Wats:ON Festival – SPEED

Notions of speed in contemporary culture are often tied to technology and its impacts on everyday life.

All events are free and at Carnegie Mellon University, specific auditoriums vary by event.

Thu 17 March
JEFF LIEBERMAN
Kresge Theatre, 7:30pm
Jeff Lieberman is an MIT scientist, multi-media artist, musician, videographer and host of the Discovery Channel series ‘Time Warp’, using high-speed photographic technologies to see beyond the limits of normal human perception. World Premiere: presenting a new original work created especially for the wats:ON Festival; the entire time-lapse video project will be choreographed, shot and edited on campus with students earlier in the day.
Participate in Jeff Lieberman’s Time-lapse Video Project at CMU!

Fri 18 March
LEIMAY: ‘Becoming’
Kresge Theatre, 7:30pm
Leimay: Ximena Garnica + Shige Moriya present the U.S. premiere of their latest collaborative dance-video project.
‘Becoming’ meditates on the continuous cycles of life and death, the modern human search for identity and the struggle to become someone. Contrasting wild physicality with meditative stillness, Leimay’s performance works synthesize dance, live manipulated video and original live music. Collaborators include an international group of artists from the U.S., Colombia, Japan and the Czech Republic, including composer Roland Toledo and dancers Denisa Musilova, Miyu Leilani and Masanori Asahara.

Sat 19 March
FILM FESTIVAL: Short Films and a presentation by TelcoSystems
ACH/ Studio for Creative Inquiry, 7:30pm
A film double feature pushing the limits and extremes of our perception.

A SELECTION OF TIME-BASED SHORTS
featuring work by Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits and Ernie Gehr.

Followed by a presentation by Dutch new-media art group TELCOSYSTEMS.
Telcosystems research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior. Their immersive audiovisual installations aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior exploring the limits of the human sensory apparatus.

Ongoing
HIGH-SPEED CAMERA PHOTO BOOTH
CFA Great Hall
Interactive photo booth, where technology allows users to see their fast moving activity played back in slow motion,
capturing details not visible to the naked eye.

Ongoing
‘9 Beet Stretch’
CFA Great Hall
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony stretched to 24 hours, a soundscape by Scandinavian artist Leif Inge.  Performances begin Thu 10:00 am, Fri 11:00 am, Sat 12 noon.

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History of the Festival

The Jill Watson Festival Across the Arts (wats:ON?) was created to honor the life of Jill Watson, whose interest in the arts inspired others through her work and her teaching. The festival celebrates Jill’s commitment to an interdisciplinary philosophy as an artist and celebrates her accomplishments and reputation as an architect. Jill Watson was a Carnegie Mellon University alumna, adjunct faculty member in the School of Architecture and
acclaimed Pittsburgh architect who died in the TWA Flight 800 plane crash on July 17, 1996. The 2010 wats:ON returned the festival to its original form as an interdisciplinary series of events, made possible by the generous support of the JILL WATSON FAMILY FOUNDATION.