AxS Festival 2014 | Curiosity

September 19-October 5, 2014

Click here for official event page

Capacity is limited. We are offering limited priority seating, please RSVP to reserve guaranteed admission. Limit 2 per person. The remaining seats are offered on a first come, first served basis.

Jeff Cain is the director of the Shed Research Institute. His work as been featured in the Getty Museum’s California Video exhibition, LACMA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and many other southern California art spaces. His community radio project, RHZ Radio was a finalist for the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica in Digital Communities. His work has been displayed internationally in the Busan Biannual, Havana Biannual, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, Ukraine.

He has a BA from Whittier College, and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is currently faculty in the USC Roski School of Fine Arts and at California State University Fullerton, and has been faculty at California Institute of the Arts, Whittier College, and Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Visit his website: shedresearch.net

Skyglow is a video installation about light and perspective in Los Angeles. Aerial footage shot from a police helicopter straight down on the city at night is turned into a planetarium style projection where viewers must lie down to look up at the “stars.”

The first 30 minutes of Skyglow will be presented with a new score composed and performed by Ezekiel Honig. Afterward, Skyglow will continue as an installation where audience members can come and go as they please.

A New York City native, and founder/label manager for the Anticipate and Microcosm labels, Ezekiel Honigconcentrates on his idiosyncratic brand of emotively warm electronic-acoustic music. Using the loop as more of a tool than a rule, Honig paints outside the lines, nestling into a comfortable, shared space between muted techno, melodic, event-driven ambient, textural downtempo, and slowmotion house – using them as reference points from which to stray, rather than as steadfast frameworks. Drawing on the rich history of musique concrete, Honig looks to incorporate a material nature into his music by imbuing it with a host of field recording/found-sound sources in the search for a balance between digital software innovation and the physicality of the world around us. Using the sounds of plastic, metal, wood, and air in collaboration with Rhodes, guitar, horns, piano, and other instrumental origins, his music is one of contrast and contradiction, combining minimal, abstract tendencies with a core of timeless harmonics – pairing inviting, fuzzy chords with clunky and dirty “mishaps.”

After more than a decade of releasing music, Honig completed his first book, Bumping
Into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal, an exploration of the sonic potential in everyday objects, spaces, and interactions. With a focus on the benefits of a strong listening practice and searching for a personal soundscape Honig took steps towards formalizing and concretizing methods he has exercised instinctually in his own sound productions.

Honig’s striving for a deeper meaning in the union of audio and visual consistently brings him into new territory, whether it is sound design for a film, producing limited edition handmade packages for music releases, or creating other means of viewing sound in relation to a physical object.

Visit Ezekiel Honig’s website: ezekielhonig.com

Mike Harding is a curator & producer, a lecturer & publisher, and an author & editor who has had occasional exhibitions, installations and performances around the world. He has been running the audio-visual label Touch for over 30 years and in this period has acquired much experience and information on disseminating cultural sounds to a wider audience. Join him for a very special DJ set at AxS 2014.

Visit his website: mscharding.net

Since its first release in 1982, Touch has created sonic and visual productions that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

Visit Touch’s website: touch33.net