Performance: Nate Boyce, "Kaoss Etudes"
The de Young will host the US premiere of the newest multimedia performance work from San-Francisco-based artist Nate Boyce. Kaoss Etudes functions like an index of various modes of image and sound production and their perceptual effects as they operate along aesthetic spectrums. Building off of the form of the etude as a limited and focused study, Boyce crafts a series of audiovisual vignettes that explore psychoacoustics and experiment with visual perception. Combining elements of CGI and hand drawn animation, accompanied by electronic and live music, Boyce’s work pushes the materiality of digital expression in form and aesthetics, conspiring to create emotional, physical, and perceptual effects. Images derived and manipulated from populist and art historical sources merge with wholly invented landscapes and objects exploring the production of pictorial illusionism in the space of a flat screen. Compositions draw in part on historical precedents like György Ligetti and Olivier Messian, and traditional modalities like baroque tonality and suspended jazz harmony, while exploiting the materiality of sound. In his manipulation of traditional forms, and invention of new forms, Boyce moves us deftly between different emotional states from the sublime to the foreboding, creating affective shifts across varied terrain, from traditional sentimentality to minimalist dissonance.
Kaoss Etudes was premiered with his long-time collaborator, New York-based musician and producer Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) at Red Bull Music Academy in Sao Paolo. Boyce has performed over the years at venues such as MoMA, New York; Barbican Gallery, London,; and PS1, New York and exhibited his work in venues such as Kunstverein Munchen; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and ICA, London.
Tickets here