Performances and Upcoming Release

Another year goes by.........

Well this is shaping up to be a fun and interesting summer! I have some performances coming up and my new album should be out by the fall. And a few interesting projects of note.

On Thursday August 7, I will be perform at Quinn's In Beacon, NY as part of their "Extreme Thursdays" series. This series is curated by my old friend and comrade James Keepnews.
Currently, the plan is to do 3 improvised pieces, each one representing a different phase in my lengthy body of work. There will be a performance with live radio, an expanded guitar piece as well as my more recent adaptation of Mozart's Magic Flute. The latter two pieces will include a projected media component. Showtime is at 9pm. Thanks James! For more info on Quinn's have a clicky here

In keeping with the upstate NY theme (I am a native, afterall!!) I'll be heading further north to Acra, NY on Friday August 8 for a performance at the Wave Farm that will be broadcast on WGXC 90.7 FM. This 2.5 hour broadcast will be similar to the Quinn's show (minus the media component) but will also consist of a collaborative piece with poet Patricia Kositzky and perhaps a few more surprises. Thanks, Galen Joseph Hunter and Tom Roe for this fun opportunity! Showtime will be at 7pm.

My next album of tortured Baroque music is finally done and slated for a September 2014 release! Baroque Treasures consists of my algorithmically improvised interpretations of pieces by Handel. Vivaldi, Albinoni and Scarlatti. This will be out on my Praxis Classics label. I must say that I have not gotten sick of this album yet, which could be a good sign. More info to come...

Summer and Fall 2013: Performances and Exhibit

I knew when I started this blog that updates would be few and far between, as I like the practice of making work much more than promoting it.

Having pretty much been on "break" since my collaborative performance with LaToya Ruby Frazier during the 2012 Whitney Biennial, I am now entering into a period of uncharacteristic activity with three performances coming up in Baltimore, DC and Philadelphia and a solo exhibit at Brooklyn's Outlet Fine Art .

But first a quick word about the amazing performance that I did this week with my dear friend, poet GE Schwartz.  Somehow, we keep getting into the quadrennial INSAP conferences, which are devoted to the intersection of art and astronomy. We did The Adler Planetarium in 2005 and Florence in 2009. This years edition took place at the Hayden Planetarium in NYC. We were selected to perform Voyager Now! a multimedia performance  based on GE's poem about the Voyager probe. In the poem, the Voyager probe, which was launched in 1977, to spread earth's humanitarian love to the universe, returns to the earth and transforms itself into a Predator Drone, which then travels out of the solar system to wage war. For this piece, I created a 2K fulldome projection and performed a live sound component. Some images below.

I'll be heading down to the Baltimore area in late July to teach my Multimedia Art History course in Goucher College's MadArts graduate program and thought that it would be fun to do some performances while I'm away. So I'm very excited to announce the following dates:

Friday July 26 at The Red Room in Baltimore with Andrew Bernstein and M.C. Schmidt (thanks, Andrew!)

Friday August 2 at the Dog Daze Festival in Washington, DC (thanks, Andrew again)

Saturday August 10 at Aux Space  in Philadelphia with AP Vague and Ian M Fraser (thanks, AP!)

And I'm also happy to announce an upcoming solo exhibit at Outlet in Bushwick, Brooklyn. For this exhibit, I will be doing a sound and media installation based on Mozart's Magic Flute.  The exhibit will run from Sept. 13-29.  (Thanks,  Julian Jiminez Howard and Aliza Kelly).

Time to get to work!

PS-I'm slowly working on my next album for Praxis Classics . Release date should be later this year....

This Week : New Album Out + Occupy Wall Street Performance @ Chelsea Museum

The Fun Continues....

My first album in seven years, Bach: The Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 has been released on my new label, Praxis Classics.

The album consists of 5 improvised pieces where Bach's classic collection of fugues and preludes is fed into my randomization algorithms and transformed into something completely different and exciting.  This project is a natural outgrowth of my End Of History series of sound installations, performances and print editions that I have done over the last 5 years.  Not only does it function as and exploration into cultural production and expressed power through form, but it's also a fun little culture jamming prank in that it comes up in searches for Bach on iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Spotify and many other online retailers!  Soon pieces of it will be inserted into classical streams on Jango as well.

Praxis is all about transforming ideas into action and my work in this regard, is among many things, a critical re-evaluation of western art music and the role of culture as a mechanism of control.

You can listen to it online for free at http://damiancatera.bandcamp.com/
Go to the contact page at http://www.praxisclassics.com and register, if you would like  a free download.

Also, I'll be performing in New York this week for an event related to Occupy Wall Street. Protest: The 99% Art Exhibition will be happening at the Chelsea Art Museum this Saturday and Sunday Oct. 15 &16.This event is organized by Jolanta Gora Vita and the Sonic Self Curatorial team  I'll be performing on Saturday at 7pm. The Chelsea Art Museum is located at 556 West 22nd Street in Manhattan.


Hope to see you there.

-Damian

This Week: Black Mountain, Rutgers & Me

Some interesting things going on this week:

On Wednesday October 5 , three of my video shorts Weapons of Mass Banalization, Hot Dick v.a and The Ron Reagan Funeral Jam will be included in the Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay exhibit at the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University.

This show, which is curated by LaToya Ruby Frazier includes the work of some 150 artists who "deploy strategies and techniques that counter and subvert culture industry ideologies that promote racism, classism, nationalism, militarism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and consumerism."

I'm honored to be able to show my work with some of my favorite current and former Rutgers colleagues including Martha Rosler, Hasan Elahi and Ardele Lister. Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay runs until October 22. The opening reception is this Wed. from 5-7pm at the MGSA Galleries, 33 Livingston Ave in New Brunswick. This show looks amazing!

Weapons of Mass Banalization (2002)

On Saturday October 8,  I'll  travel to North Carolina to perform at Black Mountain College for the ReViewing Black Mountain 3 conference, which this year is devoted to John Cage and his influences.  I'll be performing a new intermedia piece EOH v.5, which is a cut up and randmomized version  of Bach's Musical Offering complete with a video projection of the randomly distorted score. Check out the conference here

Speaking of Bach, I am on the verge of releasing my first album in seven years; The Well Tempered Clavier Book 1: A Computer Mediated DeComposition on my new label Praxis Classics. It is already available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and Band Camp and will be fully released soon.

Also; I just got news today that I will be performing and showing work at the Chelsea Museum in a few weeks in an exhibit organized by Jolanta Gora Vita and the Sonic Self curatorial team. This exhibit is in solidarity with the evolving Occupy Wall Street movement.

hope all is well,

-Damian