2012-12-26

my installation in Deep light exhibition with 桑雅劇場Sannyas Theatre


I got invited to exhibition my installation work in Deep light exhibition with 桑雅劇場Sannyas Theatre at  Mad L. I will be attending the performances as well. those who's interested in Butoh, especially in Kazuo Ohno. pretty amazing space, too..(Taipei)

我的錄像裝置在桑雅劇場的深光展覽  對舞踏或大野一雄有興趣的人一起來看表演吧 

Thank you Fanny Chou for all the support and help curating the exhibition space

Exhibition Date:  12/20 - 12/31


Deep Light
Deep Light is a series of experimental works/performances created and organized by the Sannyas Theatre that involves installation and theatre performances. It debuted at the Taipei Fringe Festival in the months of May and September in 2011 and, respectively, will be executed at the Mixed Art Design Life (Mad L) art and design studio in Taipei at the end of 2012. During its exhibition period, Deep Light aspires to incorporate different media technology and audience participation through interactive installation pieces where the space becomes a platform for new media theatrical performance. Through the use of props such as masks, documents, origami, etc..., the audience is capable of becoming the author. The result of the cross pollination of dancers, artists, audiences, and new media technology, is an interdisciplinary art piece that surpasses traditional art and theatrical production.
https://sites.google.com/site/2012deeplight/zhan-yan-nei-rong 





with all the artists/cast/crew



I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil  a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

2012-11-21

reactive film installation: Chromatic Revelry with Evann Siebens


Another awesome collaboration with Evann Siebens--An interactive realization of her film piece 'Chromatic Revelry.' If you happen to be in Victoria, BC, Canada, stop by for the opening or dance party afterwards, or stop by the windowfront to check it out after hours. It should be up for a month...
It has been truly wonderful to be working for Evann again.

G++ INTERACTIVE MEDIA RELEASE
MEDIA RELEASE
4 IMMEDIATE RELEASE
UNTIL NOVEMBER 23, 2012
EVENT//  Chromatic Revelry opening reception
PLACE//  G++ Interactive Media Gallery 1119 Fort Street Victoria BC
DATE//  Friday November 23, 2012 at 8:00 pm
A series of 10 short films integrated into an interactive landscape, Chromatic Revelry connects the ordered harmonic scale of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier with the chaos of rave culture. Shot on Super 8 film in clubs and at raves, the piece suggests a timelessness to parties, celebration and dance. The chaos is married to the musical chromatic scale, and stitches it to a formal classical dance training and aesthetic. With its archival Super 8 footage and Baroque music, the film becomes trans-historical, lost in time, and commenting on the nature of revelry, celebration and the human form rather than a particular moment in history.
Evann Siebens specializes in making media about movement. Now based in Vancouver, her short films, documentaries and media installations have been shown at venues such as Eyebeam, Centre Pompidou, MOMA, The Hammer Museum, Lincoln Centre and on PBS. Recent shows include HotShoe Gallery, London, UK; MediaArtLab/Urban Screen in St.Petersberg, Russia; Harcourt House, Edmonton and ‘Camera/Whore’ at On Main Gallery, Vancouver. Chromatic Revelry was made in collaboration with interactive artist and designer Sammy Chien.

++

preview:



2012-11-12

review on FUSE

had a great review on discarder magazine after FUSE...
it was a truly great performance and really nice to collaborate with IMR. It's rare that I can feel freely to treat and focus my live visuals as an visual art form rather than VJ images with music bands. Here we were, at the top gallery in vancouver, turn the usuals into live art.

---
FUSE
featuring in Medias Res
November 9 @ Vancouver Art Gallery
real Live Review by Nathan Pike

photo by Alex Waber
photo by Alex Waber

The art scene can be kind of an odd world to step into. God loves the artsy folk for doing what they do and understanding what makes art worth looking at. Though not immune to being moved by a gorgeously painted canvas or sculpture that speaks of faith, tradition, and experience, I find that modern contemporary art has a way of going over my head.
  However, it was the duty of this writer to leave judgment at home and to step into the world of FUSE, a unique event held three Fridays of each year in which the Vancouver Art Gallery opens its doors in host to some very cool music, art installations, and performance that you might not see at a typical gallery. With work by featured Canadian contemporary artist Ian Wallace as a backdrop, guests wandered the gallery, schmoozing, boozing, and taking in the many mediums on hand.

