Michael Una is a Chicago based sound and installation artist as well as a synthesizer engineer.  His work investigates how vibrating waves of energy and human consciousness interact. He utilize traditional musical instruments, handbuilt analog electronics, video processes, digital synthesis, and repurposed objects to build harmonic wave patterns. These patterns are projected into physical space, creating a unique and temporary audiophysical experience.

Octophonopod consists of eight speakers and an accompanying audio-reactive LED display housed within eight paper lanterns. The speakers are fed by four CD players, i.e, eight mono channels of sound run through four car stereo amplifiers. I composed an eight-channel sound piece to run through the system, generating light and sounds in a calming, ambient fashion.

The Beat Bike is a bicycle-controlled drum machine A movement-controlled audio generation/manipulation system, built from scratch. Translates gestures and dance into sound.

The Sound Suit

Michael just won the first grant from Scale Well, a Chicago based "Angel" Investor fund, to produce hand made musical instruments such as the Beep It Deluxe.  The Beep it is a Beep-it Deluxe is a handmade optical theremin, housed in a handsome laser-cut bamboo case and featuring a big chrome button and 2nd oscillator for enhanced modulation.

Beep-it Deluxe emits a square-wave tone reminiscent of 8-bit video game music. A light sensor determines the overall pitch of the instrument, while a knob on the side can be adjusted to induce a warble into the tone for all of your sci-fi and rhythmic needs.  Beep It Deluxe will be sold at the new Pilsen Gallery N0T0X

Here's a Picture of Beep It:

go love

The Chicago Art Department's Tube Series this month features Galina Shevchenko.  Galina is a Moscow born, Chicago based artist that works with visual media in the form of installation and live performance.  She loves to combine vernacular visual elements with archetypical and cultural icons creating exquisite combinations of high and pop, classical and postmodern. Her piece for the Tube series is titled "go love" and is a poetic video contemplation on the domain of feeling. Accessible through a window, the piece is a window itself that grants instant access  to subconscious controversies. The viewer is teased with its vulnerable messages and seductive lines.

Her work is represented by PSYMBOLIC Multimedia label and can be found at

http://www.psymbolic.com/unlock.html?key=/artists/galina_shevchenko

Galina's work is represented by Moka Gallery Chicago

“exPosed” by Edyta Stepien

CAD's Tube Series this month features content from a larger  video installation by Edyta Stepien. The  concept for the larger installation was to create a seductive lounge environment constructed from multiple projections of fragmented female body. The imagery of hair falling from the ceiling in a 20 ft. high drape, a close up of female skin wrapping the wall and suspended legs became it’s own leaving form. In this recontextualized  setting the video on  TV screens appear constricted, captured and fragmented .

Edyta Stepien's artistic practice encompasses  large-scale video installation,  single channel video pieces, and photography. Her work  buries itself in evocative contradictions - mysterious yet familiar, cold yet inviting, beautiful yet frightening. She aims to capture humanity in flux; between our natural organic state and the synthetic world we've willed ourselves into. While she continuously creates profound and ambiguous pieces, her immersive environments and seductive imagery plunge audiences into an inviting world of sense experience.

More of Edyta's work can be found at www.edytastepien.com

The Exponential vs. Emergence

In March of 2009, The Exponential performed an improvisational set as part of a collaboration with sculptor Eric W. Stephenson during his open studio and metal pour at Central Park Arts in Chicago. The set was performed on and around Eric’s piece entitled Emergence #17. We set up all of our equipment on and around it, and attached PZM microphones to it, converting the metal giant into a giant resonator and drum. Professional videographer Mike Dunne was brought in to document the event. This is a video composite pulled together from over 90 minutes of footage.

Performed by The Exponential. Filmed by Mike Dunne.

