Department of Music

The Composition and Computer Technologies (CCT) program in the Department of Music will present their annual festival of new music and art, artist presentations, and installations on February 3 and 4. This year’s festival will feature CCT faculty, staff, and graduate students as well as other members of the UVA and Charlottesville art-making communities. The festival will take place in the Dome Room of the Rotunda from noon on Friday 2/3 until noon on Saturday, 2/4. Performances and presentations will include surround sound electronic music, performances on custom-built instruments, lecture-presentations, video art, audio-visual installations, and more. The featured guests for Technosonics 2023 are Erica Gressman and Andy Slater.

Access to the overnight events (11pm-7am) requires a ticket. Tickets are free and available here: https://tickets.artsboxoffice.virginia.edu/10212/10213  Tickets are available on-line only.

Updated Program and Program Notes as of 3/3/23
All events take place in the Rotunda Dome Room.  
Updates / details will be listed below when they become available:

See below for guest artist presentation details:

Erica Gressman

Erica Gressman is a Miami-born, mixed Latinx queer artist working in Chicago who fuses sound art with performance. She received her BA from New College of Florida and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Performance in 2012. After Gressman received her MFA, she has worked as a Design Engineer and now has her own fabrication business, Rainbolt Productions, building architectural sculptures. These experiences have greatly influenced the heavy interactive structures that function as the sets for her compositions. Their thesis performance 'Wall of Skin' was featured in Performance Matters online journal (written by Dr. Sandra Ruiz), Teaching Contemporary Art, Barbed Magazine, Emergency Index Vol. 2, and featured on ‘La Estacion Gallery’ podcast. She has given lectures at institutions, such as Northwestern University, University of Illinois, University of Illinois CU, Royal Danish Art Academy, and New College of Florida. In 2019, they became an Illinois Arts Council Fellow after finishing Krannert Art Center's debut of her performance, 'Limbs'. She has performed at the Museum of the Contemporary Art Chicago, MANA Contemporary, Defibrillator Gallery, Pittsburgh’s VIA: Video/Music Festival, New York’s Grace Exhibition Space, Theater Factory in Malmo, Sweden, and Miami Art Center. Since the pandemic, Gressman has performed new live streamed works such as 'What to Watch in 2020' for Experimental Sound Studio's Quarantine Concert Series, along with 'Dissever' for Brooklyn's The Hive Art Community Re:Live Performance Lab online series. Currently, they are the drummer of the band, 'Fetishist', who just recorded an album with Steve Albini, while making experimental music videos. Gressman is also in the exploratory phase of creating a video art series that captures a synaesthetic experience with performance in a confined, isolated space- an echo chamber that loops amplified biological sounds.

Mixing genres, Gressman explores their hybridity through noise inspired by Miami’s underground punk scene and performances drawn from the bizarre culture clashes that punctuate daily life in Florida. They fuse sound art with performance practices to experiment with the body as technology amplified by spectacle. She builds her own theatrical sets, interactive electronic instruments, and costumes to create a synesthetic experience. They strive to translate sound and light using the body as a technological movement interface to create a cybernetic system that amplifies the abstract sentiments of a body evacuated of the human.

https://www.ericagressman.com/

Andy Slater

Andy Slater is  a Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and 

Disability advocate/loudmouth. Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and  a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a member of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists and a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative.

Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy  for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design. In 2020 Andy was acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.” His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published  in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Andy’s audio description production for Alison O’Daniel’s  film, The Tuba Thieves, was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Andy has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal (2021), Curating Access:Disability Art Activism AndCreative Accommodation (Cachia 2023), the Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes (Godin 2021), and Roctober magazine.

He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,   , the Contemporary Jewish Museum SF, American Writers and Publishers conference, Transmediale Festival Berlin,  Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne, Critical Distance Toronto, College Art Association,   Gallery 400  Chicago, Experimental Sound Studios Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, Flux Factory New York, and Momenta Dance Company Chicago. www.thisisandyslater.net

The University of Virginia’s Rotunda was designed by Thomas Jefferson as the architectural and academic heart of the University’s community of scholars. Jefferson modeled the Rotunda after the Pantheon, a second-century temple in Rome. Construction began in 1822 and was completed in 1826, shortly after Jefferson’s death on July 4 of that year. Together with Monticello, the Academical Village is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Parking is on the street or in one of the many parking lots & garages on "the Corner" or in the Central Grounds Parking Garage. The Charlottesville Free Trolly stops in front of the Rotunda on University Avenue.

All programs are subject to change.

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