CultureFest NYC 2007
Saturday and Sunday
Oct 13, 14, 11am to 5:30pm
State Street and Battery Place
"Don't miss NYC & Company's seventh annual CultureFest, a free celebration of the City's magnificent and diverse cultural offerings, on Saturday and Sunday, October 13 and 14.
More than 125 cultural organizations come together at Battery Park to share the magic of the upcoming season with you. This spectacular festival of music, art, dance, hands-on activities, entertainment and food is your once-a-year opportunity to discover all of New York City culture—and a chance to plan your personal arts calendar for the months ahead.
Hotel Cassiopeia
Oct 9 - 13, Tues - Sat, 7:30pm, $20 - $60
BAM
"Charles L. Mee's collage of a play Hotel Cassiopeia delves into artist Joseph Cornell's fantastical universe with plenty of theatrical bravado, poetry, dance, and video projection. -SP, flavorpill
Tech Talk II: Performative Architecture
Friday, Oct 12, 2007, 12:30 pm-2:00 pm
Room 114, Avery Hall, Columbia University
Speaker: Branko Kolarevic, Haworth Chair in Integrated Design, University of Calgary, Canada
Performative Architecture is a new kind of architecture, in which building performance is a guiding design principle, adopting new performance-based priorities for the design of cities, buildings, landscape and infrastructures. This emerging architecture places broadly defined performance above form making; it utilizes digital technologies of quantitative and qualitative performance-based simulation to offer a comprehensive approach to the design of the build environment. The emphasis on building performance is now redefining expectations of the building design, its process and practice. -from his book
Matthew Burtner and Friends: Featuring InHale, Brian Osborne, Luke DuBois
Saturday, Oct 13, 2007, 7:30pm
Sound artist, Matthew Burtner comes to the Tank for two sets featuring music made from feedback, flutes, wind, interactive acoustics, percussion, saxophones, computer AIs, and rhythmic machines. Burtner plays instruments of his own invention such as the Metasax, SXueAk toy, Polyrhythmicon and nWinds.
Featuring special guests Luke DuBois, the InHale flute duo and percussionist/drummer Brian Osborne, the performance will include composed works by Burtner, DuBois, and Jane Rigler, along with free electroacoustic improvisation on themes of wind, glitch and squeak.
Keith Tyson: Large Field Array
Until October 20, 2007
PaceWildenstein, 545 W 22nd St, 212.421.3292
"The sign outside PaceWildenstein's hangar-sized space on 22nd Street says "admission is limited"; if that doesn't strike you as odd, watch the bemused expressions of exiting visitors. British artist Keith Tyson has filled the cavernous gallery and its walls with Field Array, a grid of more than 230 sculptures, each measuring two square feet but entirely different from its neighbors. The sheer quantity of bizarre and hilarious objects — a contorted figure in a glass cube, a gigantic telephone, a huge house of cards — is overwhelming. Named for the Very Large Array, a field of gigantic radio telescopes in New Mexico, Tyson's installation doesn't probe deep space, but it does create a larger impression of our universe. (HGM)" -flavorpill
Mike Nelson, A Psychic Vacuum
Until Oct 28, Friday-Sunday, 12-6pm,
The Old Essex Street Market, 117 Delancey, Essex Street
" 'A Psychic Vacuum,' is a labyrinthine construction within a long-derelict wing of the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. Viewers will find their way through it (or not, if they become lost), passing by spaces that evoke the tattoo parlors and storefront psychics of the neighborhood, places Mr. Nelson sees partly as emblems of a search for belonging and belief in America."
"... constructed spaces are meticulously made to feel as if they have not been constructed, or at least not as artworks. They seem to have sprung up fully formed, like something out of the fevered minds of the authors Mr. Nelson favors: Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft." -Randy Kennedy, New York times