April 15, 2010 Contact: Edward Schocker 510-418-3447
For Immediate Release edward@thingamajigs.org

Thingamajigs Presents
Remarks on Color / Sound

Who: Thingamajigs
What: Remarks on Color / Sound
Where: Headlands Center for the Arts’ Gymnasium, 944 Fort Barry, Sausalito, CA 94965
When: May 16th from sunrise to sunset (approximately 14-hours)
Tickets: Free (donations gladly accepted)
Reservations: No reservations necessary
For more information: 510-444-1322 or people@thingamajigs.org

April 15, Oakland. Remarks on Color / Sound is a 14-hour piece, which explores collaborative work in a variety of mediums and is based on a reading of Stephen Ratcliffe’s poem by the same title (written between 7.15.05 and 4.8.08 – 1,000 pages in 1,000 consecutive days). Utilizing sound, light, movement and sculpture in an open dialogue with the architecture of the surrounding space, this performance extends investigations into the integration/interaction of human beings and natural landscape begun in our 2008 performance, HUMAN/NATURE, at UCDavis: "the relation between things seen/observed in the natural world and how such things might be made (transcribed/transformed) as works of written (or visual) art."

Remarks on Color / Sound will take place in the Gym Studio at Headlands Center for the Arts, where Thingamajigs’ cofounder Edward Schocker is currently an Artist in Residence. The performance will be held on the same day as the 2009/ 2010 Graduate Fellows Exhibition opening, which takes place in Building 944 (3rd Floor) on the Headlands campus. Headlands Center for the Arts hosts an internationally recognized Artist in Residence program, as well as interdisciplinary public programs, aiming to create dialogue and exchange that build an appreciation for the role of art in society. Find out more at headlands.org.

The historic gymnasium of the Headlands Center for the Arts offers an ideal location for this event. As the sunlight moves through the giant windows the shadows and hues create an ever-changing landscape. The piece starts at 5:59 AM (sunrise) and ends when the entire work has been spoken (approx. 14 hours). Audience members are encouraged to come in and out of the space as they wish, or to bring a pillow or mat and stay as long as they would like. You might even go for a hike or a picnic and come back.
“That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit.” – Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color

Directions: Headlands Center for the Arts is accessible from San Francisco by MUNI Bus #76, which runs every hour on Sundays between 9:30AM and 5:30PM. For directions, visit headlands.org or call 415-331-2787 x2

Artists involved:

Dylan Bolles makes performances with people and environments, many of which involve the design and construction of new musical instruments and the cultivation of co-creative relationships based in listening practice. His activities include a wide range or performance-based collaborations, time-based arts, installations, and sound compositions. These works strive to unify the performer/audience split and to build communities based in shared temporal experience. Dylan's collaborative performances have appeared at such venues as the Lincoln Center and the SF Exploratorium, but are coming soon to a living room near you. He holds degrees in music composition from Middlebury and Mills Colleges where he studied with a wide range of wonderful humans including Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Su Lian Tan, Eliane Radique, Brenda Hutchinson, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others. Dylan is co-founder and an artistic director of, thingamajigs, an Oakland-based performance festival and educational non-profit organization.

Michael Meyers work straddles the disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, set design and performance. It has been seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in collaboration with the film performance group silt on their All Pieces of a River Shore for the museum’s 2002 Bienniel. In 2005, the Lyon Opera Ballet commissioned a kinetic stage sculpture for a new production of Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset/Reset. That summer, Michael collaborated with a group of local artists at the Richmond Art Center to produce Ballybaba--a tribute to Irish Author Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy. The recent exhibit, Transtructural, with Amanda Hughen was shown at Oakland’s Johansson Projects gallery. Michael has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant for 2007-2008.

Suki O’Kane is one of the founding members of the lo-fi sampling ensemble The Noodles (with Michael Zelner), plays percussion with Moe! Staiano's Moe!kestra! and Dan Plonsey's Daniel Popsicle, and has performed live and recorded with She Mob and the side projects of its co-founder Sue Hutchinson: mad folk duo Junior Showmanship and it's alter-ego speed metal Winner's Bitch. She has performed in realizations of Jon Brumit's Vendetta Retreat, and with Lucio Menegon in his Split Lip and Soundtrack Instumentals projects. Her long-running conversation about intermedia with Sarah Lockhart is now being occasionally expressed in drumkit duo performances of SL Morse.

She works in partnership with House of Zoka, a live recording project that has documented over ten years of creative new music in the Bay Area, is an inveterate phonographer and since 2003 has been curating performances of live music and film, such as The Illuminated Corridor, a nomadic public art project that creates streetscapes of live experimental music and performative projection.

Stephen Ratcliffe’s books of poetry include REAL, Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer). Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet has just been published by Counterpath Press; Listening to Reading, a collection of essays on contemporary "experimental" poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2000. He lives in Bolinas, and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

Edward Schocker is a composer who creates music with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. He holds an M.A. in composition from Mills College, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and independently with Lou Harrison. Using an assortment of unorthodox materials of which to create sound, Edward has developed a large set of glass vessels of various sizes as his primary musical instrument.

Edward was honored to take part in UNESCO sponsored Shared Echos –a bicommunal project in Cyprus that helped build understanding between communities in conflict. Edward has been lives in Tokyo, Japan and Oakland, California, he was awarded The NEA/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship to research Japanese musical instruments and tuning systems and is currently 2010 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Zachary Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from Cornish College of The Arts, The Microscores Project, The Beam Foundation, Somnubutone Radio Series, the sfSoundGroup and the Seattle Chamber Players. His 2006 composition Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition. Zachary performed at the 2008 Sounds Outside Festival, the 2007 Bent Festival in Los Angeles, the 2006 International Computer Music Conference and has presented work at the 10th Annual Music For People and Thingamajigs Festival as well as the second Biennial SJ01 Global Festival of Arts on the Edge. In 2007, Zachary premiered a new multi-media work entitled Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery’s Composers in Performance Series that received grants from the American Music Center and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Zachary designed the sound and composed music for the plays “I have loved Strangers” produced by Just Theatre, which was listed “top ten of 2007” in the East Bay Express and the 8th Annual ReOrient Theatre Festival. His sound art work entitled Designed Obsolescence, "spoke as a metaphor for the breakdown of the dream of technology and the myth of our society’s permanence," review by Susan Noyes Platt in the Summer 05 issue of ARTLIES. ITCH, Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published the graphic score Found Print Piece No.1. During October of 2006, Zachary was an artist in residence at the Espy Foundation.

History and Mission Statement:

Thingamajigs began in 1997 at Mills College. Originally conceived as a forum for composers/performers who develop new and unique ways of producing sound, it soon broke out of the college environment and into a large public offering. As of 2004 a permanent board of was created, by which many events in addition to the Annual Music for People & Thingamajigs Festival are produced. In addition to our annual festival Thingamajigs offers a variety of arts, educational, and cross-cultural events such as The Pacific Exchange Series, Thingama-kids!, and various artist exchange programs.

Our mission is to develop and nurture the exploration of alternate materials and methods of creating sound, as well as promote collaborative efforts within other artistic disciplines not generally associated with festivals of music. With open workshops and performances, we welcome audiences/participants of all ages and backgrounds to join in a wonderful tradition started here in the Bay Area by such composers as Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and John Cage.

Calendar Editors Please Note

Who: Thingamajigs
What: Remarks on Color / Sound
Where: Headlands Center for the Arts’ Gymnasium, 944 Fort Barry, Sausalito, CA 94965
When: May 16th from sunrise to sunset (approximately 14-hours)
Tickets: Free (donations gladly accepted)
Reservations: No reservations necessary
For more information: 510-444-1322 or people@thingamajigs.org