2007 Artists

2008 artists have not yet been announced.

A multimedia art exhibition exploring the themes of psychedelia will accompany the presentations. This includes art that uses psychedelics as a specific subject matter or as an influence of the artist. In addition to traditional visual art and sculpture, large scale interactive installations designed to encourage participation are included. Look out for an evolving electronic painting designed by a cyborg mind, a reflective geodesic dome immersed in the light of computer-controlled LEDs, an installation of rhythmic light defined by music computers, trance-inducing light installations, reflective mind treatments, tranquilizing illustrations, complex photograms, a random dot stereogram and a three-dimenstional infinity mirror.

Bring a shirt, fabric, piece of clothing or paper and get your own Horizons visual silk screen printed live, by hand, with love.

Garrison Buxton
Garrison Buxton's art comprises works from two distinct but related avenues. One is Buxton's own abstract oil painting which reference topographical maps, cellular structures, fractals, the interconnection of the macrocosmic and microcosmic, science and nature at large. The other avenue is work from Peripheral Media Projects (PMP), a collaborative venture and company that Buxton co-founded with Raymond Cross, a peer and friend from graduate school at Pratt Institute.

Buxton creates his abstract works by combining chemistry and aesthetics. He mixes oil, pigment, solvents, and other variables together to yield images that directly reflect the interactions of particles on the subatomic level. Buxton, an Oklahoma native, has been living in New York City for eight years. While growing up in Oklahoma, he attended Westminster and then Bishop McGuinness High School. He initially moved to New York to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After completing his MFA, Buxton taught Printmaking at Pratt and freelanced with other artists while working on his own pieces. Then, as he and Ray Cross worked together with greater frequency and clarity, they decided to take their combined skills, visions, and interests to the next level and started working as PMP in 2003. They formally incorporated two years later.

See also: Peripheral Media Projects

Ray Cross
Ray Cross is a visual artist, printmaker, and co-founder of Peripheral Media Projects and Ad Hoc Art, a gallery in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Started as a social street art outlet in 2004, the Peripheral Media Projects collective is a group of designers, printers, street artists and activists who revitalize silkscreen printmaking by creating art for installations, street theater, clothing, live printmaking performances and work on paper. PMP is committed to promoting awareness and social transformation through the creation of art and clothing, both within and outside the gallery and fashion systems. We are a swift, skilled, and focused coalition, open to collaboration with artists who want to produce prints for the street, gallery, and clothing.

See also: Peripheral Media Projects

Seze Devres
Seze Devres, of Turkish descent, was raised in New York City. Since 1995 she has been creating cameraless photographs (photograms) that explore the potentials of light and color through abstraction. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in the United States, Turkey, and France. She created album covers for many sound artists, including a series of 500 unique photograms for a limited edition CD by Damion Romero. Devres' photogram process has gained worldwide recognition and was recently highlighted in the photo textbook Exploring Color Photography.

Along with her endeavors in fine art, Devres works as a freelance photographer, web designer, and curator. In June 2007 she curated an exhibition on contemporary psychedelic art called "Love's Secret Domain" in Brooklyn. In the Summers of 2006 & 2007, she photographed the hugely successful museum parties for the PS1/MoMA Warm Up events. She also co-hosts and photographs the weekly techno party The Bunker.

Devres has taught Photography and New Media Art at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, International Center of Photography and 3rd Ward in New York City. As a teenager she studied at the Art Students' League, received a BA from Bard College (double major in Photography and Sculpture), and completed her Masters in Photography & Related Media at the School of Visual Arts.

http://www.seze.net

Images
My experimentations with photography began with the desire to create a new visual language that extends beyond the traditional bounds of representational photography: to produce what seems to be a contradiction in terms--painterly cameraless light drawings. Visually they are a lyrical merging of painting and photography, inspired by Cubism, Futurism, and the contemporary use of digital manipulation in sound and art.

