New York Live Arts 2019 Live Ideas Festival Headliner Announced

New York Live Arts (Live Arts) to present the New York City premiere of discrete figures by Japanese companies Rhizomatiks Research and ELEVENPLAY, and American media artist Kyle McDonald, May 8-11, 2019. The performance will be the mainstage highlight of Live Arts' annual interdisciplinary festival Live Ideas, this year exploring Artificial Intelligence and titled Live Ideas 2019 - AI: Are You Brave Enough for The Brave New World?, May 8-12, 2019. Five live female dancers execute choreography with machine learning technology on a stage designed for interactivity between performers, drones, and Artificial Intelligence, in the quest for a new palette of movement to foster undiscovered modes of expressive dance that transcend the limits of conventional human subjectivity and emotional expression.

Inspired by mathematician Alan Turing, this expansive multidisciplinary collaboration between contemporary mathematicians, dancers, media artists, composers, and engineers has created a complex experimental augmented reality performance. Truly a first of its kind, discrete figures probes the circuitry connecting the corporeal to the cognitive, questioning the very essence of humanity and machine. Having garnered an international following for their many groundbreaking collaborations that meld conceptual and high-tech innovation, Rhizomatiks Research and ELEVENPLAY forge unexplored possibilities in dance as a performing art.

The performances at New York Live Arts theater feature stage direction and choreography by MIKIKO, artistic direction and music by Daito Manabe, technical direction and hardware engineering by Motoi Ishibashi, and machine learning direction by Kyle McDonald. The ELEVENPLAY cast features KOHMEN, SAYA, KAORI, MARU, EMMY.

Live Ideas is an annual humanities festival of arts and ideas, exploring thinking, the socio-political current, and the artistic expression informing and inspired by a different theme each year. Live Ideas 2019 will unfold through five days of discourse, performances, an exhibition, classes for adults and kids, and a HACK-ART-THON to bring Artificial Intelligence to the general public from the perspective of a cultural organization. The full programming schedule will be announced in March 2019. Past festivals have included The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, James Baldwin, This Time!, SKY-Force and Wisdom in America Today, curated by Laurie Anderson, MENA/Future-Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region, Mx'd Messages curated by Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, and RADICAL VISION co-curated with Brian Tate | The Tate Group and the Hannah Arendt Center.

The 2019 Live Ideas Festival is generously supported by Google, Humanities New York, Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Performances of discrete figures take place at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th St New York, NY 10011) May 8,9,10,11, 2019 at 8:30pm. Tickets start at $35 and can be purchased here. The running time is approximately 60 minutes.

ABOUT
Rhizomatiks Research
Rhizomatiks Research mainly takes up projects focusing on the field of research and development, and sets priority in opening a new expression for the future. The team which is leading Rhizomatiks Research, has produced projects with artists such as Perfume and ELEVENPLAY in addition to media-art and data-art projects, and is also in charge of all processes through the projects planning, implementation and operation.
https://research.rhizomatiks.com

ELEVENPLAY
Dance company directed by choreographer & art director, MIKIKO. ELEVENPLAY was founded by MIKIKO in 2009, in the hopes of creating dancers who possess highly artistic sense and creativity on top of exquisite techniques, body and spirit. Composed of female dancers from a variety of genre, ELEVENPLAY's methods of expression are diverse, including stages, video works, and still photos.
http://elevenplay.net

MIKIKO
MIKIKO, a stage designer/choreographer, has taken an artistic direction and choreographed for almost fifty world-famous Japanese artists like Perfume, BABYMETAL, Ringo Shiina and more. She has won many awards in the field of performing arts, and her choreography has been widely appreciated in the Japanese Pop scene. It is safe to say that MIKIKO is one of the greatest choreographers in Japan.
http://www.mikiko0811.net/

Daito Manabe
Tokyo-based artist, interaction designer, programmer, and DJ.
Launched Rhizomatiks in 2006. Since 2015, has served alongside Motoi Ishibashi as co-director of Rhizomatiks Research, the firm's division dedicated to exploring new possibilities in the realms of technical and artistic expression with a focus on R&D-intensive projects. Specially-appointed professor at Keio University SFC.
Manabe's work in design, art, and entertainment takes a new approach to everyday materials and phenomenon. However, his end goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognizing and recombining these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analog and digital, real and virtual.
http://www.daito.ws/en/

Motoi Ishibashi
Engineer / Artist. Director of Rhizomatiks Research. Born in Shizuoka, Japan in 1975. Graduated from the Department of Systems and Control Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS). Since 2015, Ishibashi has served alongside Daito Manabe as co-director of Rhizomatiks Research, the firm's division dedicated to exploring new possibilities in the realms of technical and artistic expression with a focus on R&D-intensive projects.

Ishibashi is involved in a diverse range of activities, including art performances, music videos, and installations based on the production of devices and hardware. His work has been recognized by many awards, including the Prix Ars Electronica, Cannes Lions, and Japan Media Arts Festival.

Kyle McDonald
Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He is a contributor to open source arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks, and builds tools that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways. He has a habit of sharing ideas and projects in public before they're completed. He creatively subverts networked communication and computation, explores glitch and systemic bias, and extends these concepts to reversal of everything from identity to relationships. Kyle has been an adjunct professor at NYU's ITP, and a member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and artist in residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, as well as YCAM in Japan. His work is commissioned by and shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world, including: Ars Electronica, NTT ICC, Sonar/OFFF, Eyebeam, and many others. He frequently leads workshops exploring computer vision and interaction. http://www.kylemcdonald.net/

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts produces and presents dance, music and theater performances in its 20,000 square-foot home, including a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square-foot studios. New York Live Arts offers an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people; it supports the continuing professional development of performing artists. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; it is the company's sole producer, providing support and the environment to originate innovative and challenging new work for the Company and New York's creative community.

FUNDING
Support for New York Live Arts is provided by Con Edison, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, The Harnisch Foundation, Alice Lawrence Foundation, Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Metropolitan Capital Bancorp, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, New York Community Trust, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Scherman Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and Theatre Development Fund.

Public support for New York Live Arts is from Humanities New York, National

Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
discrete figures by Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY x Kyle McDonald
(NYC Premiere)
May 8-11, 2019, 8:30 PM
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street, NYC (between Seventh and Eighth Avenue)
Tickets start at $35
Purchase tickets at 212 924 0077
or online at newyorklivearts