the colored squares of the dance floor, you’ll be making your own music. All you have to do is move. Rumpus Room for Dancers (2021), a project by Colorado-based artist Brad Gallagher, was created during the pandemic, when it wasn’t safe or practical to do performance pieces before live audiences. Using 3D motion-capture technology, Gallagher developed a space conducive for a single dancer to move about. A 3-by-3 virtual grid of rectangular pillars, each one divided into sections, provides 27 points in space which trigger musical sounds when intersected by the user. A tracking device attached to the user triggers an additional series of pre-set sounds based on the movements of the body.
“You can get some fairly complex sound going as you move through this piece,” says Frank Ragano, co-owner with Mariannah Amster of Parallel Studios and producer of Currents New Media, the annual festival of technology-based contemporary art.
Gallagher’s new media installation is on view at the Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 505-982-1338, ccasantafe. org), one of two main venues hosting Currents. And its second major venue — the Santa Fe County Fairgrounds (3229 Rodeo Road, 505471-4711) — gives Currents its largest area of city-wide coverage yet.
“We went over there initially thinking we were going to be putting up a tent of some kind, but they have a 5,000 square-foot building,” says Amster about the addition of the fairgrounds, which will be Currents first time at the venue. “It’s solar powered. It’s on the south side, which we hope expands our audience.”
The work in Currents is focused on projects developed using electronic media, including digital art, single- and multi-channel video, interactive art, sound art, robotics, and 3D printing.
Participating venues include SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 505-989-1199, sitesantafe.org), Parallel Studio’s year-round exhibition space, Currents 826 (826 Canyon Road, 505-772-0953, currentsnewmedia.org), and Form & Concept (435 S. Guadalupe St., 505-780-8312, formandconcept.center), which is showing Arizona-based artists Shomit Barua and Christine Cassano’s Degrees of Granularity (2021).
Barua and Cassano’s project is an ephemeral sound sculpture composed of more than 500 paper-thin, translucent pieces of porcelain. Stacked on top of a black mirror, the friction of the bone-like pieces is captured by motion-reactive audio, which produces a subtle tectonic vibration. As the pieces clink against each other, the porcelain is slowly ground into dust.
Degrees of Granularity opens in conjunction with the festival on Friday, June 17, and is on view through Oct. 1.
In addition to art and technology related projects, Currents features a lineup of multimedia performances, including Survey, a series of half-hour outdoor, pop-up performances by local group Theater Grottesco at the fairgrounds (1, 2, and 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 18, and June 25), and Alive Painting, an audio and visual performance piece involving digital projection of live gestural painting by Tokyo-based artist Akiko Nakayama (8:30 p.m. on June 25 at SITE Santa Fe). — M.A.