I compose on sheets of film, using the light provided by a color enlarger, drawing with/from the basic materials commonly found in a darkroom: beakers, tape, cardboard, and knives. The tools are rough, but the photographs, once completed, are complex. This process enables me to make luminous explorations of forms, detailed with graphic slashes as complimentary shadows are interrupted by bright sparks of light.

For over eight years I have been evolving and perfecting my technique within the medium of the traditional photogram, which is a photograph made without the use of a camera or a lens. By refining my control of color and linearity, opacity and transparency, I seek to create a depth rarely seen in most photograms. Unlike typical photograms, my images are not silhouetted outlines of objects. And unlike much abstract photography, my images are not close-ups of patterns and shapes seen through a lens. These photographs are a convergence of light and mass built from a rich layering of shapes and gestures. They exist in the own other-worldly kaleidoscopic space, to be interpreted through our experience with the "real" world, and thus create an intimate reading within the viewer.

Scott Draves
Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a video and software artist residing in New York City and San Francisco. He is the creator of the Fractal Flame algorithm, the Bomb visual-musical instrument, and the Electric Sheep distributed screen-saver. All of Draves' software artworks are released as open source and distributed free on the internet. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. In 1997 Spot received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University for a thesis on metaprogramming for media processing. He projects live video for underground parties and at clubs, and self-publishes SPOTWORKS, a DVD of abstract animation synchronized with electronic music. His current project is Dreams in High Fidelity, a painting that evolves, and is installed in the lobby of Google's headquarters.

http://www.draves.org

Dreams in High Fidelity
Dreams in High Fidelity is a painting that evolves. It was designed and rendered with the Electric Sheep screen-saver, a cyborg mind composed of 50,000 computers and people mediated by a artificial intelligence. It uses mathematics and evolution to create an endless abstract animation guided by all those who watch it. See http://www.hifidreams.com for more information.

Nick Hallett / Harkness Group
Nick Hallett is a musician and avid curator working in the intersections of sound, moving image, and live performance. His projects encompass performing various genres of new music-from opera to cabaret to pop, composing for film and theater, developing audiovisual installations, DJing, writing, and filmmaking. He originated the band PLANTAINS, which from 2000 until 2003 operated as a live multimedia act, incorporating electronic music and video.

In 2005, Nick started Harkness Audiovisual, an initiative devoted to creating innovative contexts for new media. This has resulted in a series of immersive salons, film screenings, and live a/v performances, including a rare presentation of the Joshua Light Show at The Kitchen earlier this year.

http://www.harknessav.org

Visual Acid
Visual Acid is an synesthetic, multimedia installation which takes as its starting point the electronic disco genre, Acid House, to construct an immersive environment of rhythmic light. Defined by the sounds of the "808" drum machine and "303" bassline sequencer (both developed by Japanese electronic music manufacturer Roland) Acid House music was created by Chicago-based DJs during the mid-1980s.

Visual Acid will too be defined on the basis of these revolutionary music computers. The centerpiece of the installation is a genuine 808, its basic functions harnessed to trigger a series of stroboscopic, fluorescent light fixtures through the unit's individual audio outputs (a remarkable and unique feature of the 808), thereby reimagining the instrument as a fully interactive visuals-generating tool. As its companion, an "Optical 303" squelches the imaged representations of signature Acid basslines, which are projected through rotating prisms and shot throughout the space as cinematic, rainbow-infused light.

Robert Horansky
Robert Horansky resides in Manhattan and is an artist, photographer, and Design Director. Working in this field in New York for over 20 years, he's spent the past 10 years at The New Yorker working on projects such as the New Yorker Festival and designing The Complete New Yorker which received the Best DVD package acknowledgement in the 2006 Wallpaper Magazine Design Awards issue. For the last 5 years, he has art directed and designed the event graphics and the collectible program guide for the TED Conference held annually in Monterey, California. In his art, he is constantly researching , internalizing and exploring different types of visual systems and how they integrate and morph into something new. The visual systems in his complex drawings have a tranquilizing effect that can also simultaneously appear microscopic or universal in scale.