Reacting to one’s surroundings is no longer merely a method for one’s own personal expression. It’s now simultaneously a nervous addiction, and a vital therapeutic act both beckoned and facilitated by the exponential growth of networked social communication tools, and the further encroachment of special interests into all realms of society that were once thought to be personal. One is forced to react, in an attempt to stay humane and sane, in a post industrial whiplash culture where even the most intimate communications are routinely transmitted across vast networks via screens and keys of varying sizes—brought to you by your benevolent sponsor. This reaction is often involuntary and destructive—The Exponential makes its reaction intentional and productive. We’re responding to the loss of control over our absorption of this environment littered with the sounds, smells, and waste of a hyper-stressed population; where glass and steel monuments to monetary deities rise high above the compromised dreams of it’s inhabitants; where ghettos are fed with synthesized fast foods and hyper-capitalist pop music expounds executive values of thug success. Our visceral response to this storm of clutter, however, can be designed, and it is humane and authentic. We indulge in our reaction, harnessing its revolt and exposing its complexity and timber, allowing our observer to step into this new space: a creative ethos of imaginative possibility. To do this we reach backwards, clutching onto ancient acoustic instruments—some almost entirely forgotten—and project them forward through the means of modern technology. We build a primal, human response to over-stimulation, and push it up through the cracks in this cluttered outer shell of our contemporary existence.

theexponential.org@gmail.com

The Tube Series is a monthly video installation, curated by CAD and supported by the Chicago Arts District. Each month beginning on the second Friday to coincide with the Pilsen Artwalk, CAD brings a new time-based artist to install their work in the storefront window located at 1833 South Halsted. With this series, CAD aims to promote new and emerging artists while raising awareness for Chicago video art.

"We Are" Video by Chuck Przybyl with Agnieszka Kulon and Cleveland Dean, explores the ideas of black and white within the contexts of video installation and performance. Video installation is located in the storefront window of 1833 South Halsted and will be viewable through December 12, 2009.

Chuck Przybyl: A Chicago-based visual artist with a distinctly authentic and contemporary sensibility. He takes the everyday, as well as the extraordinary, and creates dreamlike images in video and still form. More work by Chuck Przybyl can be found at 10klux.com. chuck@chuckphoto.com.

Agnieszka Kulon: Art has no boundaries. I am a follower of this principle. I refuse to label myself objectively that is why you discover that I have many trades in this art.

Cleveland Dean: Gravitating to the influences of the early American Abstract Expressionist movement and Asian calligraphy, he pulls from various elements and life experience and has formed an individual style that reflects his vision, intellect, passions, transgressions, and love.

The Tube Series is a monthly video installation, curated by CAD and supported by the Chicago Arts District. Each month beginning on the second Friday to coincide with the Pilsen Artwalk, CAD brings a new time-based artist to install their work in the storefront window located at 1833 South Halsted. With this series, CAD aims to promote new and emerging artists while raising awareness for Chicago video art.

http://accidentalmysteries.blogspot.com/2009/10/interview-with-francois-robert.html

Another acclaimed series by Francois called "Faces" finds friendly, odd and interesting facial characteristics in everyday objects.

Francois also likes structure and order and for a few decades has chronicled the emptied pockets of everyday and not so everyday people, yours truly included.

http://francoisrobertphotography.com/#/portfolio/fine_art/contents

You can find Francois' full website here:

http://francoisrobertphotography.com/

www.designboner.com

Design Boner is a humble design blog.  Co-creators Porcelain and Cardboard (IRL: Katie Brown and Jessica Bartlett, respectively) enjoy the anonymous editorial freedom to lean poetic against fabric samples or type a little smack about dining tables.  This selectively chatty duo fancies themselves artists, writers, style scouts (and/or rebels), and now – maybe most consistently – a couple of damn fine photographers.

www.designboner.com

Design Boner is a humble design blog.  Co-creators Porcelain and Cardboard (IRL: Katie Brown and Jessica Bartlett, respectively) enjoy the anonymous editorial freedom to lean poetic against fabric samples or type a little smack about dining tables.  This selectively chatty duo fancies themselves artists, writers, style scouts (and/or rebels), and now – maybe most consistently – a couple of damn fine photographers.

6 & 7, a project in progress since February 2007, was initiated as a challenge to find visual interest in the everyday.  The “rules” are simple: both Porcelain and Cardboard must take one photo every Saturday (6) and Sunday (7).  This exhibition showcases the best of each blogger’s individual images, as well as a sampling of successful four-panel mosaics, each of which have been published on designboner.com, post-weekend.

…blah blah blog….

Join us as we shutthehellupwithourwords for one night and allow our imagery to speak for itself.

A VJ is a performance artist that manipulates video as an art form. Typically, VJ's mix video live and in conjunction with electronic music at clubs, festivals and "illegal" underground parties called "raves". Seth's VJ work combines video found in the public domain, samples of uncommon film footage and video he shoots of objects and subjects of interest.

Musical Performance by Trenchdigger and 0+1=Everything and Afters Cool Society