Look + Listen Free Annual Festival Returns in May 2021

Look + Listen's free annual festival returns for its nineteenth season in May 2021 with an "At Home Edition" designed to bring art directly into audiences' homes, in both digital and tangible forms.

Curated and produced by guest Artistic Director Paul Pinto and Executive Director Grace Parisi, Look + Listen 2021 presents a startlingly ingenious response to our current moment. Along with captivating online performances, audiences will be treated to limited-edition physical artworks, delivered by mail (to US residents only). Registration for the festival is now open at lookandlisten.org.

Notes Pinto, "Four multimedia artists have created work for the next stage of the quarantine: where the dominant arts venue is still home, but our circles are larger, our attention is not solely on isolation, and our appetite is to not spend all day on screens." Last year's festival was canceled due to the pandemic; Look + Listen's 2021 offerings perfectly embody this fragile transitional point in time.

On three Saturdays - May 8, 15, and 29 - Sound, visual, and literature artists Mendi + Keith Obadike will play LULL: a sleep temple, an eight-hour sonic experience incorporating field recordings, analog synths, and acoustic instruments intended to create a field of sound for dreaming. The first 100 registrants will be sent a small "dream kit" containing a booklet, candle, and sachet. In order to accommodate sleepers around the world, the three streams will start at different times: May 8, 10 pm Pacific Time; May 15, 10 pm Lagos/Berlin time; and May 29, 10 am Eastern Time.

On Saturday, May 22 (4:00 pm Eastern Time / 1 pm Pacific Time / 10 pm Berlin time, UTC+1), Hong Kong-born, Berlin-based composer/performer/instrument builder Viola Yip joins forces with composer/vocalist/sound artist Ken Ueno, a professor at UC Berkeley, for the world premiere of an hourlong piece performed synchronously by the two artists from their home locations - a nine-hour time difference.

thingNY's collaboratively created Dear Nancine consists of mailed gifts to experience alone, and/or with your household or close friends. The work centers around cartography, land rights, colonization, and routine. Packages will arrive to the first 100 registrants on Saturday, May 1.

Audra Wolowiec, an artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, installation, text, and performance, has created Semaphore, a printed booklet exploring modes of communication across long distances, mailed to all festival registrants in the US. Semaphore will serve simultaneously as a festival program, conceptual art piece, and activity book.

Further details on the programs follow.

i??P E R F O R M A N C E S

MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE: LULL: a sleep temple

Saturday, May 8 (10 pm - 6 am Pacific Time, UTC -7)

Saturday, May 15 (10 pm - 6 am Berlin/Lagos time, UTC -1)

Saturday, May 29 (10 pm - 6 am Eastern Time, UTC-5)

Lull, a sleep temple is an overnight musical work in which husband and wife team Mendi + Keith Obadike present a sonic environment designed to be listened to while sleeping. The eight-hour hour piece uses field recordings, analog synths, and slow-moving harmonies from pianos, guitars, banjos, bell plates, and elongated melodies to create a field of sound for dreaming. At the center of the work is Mendi's voice incanting original texts, remixed mythologies, and found fragments from books about dreams.

Lull was created against the backdrop of the pandemic, a political uprising and so called "civil unrest", in a time when it was difficult for many people to sleep. Mendi + Keith Obadike have explored sound, language, and altered states of consciousness across many of their works. In this period they became interested in myths about dreams and the rhythms of sleep. They built Lull to respond to these cycles. Lull is accompanied by a "dream kit," which includes a candle made by the artists, a sachet of lavender, and a bedtime poem from the album. Each of the three streams will correspond to a different time zone, beginning with a brief online chat.

Viola Yip + Ken Ueno - World Premiere

Saturday, May 22 (4:00 pm Eastern Time / 1 pm Pacific Time / 10 pm Berlin time, UTC+1)

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han says, "In the present characterized by an excess of openings and dissolving boundaries, we are losing the capacity for closure, and this means that life is becoming a purely additive process. For something to die, life must find its own closure. If life is deprived of any possibility of closure, it will end in non-time."

Viola Yip and Ken Ueno, in their new piece for the Look + Listen Festival, ask: How can we reclaim time from the Covid malaise of non-time? What are ways in which geographically-distanced performance can point to the limits of what we feel as the "now?" Yip and Ueno will present an hour-long live telematic multimedia performance originating from Yip's studio in Berlin and Ueno's in Berkeley, California - nine time zones apart. Their piece will instrumentalize the streaming network, expressively coaxing affordances of failure, sonic artifacts which serve as evidence of life being lived in the present.

M A I L E D...A R T W O R K S

thingNY: Dear Nancine

Dear Nancine, a Look + Listen 2021 exclusive, is an at-home, month-long multimedia gift delivered through the U.S. mail. With letters, scores, sound walks and puzzles, this new collaboratively created piece consists of mailed gifts to experience alone, and/or with your household and close friends. Delivered throughout the month of May, Dear Nancine offers a way to engage on the page, online, on your phone, outside, and potentially... with your old friend Nancine, whoever they may be.

Made by thingNY members alejandro t. acierto, Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young, Dear Nancine is being created for and because of the artistic and political reflections about "our land" and "our space," given that the past year has forced us to occupy the smallest sliver of those things. The first Dear Nancine packages will arrive in registrants' mailboxes on Saturday, May 1 (US residents only).

Audra Wolowiec: Semaphore

Audra Wolowiec is an internationally-shown artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, installation, text, and performance with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. She is interested in how sound can create spaces of listening and connection.

In Semaphore, created exclusively for Look + Listen 2021, Wolowiec invites participants to convey messages and communicate at a distance through a printed poster with postcard inserts that will be mailed to each audience member. The typeface semaphore, created in response to the bodily movements of semaphore flag positions, will be provided as a working font that can be used at home to send coded (or choreographic) messages digitally. The poster will include visuals of early communication devices, drawing attention to our ever-changing desires and needs to communicate with each other across distances.

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