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Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: June 28, 2023
Joshue Ott & Kenneth Kirschner
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2015, Project Resident
Members
Joshue Ott, Kenneth Kirschner

Joshue Ott (b. 1977, he/him) is a visualist and software designer who creates cinematic visual improvisations that are performed live and projected in large scale. Working from hand-drawn forms manipulated in real time with superDraw, a software instrument of his own design, Ott composes evolving images that reside somewhere between minimalism, psychedelia, and Cagean chance. He has performed with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; with Son Lux at MASS MoCA; with Gina Gibney Dance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and frequently at venues throughout NYC, including Le Poisson Rouge and Roulette. Installation works include a large-scale audience interactive performance at the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik, Iceland; a collaborative drawing system installed on the IAC Center’s 120-foot-long video wall; and a collaborative drawing installation at the NASA Ames Research Center. Ott is also the visual mastermind behind the hit iOS apps Thicket, snowDrift, Falling Stars, and Pitch Painter.

Kenneth Kirschner (b. 1970, he/him) is a composer of experimental music working at the intersection of avant-garde classical composition and contemporary electronic music. His work is characterized by a close integration of acoustic and electronic sound sources; a strong focus on harmony, pattern, and long-form development; and experimentation with techniques such as chance procedures, indeterminacy, and microtonality within a digital context. An advocate of open source music, Kirschner releases all of his work freely online through his website, kennethkirschner.com.

Eyebeam Project Residents (2015):

The Variant apps are a series of generative artworks created by visualist Joshue Ott and composer Kenneth Kirschner. Each Variant integrates interactive visuals with indeterminate music to create an ever-changing, ever-evolving audiovisual experience. This installation brings together two instances of the iOS app variant:SONiC with an extended 8-channel sound installation based on further transformation of the app’s music.

Visit the Variant Project here

A subtly interactive installation by Kirschner and Ott of their app, “variant,” allowed visitors’ gestures to take on a material form in light and sound.

 

This project was featured in a group exhibition for the 2015 Project Residents titled, “Inside/Out”

About Eyebeam Exhibition: Inside/Out (2015)

Featured Artists:

Kenneth Kirschner and Joshue Ott, Joanna Cheung, Tega Brain, Lilian Kreutzberger, and Collaborators Gene Kogan and Lisa Kori.

Lines don’t just separate; they’re also a meeting place, where surfaces are joined. This exhibition highlights five projects made during the 2015 Eyebeam project residencies, which probe at the porous boundary between the external and the internal, by examining how technologies make visible, audible or thinkable that which is normally hidden away inside. 

A subtly interactive installation by Kirschner and Ott allows visitors’ gestures to take on a material form in light and sound. Cheung’s dialogues with her family inventively adapt computer code for its storytelling power. Using natural elements, Brain creates sensory experiences from the wi-fi networks which surround us. Kreutzberger’s paintings interrogate and layer invisible connectivities, while Kogan and Kori explore tools for digital performativity—and in particular, opera. 

These works were examples of technology in an expanded sense: they are physical and conceptual tools by which we navigate and ultimately transform our contexts. This show was preceded by the exhibition Outside/In, which sought to bring digital imagery into dialogue with physical architecture. 

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

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