Image Node
Image Node is an audiovisual collective founded in 2001 which focuses on experimental realtime multimedia. While its focus is on the Burning Man festival, where it has appeared every year since 2001, Image Node also produces events in New York and other cities. Image Node projects include the Office Of Domeland Security, Bush Bush Revolution, The Tron Project, Capitol Offense, and many others. Image Node members who worked on Panoply include Ben Bartelle, David Polenberg, Jason Cipriani, Chris Jordan, Christine Ritok, and Sarah Porter.

See also: Todd Polenberg

http://www.imagenode.org

Panoply
Panoply is a 24' 3-frequency geodesic dome that contains nearly 700 full-color computer-controlled LEDs. Its interior walls are reflective. It is an experiment in space, time, and light.

Anakin Koenig
Anakin Koenig is a performance-sculpture artist who creates large-scale inflatable structures. His transformative installations engage architectural space and challenge the social and psychological horizon of the audience. Some of the pieces that he builds are transient instruments/environments for performances; others, such as Breathing Chandeliers, are soothing kinetic objects with built-in lights and sequenced inflation.

Recent projects include: an installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; a collaboration with Pierre Huyghe to create an inflatable environment for The Journey That Wasn't, presented at the 2006 Whitney Biennial; an installation at the DDM Warehouse in Shanghai; a collaboration with Leo Villareal for Creative Time, a sculpture at NASA Ames Research Center; and, a residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MediaLab for the Soft-Car project with Frank Gehry and General Motors. Based in New York, he founded Anakin Koenig Airways in 2001 and received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2004.

http://www.akairways.com

Starfish Garden
Inspired by the dynamism and variegation of starfish and other sea creatures, Starfish Garden is a ceiling installation comprising large breathing inflatable objects lit from the inside. The shape and size of each starfish is unique, and each individual element touches and affects the movement of the others, reflecting the dynamism and variety of life. The "breathing" (inflation and deflation) and the lights are sequenced for each element.

http://www.akairways.com/starfish_garden03.shtml

Leif Krinkle
For more than ten years Leif Krinkle has been collaborating with artists, musicians and designers from around the world, developing multidimensional media and challenging the potential of traditional art forms. He has created multimedia performances, engineered interactive installations, fabricated musical robots, designed large nontraditional display systems, and engineered physical devices for interaction with immersive multimedia environments.

See also: Nick Hallett / Harkness Group

http://leifkrinkle.net

Aaron Taylor Kuffner
Aaron Taylor Kuffner, aka Zemi17, is a composer, musician and media artist who creates experiences that are to plant seeds for the evolution of consciousness.

He studied new physics, technology, mixed media installation and experimental performance and worked on technology art, internet art, electronic-tribal music, guerrilla performance and circus artistry throughout the underground art scene of San Francisco and New Orleans . He moved to New York in 1997 and formed the experimental multi-media performance group Ransom Corp. His 'urban rituals', a fusion of modern and butoh dance, performance art, aerial acrobatics, video projections, site-specific installations and interactive audio scores, were performed in abandoned warehouses, subways, boats, rooftops and parks. His large scale works are The Fractal Seed and Sky Plots, which debuted at La Mama ETC and toured throughout Europe. He founded the 23 Windows collective community art studio in 2001 and co-created and curated The Resonant Wave Experimental Multi Media Art Festival in Berlin.

Zemi17 lived and worked in Indonesia collecting field recordings of nature and researching classic gamelan music and performed with professional groups in Yogyakarta and Bali . His study was concentrated on two archaic forms of gamelan, Sekatan and Slonding.

Zemi17 has received awards and sponsorships individually and through his affiliations from the Berlin Arts Council, Kultur Im Spannwerk, I-D media Berlin, European Union Arts Council through Schloss Brollin Research Labor, the James F. Robison Foundation, DTW fresh tracks, The Soros Foundation, Swiss Air, Psuedo.com and the estate of Dorthea Taylor.

http://zemi17.net/

Orkestra Jangkrik dan Gamelan Listrik Aneh (The Cicada Orchestra and Strange Electric Gamelan)
At Horizons, Zemi17 will be presenting live compositions sourced from the Balinese Trompong, recorded and reprocessed, syncopated and rewoven into electronic sound tapestries.

