Feast for the 5.1 Senses

Saturday, November 1
Admission: $50, including 2-course Indian-inspired menu
Showtime: 7pm
reservations are recommended

Imagine: You enter into a large cinema and settle into your seat. After a few minutes, the lights dim and the screen goes black. It is dark and everyone is silent, waiting for the film to begin. Then there is thunder; the speakers roar. The screen remains black, yet your body is immersed in sound. You are listening to cinema for the ear.

Co-curators Alexis Bhagat and Lauren Rosati have organized a two hour program of 5.1 Surround Sound works by over a dozen international artists for ((audience09)). Emphasizing temporal, narrative, and spatial experimentation, ((audience09)) mines an unexplored territory in the cinema. The movie theater is standardized, built space throughout the modern world:  just as the uniform space of stereo FM transformed popular music, the uniform space of surround sound has the potential to transform contemporary sound art. Currently, sound artists have been limited to designing surround sound works for home theaters, or for the cinema as corollary to the visual film. ((audience09)) promotes the exploration of the cinema as a concert hall for the 21st century.

((audience09)) crosses artistic as well as geographic boundaries, building connections between New York and Indian artists and organizations. In collaboration with Pooja Sood and Khoj Insternational Artists’ Association, the festival will be presented in Delhi, India in Winter 2009. The program will be previewed for the public in New York in November 2008 at an exciting venue TBA. Please sign up for the ((audience)) email list at au.dience.org for updates. Furthermore, the program will travel to film festivals and cinemas worldwide in 2009, bringing this work to a wider audience.

Feast for 5.1 Senses
The curators will hold this multimedia dinner benefit for ((audience09)) at Monkeytown, Brooklyn, on November 1, 7:30-10:30pm. With sound and string performances by Michael Northam, Zach Layton and MV Carbon, surround sound by Annea Lockwood and Simona Brinkmann, live video and sound by R. Luke Dubois, and a video mix by Lauren Rosati. Tickets are $50, including entrance and a two-course Indian-inspired dinner. Monkeytown is located at 53 North 3rd Street between Wythe and Kent Streets.

For more information on current and future presentations of ((audience)), or to learn more about the Feast for 5.1 Senses, please visit au.dience.org/feast or email co-curator Lauren Rosati at lauren@au.dience.org.

THE MENU
Starters (choice of):
Asparagus and sweet potato Samosa
Frisee, lemon-jaggery chutney

Vindaloo lamb sliders
Toasted naan, roasted tomato chutney, pickled mango

Pappadom crab roll
Fennel cured apples, avocado raita

Main Courses (choice of):
Wild mushroom, sweet corn and spinach curry
Anise flavored rice, Red chile jus

Seared duck breast
Leg confit Samosa, red lentils, coconut-jalapeno chutney

Tandoori Striped Bass
Cauliflower "cous-cous", roasted eggplant, saffron-cardamon nage

EXHIBITION SUPPORT

((audience)) is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions on behalf of ((audience09)) may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. To make a tax-deductible donation to ((audience)), please visit https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/contribute/donate. Select “AUDIENCE” from the “ON BEHALF OF” pull-down menu and complete the online form.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Alexis Bhagat is a writer, sound artist, and activist. He is co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography and co-curator of the traveling exhibition "An Atlas." He is the co-editor with Gregory Gangemi of Sound Generation (Autonomedia, 2008), a collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists and composers. He has organized concerts, discussions, and “listening lounges” of sound art and phonographic work in New York, Japan, Vermont, and Delhi, India. Since 2002, he has been a director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a grant-giving body supporting radical writers, and regularly writes a column "On Words and Revolution" for their journal, Perspectives.

Lauren Rosati is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator and writer interested in social culture, new media installation, and contemporary art. She is co-publisher of sound art magazine LOUD5, curator of the festival Build/Decay, a multimedia event that explores the simultaneous creative and destructive art processes, and writer of an essay in the recent book, PERFORMA, on the 2005 performance art biennial of the same name. Recent curatorial projects include Ice Cream Headache, a day-long, five-borough audio tour in which reinterpreted ice cream truck jingles were broadcast to an unsuspecting public, and Summer Mixtape Volume 1: the Get Smart edition, an exhibition of emerging New York artists at Exit Art co-curated by Associate Curator Herb Tam. Lauren Rosati has been the Assistant Curator at Exit Art since September 2007.