  Performing on the main floor every hour on the hour was modern dance troupe MACHiNENOiSY. My partner and I caught one of their performances and it was kind of strange and beautifully rendered. A woman and man, Delia Brett and Daelik respectively, dressed in red and white pushed, pulled, and undulated around on mats, performing an almost yogic sex argument where one would pull the other into their space, writhe around them, lift them up, scream and yelp a bunch and then separate back into circling each other. I’m sure there were many there who “got it” and appreciated every second. Though intrigued by the stories and dialogues told through bodily movement and dance, it still passed me by. Like I said, easily lost in the many mansions of artistic expression.
  What wasn’t lost on me was a performance by Vancouver experimental band In Medias Res, playing their movement of music titled “After the moon comes the sun and again the moon: experimental music for electric guitar, bass, and drums.” Set against a backdrop of projected moving images and video overseen by video artist Sammy Chein and featuring works by contributing artists Khan Lee, Mark Soo, Andy Dixon, Nicole Ondre, and Derya Akay, the band built it’s slow burn ferocious sounds into the images, encasing them in even deeper meaning. When the evolving lotus flower-like painting wasn’t mesmerizing enough, the musical drones and loops that band members Andrew Lee, Ryan Flowers, and Ash Poon, along with guests Lindsey Hampton, and Shaunn Watt, projected with force and precision that had me by the collar. Or when the plane taxiing on a runway neared take off as the music built to a climax, I was transfixed.
  This is what I came for and it was during their set that it registered how cool this event is, despite my misgivings about hard to swallow art pieces or dance expression that made my eyes cross. We are fortunate to live in a city that facilitates this artistic freedom. In one building were many well-dressed people from all walks of life, each with their own idea of what is profound and each appreciating it in a different way. Under one roof was art, music, and dance, all of which had a unique message to bring. I’m not entirely certain how I downloaded that message, but one thing is certain: I will most definitely be back.


http://discorder.ca/discorder-magazine/index.php/2012/11/15/fuse/

2012-10-22

Midnight Tea in Mumbai: help us spread the word

I've worked with Miko Kuro's Midnight Tea in Vancouver a couple years ago... it was a really awesome experience. Quite creative, poetic, intimate and mesmerizing. This December Midnight Tea is going to be in Mumbai. This project/group needs raise funding for travel and project expense. The original idea is for me to perform remotely via internet, yet if we raise enough funding I might be able to be there as well to perform in the same space with everyone. Regardless, I hope anyone who's interested in this kind of art could help us spread the word, any money could help make the team's dream coming true.

Kickstarter link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1565439438/midnight-tea-in-mumbai-0

in the video you'll hear some of the sound that I performed with Kang-Te Chang.


Once in a lifetime.

2012-08-17

Dance & New Media Performance: Law of Proximity

I am working on New Media/ live visual design for this performance. invited by my favourite composer/new media artist Stefan Smulovitz.. working with dance company MACHiNENOiSY and many wonderful and interesting queer youth performers! and... also performing with the awesome local musician/co-organizer of 1067 Chris Kelly.



Queer Arts Festival and MACHiNENOiSY present: Law of Proximity



Building on their pilot project at QAF 2011, MACHiNENOiSY’s expanded 2012 Law of Proximity project engages young queer emerging dancers in a contact improvisation workshop, culminating in this 4-day performance presentation at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.


Law of Proximity uniquely engages Vancouver’s young and developing Queer, Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered community in an exciting and informative physical dialogue on performance, art, identity and communication. The project extends the points of intersection between the gay and lesbian perspective, the artistic community and the heterosexually-dominant public.

MACHiNENOiSY’s co-artistic directors Delia Brett and Daelik will be working with professional dancer Jennifer McLeish Lewis toward training the youth performers in contact dance and performance skill development over a period of one month. Youth will also work on storytelling with acclaimed author Karen X. Tulchinsky, and interactive electronic music with composer Stefan Smulovitz, ultimately working toward a performance with audio artist/collaborator Chris Kelly and new media visual artist/collaborator Sammy Chien driven by the young participants and facilitated by MACHiNENOiSY.