Deniz Kurtel
Deniz Kurtel is an installation artist who works with LEDs and mirrors to make psychedelic light sculptures. She first started showing her work at Wolf+Lamb techno parties, and later at places such as 3rd Ward, School of Visual Arts, and the Burning Man festival. Recently, she has also been interested in outdoor art installations that respond to natural effects such as wind, light, and dark, and her latest work consisted of 1100 pinwheels at Burning Man that created an intense audio-visual representation of the wind with the use of mylar and glow in the dark paper. Her primary interest is in facilitating alternative forms of perception that encourages the individual to search for a more authentic "reality". She is currently finishing her studies in Quantitative Methods at Columbia University.

http://www.denizkurtel.com

Head Dresser

The work is comprised of an LED box made of see-through mirrors attached onto a hair steamer, which surrounds the viewer's face when sat on the barber chair placed under it. The use of hair salon equipment intends to give the feeling of receiving some sort of "reflective" mind treatment instead of hair treatment, through the psychedelic visual environment that closely embraces the mind.

Zach Layton
Zach Layton is a composer, curator and new media artist based in new york with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental music, biomimicry and contemporary architectural practice. His work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns.

See also: Nick Hallett / Harkness Group

http://www.zachlaytonindustries.com

Gerald Marks
Gerald Marks is an artist working along the border of art and science, specializing in stereoscopic 3-D. He may be best known for the 3-D videos he directed for The Rolling Stones during their Steel Wheels tour. One of those videos was the ultra-psychedelic 2,000 Light Years From Home. He has taught at The Cooper Union, The New School and the School of Visual Arts, where he currently teaches Stereoscopic 3-D as part of the MFA program in Computer Art. He was a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, where he worked in computer-generated holography. His Professor Pulfrich's Universe installations are popular features in museums all over the world; originally at San Francisco's Exploratorium, and then at the N. Y. Hall of Science, and Sony ExploraScience in Beijing & Tokyo. He has done 3-D consulting, lecturing & design for scientific purposes for The American Museum of Natural History, the National Institutes of Health, and Discover Magazine. He has designed award winning projections and sets at the Public Theater, SOHO Rep, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center and the Nashville Ballet, creating projected stereoscopic sets. He created the 3-D glass-block mural in the 28th Street station of the #6 train.

Brock Monroe
Both as a solo artist and as part of the Mighty Robot A/V Squad, Brock Monroe has harnessed the tools and techniques of experimental cinema and the psychedelic lightshow to create live, improvisatory projections.

See also: Nick Hallett / Harkness Group

http://www.secretprojectrobot.org

Peripheral Media Projects
Based in Brooklyn, New York, PMP has grown to be a source of collaboration with people from a wide array of backgrounds. PMP works with architects, designers, musicians, performers, and anyone interested in producing prints for the street, galleries, apparel, etc. PMP is committed to promoting awareness and social transformation through the creation of art and clothing, both within and outside of the gallery and fashion systems.

http://www.peripheralmediaprojects.com
http://www.plandclothing.com
http://www.adhocart.org

Retinal Treats
Note: Bring a shirt or something to have images printed on.

Peripheral Media Projects' delegates ZERO & Negative ZERO have teamed up on another mission to bring super-horizon-inspired visuals to the event. These retinal treats comprise some fresh-of-the-press releases and some classic delights. Bring a shirt, fabric, piece of clothing, paper, whatever, and we'll drop the Horizons happiness on it, live, in person, printed by hand, with love.

