Interactive Audio Visual Performance (in Serenades for Settling)

Working in conjunction with Serenades for Settling (Tending Ostreidae) by Stephanie Rothenberg and Suzanne Thorpe, Ithaca-based artists Paulina Velazquez Solis and Travis Johns present a performance derived from the data created, informed, and guiding this piece — manipulating network traffic, shipping lane data, and robotic oyster behavior into new sounds and images informed by electromechanically-controlled guitars, immersive brainwave responses, and live stop-motion animation.

ABOUT PAULINA VELÁZQUEZ SOLÍS

Paulina Velázquez Solís is a multimedia artist and curator from Mexico and Costa Rica. She works with installation, sound, sculpture, drawing, animation/video, and media performance. She is interested in the body and the biological and natural world in interaction with the cultural and social notions of normalcy and experiences as a multinational individual.

Her work has been shown in places like Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo and TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Ex Teresa Arte Actual in México City; Casa de las Americas in La Havana, Cuba; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panamá City; Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; and Root Division and The Lab in San Francisco.

Velázquez received a B.F.A. and Licenciatura in Printmaking from Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica and an M.F.A. in New Genres from
the San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright Scholar. She currently serves as a visiting critic in the college of art, architecture and planning at Cornell University.

ABOUT TRAVIS JOHNS

Travis Johns is a composer, instrument builder and educator based in Ithaca, New York with degrees from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and Mills College. Active in the field since the early 2000’s, his work largely concerns biometric interfaces, installation, interactivity and DIY analog instrument design has been featured at such places as MAC Panama, MADC Costa Rica, The Bangkok Art and Culture Center, The Cal Academy of Sciences and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. In 2023, he led the restoration of the Moog Rothenberg Keyboard, a 479-key microtonal organ for the Cornell Center
for Historical Keyboards.

ABOUT M+V

As a duo, they have been collaborating since 2003, oftentimes under the nom de plume of m+v. Most notably, in 2011 they won the Bienarte8 Costa Rican Biennial with Raro, an immersive installation that later represented Costa Rica in the 2013 Biennial of the Central American Isthmus (BAVIC).