Upgrade! Milwaukee presents Patrick Lichty and Christopher Burns!
Sunday April 19, 7 – 9 PM
MOCT, 240 E Pittsburgh Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53204
Please come to our first-ever Upgrade! Milwaukee, featuring Chicago-based Patrick Lichty and Milwaukee’s own Christopher Burns!
patrick lichty
Patrick Lichty (b.1962)Â is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He began showing technological media art in 1989, and deals with works and writing that explore the social relations between us and media. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney & Turin Biennials, Maribor & Yokohama Triennials, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, and the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow, a Smithsonian New Century/New Media Award recipient, and a multiple nominee for the Rockefeller New Media Fellowship.
He also works extensively with virtual worlds, including Second Life, and his work, both solo and with his performance art group, Second Front, has been featured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and ArtNews. His latest work, a collaborative work with Gazira Babeli, entitled 7UP, will have a solo exhibition at SKUC gallery in Slovenia this Fall.
visualizations by Christopher Burns
Christopher Burns is a laptop improviser and a composer of instrumental chamber music. His works explore simultaneity and multiplicity: textures and materials are layered one on top of another, creating a dense and energetic polyphony. Both electronic and acoustic music are influenced by Christopher’s work as a computer music researcher. The gritty, rough-hewn sonic materials of his laptop instruments are produced through custom software designs, and the idiosyncratic pitch and rhythmic structures of his chamber music are typically created and transformed through algorithmic procedures. His most recent projects emphasize multimedia and motion capture, integrating performance, sound, and animation into a unified experience.
A committed educator, Christopher teaches music composition and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Previously, he served as the Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, after completing a doctorate in composition there in 2003. He has studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan Radzynski.
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Announcing the launch of Upgrade! Milwaukee.
Upgrade! Milwaukee is a regular gathering of digital creatives – artists, musicians, performers, writers, curators and the public – that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the local new media community. It features 1-3 guest speakers at each event, held at a rotating venue: informal, free, and open to all. We welcome suggestions for speakers, panels or gatherings. Upgrade! Milwaukee will continue to grow as a local node within the global Upgrade! International (UI) network.
Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year. There are currently over 30 nodes in UI, across North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Second Life.