Todd Polenberg
Todd Polenberg is a new media artist, electronic musician, and ersatz electrical engineer. His a a member of the Fort/Da audiovisual collective and a founding member of Image Node. His artwork consists of large-scale LED installations, audiovisual remixes, rituals for the secular, and meditations on the unheimlich of technology. He performs abstract techno music as Habitrail and ambient hiphop as Autophage. His work has been seen and heard in places such as Ars Electronica, The Bunker, Brooklyn lofts via The Danger, Artbots, Roseland, and the Burning Man festival.

See also: Image Node

http://www.imagenode.org

Douglas Ruuska
Douglas Ruuska is a sculptor/maker interested in the exploration of experience. His work extends sculpture into a more dramatic, interactive realm by utilizing kinetic elements and lighting as integral components. The goal is to better reflect the ever-changing physical and visual experience that comprises life itself. Dramatic changes of scale such as room-sized Galaxies or neurons bring these objects into the human realm to help promote a better comprehension of where we fit into the grand scheme of the Universe.

He has exhibited in such inhospitable and far-flung places as Burning Man, McMurdo Station in Antarctica and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He most enjoys clambering over, under and around anything in the search for the Hidden details and beauty of the world he happens to find himself in at the moment.

http://www.ruuskado.com

A Matter of Perspective
By day a static, double-armed, spiral galaxy. A skeletal construct with all of its various mechanisms exposed for leisurely perusal and examination. At night, its mesmerizing purpose comes to life when darkness obscures the structural elements. Leaving behind an ever-changing pin-wheel of colors, patterns and moods.

Betty Taopat Kao

http://beatrixxx.deviantart.com/gallery

Shelf
An Asian face opens to reveal a scene depicting the senses and auspicious objects.

The viewer can travel to the different floors on the three shelves to move through the subconscious mind. People often conceal an intimate story held by their objects. On a individual level, many people arrange their shelves to be altars to their personal beliefs and interests. The objects are decorative, comforting, and hold sentimental value to the owner. Hand sculpted ceramic with brass hinges.

Leo Villareal
Villareal has shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States in both public spaces as well as in galleries and museums including PS1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, Long Island City; Palm Beach Institute for Contemporary Art, Palm Beach; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; and the Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France.

Villareal studied installation sculpture and video at Yale University and went on to the Interactive Telecommunicatons Program (ITP) at New York University where he specialized in virtual reality, simulation and interactive television. He spent two years as a member of the research staff at Interval Research, a private think tank in Palo Alto founded by Paul Allen.

http://www.villareal.net

Bulbox 1.0, Bulbox 3.0
The Bulbox series is a progression of small-scale light works that use highly artificial technological processes to provoke intuitive, emotional responses from the viewer. The quality that emerges from each work is organic, and relates to the need to seek a pattern or understanding in forms that are at once methodical, natural and mysterious in appearance. Their rhythms alternate between chaos and order as the pieces hypnotically throb and pulsate. Points of diffused light drift in and out of synchronous patterns as each work 'breathes'. Villareal's work almost always uses a continuously variable system, exploring the 'analog' in its most fundamental sense. Many of the artist's works are very large in scale, created specifically to engulf the viewer in a particular atmosphere or environment. The Bulbox series is an attempt by Villareal to place a small piece of this discipline in one's living environment; an attempt to create a small 'beacon' of his process in a wide variety of locations. In spite of the fact that the work is made of Plexiglas, light bulbs and computer chips, each piece has a very low-tech quality; a quality that is visceral in its aesthetic simplicity.

James Vogel
James Vogel is a fine artist, art director, and creative designer. He graduated from Columbus College of Art and Design before running away with a traveling circus that brought him to New York City. A multi-disciplinarian, James has taken on an array of esteemed projects. He has designed for Irving Penn's photography, Lou Reed's Modern Dance video, Bette Midler's Millennium Tour, Salmon Rushdie's Haroon, Micheal Mao's Dance theater, Saturday Night Live, The Boston Ballet, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

His works appear on Jim Henson's Sesame St. and Broadway production such as the Lion King, Avenue Q, The Little Shop of Horrors, and Tarzan. He has displayed for Virgin Records, Vogue Magazine, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Calvin Klein. His foray into motion pictures has included animatronics, special effects and art direction. You can view the trailer to his latest collaborative movie project online at revolverthemovie.com.