Performers:
Aly dela Cruz Yip
Ander Gates
Charlie Cook
Eric Buelow
Isaac Rosen-Purcell
Morgan Condon
Nina Bialecki
Rae Takaesu
Jennifer McLeish Lewis


Law of Proximity is a Community Arts Development Production. It has the support of the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, QMUNITY, The Cultch and their Ignite program, and The Queer Arts Festival.







on Youtube

info:

Review on The Province:

Article on Georgia Straight:

2012-06-09

Performing in Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival

 After Toronto's Subtle Technology Festival, we're performing
http://guelphdance.blogspot.ca/2012/05/experiments-in-science-and-beauty.html

2012-05-26

Experiments 2012 Ontario Tour (New Media/Projection Design)

Touring with LINK DANCE as New Media/Projection Designer for remounting EXPERIMENTS (revision) in Toronto and Guelph, Ontario.



Subtle TechnologiesLINK Dance Foundation and Danceworks are proud to present EXPERIMENTS: Where Logic and Emotion Collide as part of the 15th annual Subtle Technologies Festival.
Friday May 25 and Saturday May 26 @ 8pmGet tickets hereNB: A 3-day Festival pass includes one ticket to the Friday evening showing.
EXPERIMENTS
A collaboration between ecologists and dancers, EXPERIMENTS probes the connections between science and art to unveil the creativity, experimentation and intuition employed in both disciplines to understand the world around us. For three years, LINK Dance Artistic Director Gail Lotenberg researched this piece with a group of dancers and renowned ecologists, specializing in the study of non-verbal communication. A world of new ideas comes alive on stage.
Experiments “brings together…art and science … in a show quite unlike anything you’ve seen before.” Georgia Straight, Nov 2010


http://subtletechnologies.com/events/festival-2012/experiments/

2012-05-10

sound design got into DOXA film festival


I've been working with the amazing filmmaker, artist and educator Pia Massie as Sound Designer in the past couple years on this project. It was initially created for 3 ch. video installation piece, but it also got made into a screening version as well, in 5.1 surround.

It got into DOXA Film Festival!

http://www.doxafestival.ca/festival/films/just_beyond

http://justbeyondhope.com/

2012-05-05

collaboration in SFU MFA project "a doll's room"

Based on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House

Directed by Pegah Tabassinejad
Dramaturgue: Nazli Akhtari

Technical Director: Terence Grigoruk
Lighting Advisor: Jonathan Kim
Stage Manager: Cherry Song

Performers: Golnaz Boroumandi
Mehdi Sadr
Natalie Schneck
David Secunda
Vic Ustare

and

Voice: Sarah Amini
Music: Remy Siu
New Media: Sammy Chien


This Performance is open to public to get in sometimes between 6pm-10pm and leave whenever you want.
It is part of the MFA Spring Show of the grad students of Interdisciplinary Art program at SFU and it's a good opportunity to watch other performances, including dance, theatre and music within this period of time.

A Doll’s Room is a four-hour durational piece that does and does not happen on the stage. It explores the gap between the virtual and the real, and investigates the absence within the two worlds.
The piece tries to practice absence: absence of actors, composers, designers and production elements such as light or sound. It uses very minimal technical support. This performance is an attempt to study the differences and similarities between theatre performances and reality shows. It explores the space between the performers as well as the space between the audience and the performance.
As the title suggests the spoken text mostly comes from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Ibsen’s play provided me literary with sentences. I treated his sentences as just sentences, and our dramaturge wrote and rewrote them considering no original logic or intention. The characters are equally important, but they accidentally remained reflective of Ibsen’s characters.

2012-03-08

Becoming-Chimera 夢獸 : Improvised Interdisciplinary Experiments 即興跨領域實驗表演



Becoming-Chimera 夢獸
Improvised Interdisciplinary Experiments 即興跨領域實驗表演
Music, Sound, Visuals, New Media, Movement and Dance 音樂X視覺X舞蹈X聲響X科技
Man can never say: "I am a bull, a wolf.. ." But he can say: "I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep" --Deleuze and Guattari.
It's about relation, not identification. The color red to sound is as sharp timbre to the movement of the body. Like dreams to memory, synesthesia to sensory and epiphany to temporality. Finally we are no one, but a becoming.

Becoming-Chimera is an improvised interdisciplinary-performance that involves live visuals, live electroacoustic/experimental music, soundscapes, dance/movements and new media. The performers experiment and improvise with specific dispositions and qualities either conducted or by aleatoric algorithm. It travels within the Bergsonian sense of time, and Deleuzian notion of becoming, where the creation is constantly in-flux and in process. Likes dreams, like rhizomes, they engulf deep connection between each entities and unfold new dimensions of our reality.

