Chelsea Manning, Laurie Anderson, Solange Take Stage At DAY FOR NIGHT SUMMIT

Day for Night is proud to announce the program for the first edition of the Day for Night Summit, which will take place on Friday, December 15. The Summit will feature art and technology pioneers Laurie Anderson, Chelsea Manning, Nadya Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot), and Lauren McCarthy and serve as the first opportunity to experience 18 site-specific art installations-from artists Ryoji Ikeda and Matthew Schreiber-in a more intimate setting before the festival weekend officially kicks off.

The topic of activism serves as a thread through each talk, weaving its way from Laurie Anderson, one of the world's best known female performance and tech artists, to Lauren McCarthy, a cutting edge visual artist who integrates social media and coding into her work. Government transparency and LGBTQ advocate Chelsea Manning and political activist Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot will speak about the intersection of international affairs, technology, and security.

Each talk will be punctuated with performances by renowned spoken word poet and musician Saul Williams. The Summit will culminate with a performances by Saint Heron ft. Solange, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kaytranada.

Please visit www.dayfornight.com for most updated information

The Day for Night Friday Summit is a separate, ticketed event, offering the opportunity to start the weekend early, adding eleven hours of events to their schedules: music, a sneak peak at the site-specific artworks that have been installed for the festival, and a series of activist-led talks.

MartyrLoserKing tagged his screen name onto the White House lawn via remote drone. He's working from a remote e-waste camp in Burundi, Central Africa, neighboring the more well-known Rwanda, with equipment scrapped together from our old Dell PC towers and Sidekick IIs. Homeland Security, the NSA, and the CIA are tracing his signal back to a place that isn't on the map or on the grid, and the alert level rises when he hacks NASA just to show he can do it. At least, that's what Saul Williams will tell you when you ask about his upcoming album and the story it's inspired. Written and recorded between Senegal, Reunion Island, Paris, Haiti, and New Orleans and New York, 'Martyr Loser King' is a multimedia project that engages the digital dialogue between the First and Third Worlds, and the global street sounds that yoke the two. "In Senegal, I was buying iPhones for $20, Beats for $10, because they get all the influx from China, with no regulation," Williams explains. "So everyone's online. Everyone's high tech." He sites Beyonce, Fredo Santana, and Haitian field recordings as musical inspirations for his self-produced sixth album, straining trap hi-hats and mbira strokes together for a nuanced, entirely original sound. "I'm just letting you know what I'm reading and seeing while I'm writing. When I'm writing, the music leads."

Williams has been breaking ground since his debut album, Amethyst Rock Star, was released in 2001 and executive produced by Rick Rubin. After gaining global fame for his poetry and writings at the turn of the century, Williams has performed in over 30 countries and read in over 300 universities, with invitations that have spanned from the White House, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, The Louvre, The Getty Center, Queen Elizabeth Hall, to countless villages, townships, community centers, and prisons across the world. The Newburgh, New York native earned a BA from Morehouse and an MFA from Tisch, and has gone on to record with Nine Inch Nails and Allen Ginsberg, as well as countless film and television appearances.

Chelsea E. Manning worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, where she publicly disclosed classified documents that revealed human rights abuses and corruption connected to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon being sentenced to 35 years for leaking government documents, an unprecedented amount of time for whistleblowers, she publicly identified as a trans woman and asserted her legal rights to medical therapy. After serving 7 years in military prison, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence to time served. She was released in 2017.

Today Manning is a Washington D.C. based technologist and network security expert whose actions have shown the power of individuals to change the world through bravery, conscience, and determination. She speaks on the social, technological, and economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence, and on the practical applications of machine learning. She is a vocal advocate for government transparency and queer and transgender rights on Twitter and through her op-ed columns for The Guardian and The New York Times.

Laurie Anderson is one of America's most renowned - and daring - creative pioneers. She is best known for her multimedia presentations and innovative use of technology. As writer, director, visual artist and vocalist she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music.

Her recording career, launched by "O Superman" in 1981, includes the soundtrack to her feature film "Home of the Brave" and "Life on a String" (2001). Anderson's live shows range from simple spoken word to elaborate multi-media stage performances such as "Songs and Stories for Moby Dick" (1999). Anderson has published seven books and her visual work has been presented in major museums around the world.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance "The End of the Moon." Recent projects include a series of audio-visual installations and a high-definition film, "Hidden Inside Mountains," created for World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. In 2007, she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2008, she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece, "Homeland," which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June 2010. Anderson's solo performance "Delusion" debuted at the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad in February 2010. In October 2010, a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro. In 2011, her exhibition of new visual work titled "Forty-Nine Days In the Bardo" opened in Philadelphia, and "Boat," her first exhibition of paintings, premiered at the Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York. She has recently been appointed as a three-year fellow at both EMPAC, the multimedia center at RPI in Troy, NY, and PAC at UCLA. Anderson lives in New York City.

Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn whose work explores social and technological systems for being a person and interacting with other people. She makes software, performances, videos, and other things on the Internet. She is the creator of p5.js.

Lauren has exhibited at Ars Electronica, Conflux Festival SIGGRAPH, LACMA, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and worked on installations for the London Eye and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.

She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³.

Installation by Tundra at Day for Night 2016; Photo: Theo Civitello

VISUAL ARTISTS (FRIDAY - SUNDAY)
The Day for Night 2017 artists are a wide-ranging and diverse group of creators from around the world, from sculptors to coders to engineers: Ryoji Ikeda, Matthew Schreiber, Conditional Studio + Processing Foundation, James Clar, Felicie D'Estienne D'Orves, Kyle McDonald, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Radio Soulwax, VT Pro, The Mill, Hovver, Playmodes, Theodore Fivel, Ekene Ijeoma, Cocolab, Sam Cannon, Vincent Moon and Priscilla Telmon, and Lina Dib.

There will be a performance by multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda, who brought his wildly innovative "stage shows" to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Holographer and laser light artist Matthew Schreiber, who was formerly James Turrell's studio assistant, will create a site-specific, large-scale light installation. Los Angeles-based nonprofit Conditional Group + Processing Foundation will present a new installation and workshop about creative coding, software literacy in the visual arts, and youth education. Theodore Fivel, a sculptor based in Paris, will bring one of his amorphic creations, using the space as an art installation. Lina Dib, the artist and anthropologist known for investigates socio-technical, ethnographic, and ecological change, will provide a site-specific work.

Complete line-up and more information here.

"With the 2017 edition of Day for Night, we continue combining well-established and internationally acclaimed artists with emerging talent from around the world. We are also pushing forward with our mission to bring a better understanding of new media practices by introducing more educational components. Finally, this year's edition will continue to showcase collaborations between artists and musicians, with performances within installations, thus sharpening our focus on the merging waters of light, sound and space," says Day for Night curator Alex Czetwertynski.

ABOUT DAY FOR NIGHT
Founded in 2015 by Free Press Houston and New York-based creative agency Work-Order, Day for Night is a visually immersive art and music festival that explores light, space, and sound. It has transformed the festival landscape by combining new media art and headlining musicians to create new sensory experiences. Day for Night will take place at the historic PostHTX (401 Franklin Street), a 1.5 million square foot indoor-outdoor space. Day for Night 2016 brought over 23,000 people to view 16 exhibitions and a two-night music festival that featured 68 bands, including the Aphex Twin-against a backdrop of virtual reality art installations by the likes of Björk. The inaugural festival in 2015 featured musicians including Kendrick Lamar, New Order, Philip Glass Ensemble, Dillon Francis, Janelle Monáe, Flying Lotus and Death Grips, as well as installations by more than a dozen leading visual artists from across the globe.