John Walter
John Walter is the creator and founder of the True Mirror Company. He has a background in math, physics and computers and has been struggling with the relationship between the self and the world, particularly when seeing himself in a mirror.

At a friend's party he walked into the bathroom and despite his happy mood, he noticed the fakeness of his smile in the mirror. Something was wrong. As he turned away, he discovered a medicine cabinet mirror at 90 degrees from the mirror he was looking in, catching his reflection in the other mirror. This time his smile looked distinctly warm and inviting.

Two mirrors at right angles "un-reverse" the mirror image and reflect us properly. What he discovered in that instant was self-recognition. He saw himself as he was. His feelings and expressions matched reality. He saw his happiness and normalness and his eyes began to shine: "There you are!" he exclaimed.

He realized that a regular mirror was a distortion and since that moment his mission has been to bring that experience to the world. He found a way to make the two mirrors join seamlessly and founded the True Mirror Company in 1992. He has developed a full theory of why the true mirror image is so different, including concepts such as right brain/left brain theory, information processing, personality, feedback loops, and social conditioning and he has shown it to thousands of people.

http://www.truemirror.com

The True Mirror
The True Mirror reflects you without your image being reversed Ð it shows you a view of yourself unlike any other mirror. The traditional, backwards mirror you have always seen reverses left and right, makes reading unreadable, and changes your appearance in two distinct ways, physically and psychologically.

The physical is more noticeable at first, where, for instance, birthmarks and hair parts appear on the opposite side. You also move differently in the True Mirror: notice how you stay in the center regardless of which angle you face the mirror. Many people see themselves as strongly asymmetric-- this is somewhat of an illusion, as you are seeing asymmetry on the opposite side and it tends to get doubled. If you tilt your head, as most people do, your eyes don't line up like in a regular mirror, and you get a sense that your head is skewed (try to make your eyes perfectly level and this sense dissipates a little.

If you dig a little deeper, there are psychological differences in the person that looks back at you from the True Mirror compared to the person in a backwards mirror. Turns out, the backwardness alters the information in your face in subtle, yet important ways. The right brain/left brain differences we all have are changed 180 degrees-- you are seeing the only person in the world with a logical right brain and feeling left brain! How the differences in your brain are reflected on your face is highly dependent on each person, but whatever natural expression you may have almost always becomes somewhat un-natural instantly in the backwards mirror. You interact with this person in an un-natural way, typically by becoming expressionless Ð the mirror stare replaces the natural smile. Try looking with together with a friend, and animate yourself to see how your face looks and feels different!

The True Mirror can open a new window to discovering your self and what you bring to the world through your face and expressions. The most rewarding experience is when you "get it", and see that you are "getting it" in the mirror, and all of a sudden you have a major explosion of expression-- so much richer that what you have always seen in a backwards mirror... this is the "you" that the world sees!

Crystal Infinity Mirror
Have you ever seen an infinity mirror-- where two mirrors reflect each other into infinity? Well the Crystal Infinity mirror is like that except in three dimensions! Because the mirror is much more reflective than regular mirror, there are at least 30 reflections in each direction, instead of the usual 10-15.

Healing Plants with Nat Bletter
Nat Bletter is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnobotany at the City University of New York and the New York Botanical Garden. He specializes in medicinal plants of Peru and Mali, quantitative ethnobotany, and stimulant plants such as cacao. He has also worked as a computer graphics and virtual reality researcher for seven years and created sculpture, graphic art, music, electronic art, and fire art from an early age.

He is the author of a chapter on the psychoactive effects of chocolate in the recently released book Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (Maya Studies).

http://sciweb.nybg.org/science2/Profile_45.asp

Healing Plants Display

Nat will serve some teas of (legal) psychoactive plants, show the wide range of psychoactive plants available, and answer questions about the botany, neurochemistry, and shamanism of psychoactive plants