Why does a song, an image, a smell, a touch or a temperature can be so evocative and empowering to you? How much power, affect and contagion are embedded in these memories and sensory? And what if they can speak to each another? In the genesis of our dreams, every moment can be temporal yet perpetual. In a way, every part of memories are improvising and forming unconventional connections, like synesthesia, the boundaries are being challenged and unraveled. In our interdisciplinary collaboration, we are creating an ongoing experimental dialogue with deep intuition, creative technologies as well as phenomenology and multiplicity in order to unfold paths to the undiscovered landscapes.


夢獸:我們得以重組成不知道的什麼

這裡的界線需要跨越,定義需要破解;現象還在進行,維度不斷擴張,沒有獨一絕對,全是變動著的相對;這一分鐘或許於你暫存,下一秒可能於我永恆;當聲音與影像散落在身體,感知將連動而起,再分崩,再重組,又植入記憶,成為嵌合體,成為靈感交合的獸。你說,誰能否定自身之可塑?

Becoming-Chimera的跨界即興展演,讓人為的實驗音像,構成直覺的感官對話,可聞伯格森所稱的主觀時間,可看德勒茲所指的正在生成,旅程無盡開展,朝向未知的聲境和景觀。

你聽,你嗅,你撫觸,你韻動,而我感到無窮無限疊加於我。
我說的是夢,在夢中,我從不阻止即將發生的任何什麼。
(文: 孫志熙 Chinese text written by Andria Sun)

Created and organized by Chimerik (Sound/ Visuals/ Dance/New Media) 似不像 (聲音/影像/舞蹈/科技)

with guest collaborators:
Jain-Lung Lee (Movements) / 李建隆 (舞蹈)
Kang-Te Chang (Vocal) / 張康德 (人聲)
Min-Yen Terry Hsieh (Saxophone) / 謝明諺 (薩克斯風)
Shih-Yang Lee (Piano) / 李世揚(鋼琴)
Alma Lin & Jeff Lai (Experimental Film)/ 林淑雲 & 賴宗昀 (實驗錄像)


時間 Date
3/10 (Sat) 19:30 - 21:00

票價 Ticket
NT$ 150

地點 Location
南海藝廊 Nanhai Gallery
台北市重慶南路二段19巷3號
No.3, Lane 19, Sec. 2, Chongcing S. Rd., Jhongjheng District, Taipei City 100
http://blog.roodo.com/nanhai


Direction/ Live Electroacoustics
Sammy Chien

Live Drawing/ Live Visuals
Shang Han Chien

Generative Live Visuals/ Programing
Viktor Lin

Dance/Movements
Felicia Lau

Dance/Movements
Jain-Lung Lee 李建隆

Live Piano
Shih-Yang Lee 李世揚

Live Saxophone
Min-Yen Terry Hsieh 謝明諺

Live Vocal
Kang-Te Chang 張康德

Graphics/ 3D Modeling
Stan Chang

Computer Programing
Webb Hsu

Experimental Film
Alma Lin 林淑雲 & Jeff Lai 賴宗昀

Administration/Management
Vikter Pan

Choreographic Consultant
Erika Mitsuhashi

Costume Design
Woozy Chang 張瓊文
Chou En Yu 周恩聿

Stage Manager
Yao-Ching Tsou 鄒耀慶

with the support of Nanhai Gallery
Special Thanks to Meta Hong

2012-02-06

my interview from SFU

I just realized that my interview from SFU has already been posted! It's so kind of Dean Lastoria to describe me in such a lovely way. I'm truly proud of SFU and really inspired by it's supportive and creative environment. This innovative spirit lives on. My life is so colourful and it's still expanding. Much love to all the humble intellectuals/artists that knows how to make educations fun and keeping our artistry and creative souls alive.
http://cgi.sfu.ca/~scahome/?q=node%2F1043


Recently our School started offering honours degrees to students who have achieved high marks, and studied significantly more than is normally expected. One of the first Film students to receive the honors BFA is Sammy Chien who convocated this June.

Sammy is a great example of a successful student. He took advantage of all the interdisciplinary opportunities this department has to offer … and made some of his own. He learned the strong disciplinary core of the Film Program and then branched out working most recently with Dance on amazing video projections for performances.

Given Sammy’s successes with video projection in live performances one might think that 16mm film would be something he has outgrown, but Sammy feels that it is important.

Dean L September 6/11