Friday May 19 2017, 16.00 h

The collaborative localStyle was founded in Amsterdam in 2000 by Jay Alan Yim and Marlena Novak. Their intermedia practice includes video, sound installation, interactive installations, live performance with electronics, and audience participation. Their goal is to use the senses to interrogate complacent acceptance of existing assumptions, and their projects explore how territories and boundaries—whether physical or intangible—are constructed, interpreted, and negotiated, via themes as varied as issues of trespass, the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon, and experimental Eurasian blackbird grammar. These works have been presented in festivals, museums, galleries, and alternative venues in more than forty cities worldwide (a.o. Albuquerque, Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Barcelona, Beijing, Belgrade, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Budapest, Camden, Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen, Duluth, Eindhoven, Den Haag, Huddersfield, Jerusalem, Kansas City, Korcula, Linz, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, the Orkney Islands, Richmond, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, São Paolo, Sarasota, Shanghai, Sittard, Sydney, Szczecin, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Torino, Toronto, Valencia, Warsaw and Wrexham). Festival presentations have included the National Art Museum of China’s (NAMOC) TransLife Triennial, STRP Festival, Visioni dal Futuro, Taipei Digital Art Festival and others. Marlena Novak is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation. Prior to that, she served as Associate Director of Northwestern’s Animate Arts Program, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago and visiting professor at the University of New Mexico. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Chicago, Cleveland Institute of Art, Amsterdams Instituut voor Schilderkunst, Pädagogische Hochschule (St. Gallen, CH), and a resident at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios (Loughborough, UK). She has received grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, Illinois Arts Council, Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Her work is included in public (a.o. the Corcoran in Washington, DC and the Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort, NL) and private collections in Europe and the USA, and has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in more than forty cities worldwide. In 2018 she will be an artist in residence in Krems, Austria. Jay Alan Yim studied music composition at the University of California Santa Barbara, the Royal College of Music, and Harvard and computer music at Stanford and MIT. He currently teaches at Northwestern University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council (three times), Tanglewood, Aspen, and many other awards. His music has been featured at international festivals (Darmstadt, Ars Musica, Huddersfield, Wien-Modern, Gaudeamus, Almeida, Tanglewood, ISCM World Music Days) and has been performed by artists such as the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, l’Orchestre National de Lyon, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble SurPlus, Arditti, JACK, and Spektral Quartets, Nieuw Ensemble, ICE, dal niente, Gareth Davis, and Frances-Marie Uitti. http://www.localstyle.tv http://shinkyoku.org

Supported in part by a grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE).