Wired
On NJN’s State of the Arts
Friday, May 19 at 8:30 pm; and Wednesday, May 24 at 11:30 pm

STATEWIDE – Humans, it seems, make art out of anything they can — be it stone, paint, or binary codes. Are we Wired for art? This episode of State of the Arts looks at artists mixing up technologies, from the handcrafted to the digitally sampled. Wired airs on Friday, May 19 at 8:30 pm, with a rebroadcast on Wednesday, May 24 at 11:30 pm.

• PLOrk
PLOrk — a rough acronym for Princeton Laptop Orchestra — is a new ensemble directed by Princeton University professors, Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, and made up of 15 students who use laptop computers as their instruments. Each musician sits on a pillow with a six-channel hemispherical speaker and a variety of control devices, and produces unique musical sounds in real time. State of the Arts producer Eric Schultz recorded one of the group’s premiere performances, which included works by Trueman and Cook, as well as Paul Lansky, Brad Garton, Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn, Scott Smallwood, Seth Cluett, and Ge Wang. The performers were joined by renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, legendary accordionist Pauline Oliveros, and the young percussion quartet So Percussion. Schultz also visits some of the musicians in class at Princeton University.

• Eco-Art
The works of eco-artist Brandon Ballengée will be on display in a new exhibit, “Alchimie de la Douleur” (Alchemy of Grief) at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, New Jersey, running through June 24, 2006. Ballengée will also be doing eco-art workshops and creating his signature outdoor black-light “love motel” sculptures at both The Teaneck Park Conservancy and at a local elementary school. These temporary installations, which he has created in the rainforest of Costa Rica, a town square in Germany, and on a floating barge in Venice, are created in part by bugs attracted to the black light, which then mate and feed and become part of the sculpture, which is thus “painted” with the bugs’ chemical pheromones.

State of the Arts producer Susan Wallner will be on hand as Ballengée creates the black-light structure with students from the Nathaniel Hawthorne School in Teaneck, and later that evening when the sculpture is “turned on” for the bugs. Ballengée has been interested in both art and biology since he was a teenager, and he continues to be directly involved in field research and ecological activism. His artwork, which explores the connection between individuals and the environment, is being shown by the Puffin Cultural Forum as part of its ongoing interest in both art and nature. The Puffin Foundation oversees both the Puffin cultural programs and the Teaneck Park, which opened for the community on May 7, 2006 after an extensive cleanup (it had previously been a “brownfields” dump).

• Digital Tao
Antonio Puri and LiQin Tan have collaborated to combine abstract painting with high-powered computer animation in “Path of Cosmologies & Technology,” a new exhibit at the Noyes Museum in Oceanville, New Jersey, running May 13 - September 3, 2006. Collingswood-based artist Antonio Puri creates large-scale paintings of a spiritual nature. Puri is inspired in part by a childhood spent near the Himalayan mountain range where he first experimented with traditional mediums like clay, woodcarving and batik. Cherry Hill artist LiQin Tan has a successful career that includes working as an animator for Disney and founding “Painter Magazine” in his native China. He now teaches in the Electronic Art program at Rutgers University, Camden and specializes in 3-D computer animation. As State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa discovered, when these two unlikely artists work together — using laptops, video projectors and lots of canvas — the result is a show teeming with life.

• Vital Signs
The Boston Symphony Orchestra was wired for a recent concert in an unusual way. Protruding from a jersey-like jacket worn by Conductor Keith Lockhart was a bundle of wires and sensors. Five orchestra members wore the same outfits, and nearly 50 members of the audience also wore sensors or manipulated handheld devices. The jackets and sensors were designed by Dr. Teresa M. Nakra, Assistant Professor of Music at The College of New Jersey, graduate of MIT’s Media Lab, and founder of Immersion Music, Inc. The musicians and audience were “connected” to better understand how our brains and bodies respond to music. By measuring physiological changes during music making and listening, the experiment is meant to uncover the nature of our emotional responses to music and how much of a common experience we share. State of the Arts producer Adelia Honeywood Harrison visits Dr. Nakra for a demonstration of the technology behind her sensory clothing. Also interviewed is Dr. Philip Tate,

Conductor and Assistant Professor of Music at The College of New Jersey, who reflects on the emotional experience of music.

State of the Arts, the award-winning, half-hour arts magazine airs every Friday at 8:30 pm, followed by an encore presentation each Wednesday at 11:30 pm.

The current episode of State of the Arts can be viewed online at www.njn.net. Individual stories will be available to view online following their broadcast by visiting the program online at State of the Arts.

Funding for State of the Arts is provided by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The series producer is Susan Wallner and the executive producer is Nila Aronow.