Interference AV Adds Opening Musical Acts Sadaf, Irreversible Entanglements and YATTA

Times Square Arts and Clocktower Productions present Interference AV, a free, three-night festival of video art with UNDERVOLT & CO. and live music that will take place at the AMC Empire 25 on February 19-21 from 8:00 - 10:00pm, with doors opening at 7:00pm. Sadaf, Irreversible Entanglements, and YATTA will open for headliners Jlin, Lightning Bolt, and the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Experimental video collective UNDERVOLT & CO. will VJ live projections on an epic scale for Interference AV, a free, three-night festival takeover of America's top-grossing multiplex, the AMC Empire 25. The festival is Times Square Arts and Clocktower's second event in the AMC Empire 25, following the one-night-only concert and zine fair Primal Screams from March 2016. Interference AV's movie-theater-turned-concert-stage will feature a different headliner each night and dynamic live projections by UNDERVOLT & CO. artists Peter Burr and Sabrina Ratté, including their original work and live remixing of video art by other collective members including Andrew Benson, Jacob Ciocci, Birch Cooper, Brenna Murphy, Yoshi Sodeoka, Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Ryoya Usuha, and more. In the lobby, Clocktower will curate DJs and a zine fair.

Schedule:

Feb 19: Jlin // Sadaf

Feb 20: Lightning Bolt // Irreversible Entanglements

Feb 21: The Sun Ra Arkestra // YATTA

Attendees can RSVP for free for each evening at https://withfriends.co/clocktower. RSVPs are essential but will not guarantee entrance. Admission will be first come, first served at the door. No seats will be held.

Lani Combier-Kapel, Curator & Event Manager for Clocktower, said, "Times Square is a felt experience. An area of New York that overloads the senses with buildings, billboards, and lights, leaving travelers to make sense of differing signals. Interference AV brings these facets to a three-day spectacle, with leading forces in fringe art, music, and video collaborating at a historic movie theater right in the middle of "the crossroads of the world". Believing this crossroads to be the impetus of art, we have devised a place where people will want to stay: an experimental coven and artistic sanctuary. Be prepared to take it all in, popcorn and earplugs in hand."

Sabrina Ratté, artist, said, "In this live setting context, our approach will leave a lot of space for improvisation and live effects, while integrating some more complex imageries created prior to the event. Live video synthesizers and video feedbacks will be triggered by the music at times, when at other times they will morph into 3D environments, in an interplay between the illusion of depth and flatness, mat and shiny surfaces, raw electricity and slick digital aesthetic."

Debra Simon, Times Square Arts Director, said, "After the success of Primal Screams, which featured the talents of Screaming Females, Guardian Alien, and Priests, we're thrilled to return to the AMC Empire for Interference AV, taking some of the essential elements of Times Square - the lights, the screens, the live performances, the energy - and distilling them into a layered, dynamic experience."

About Times Square Arts
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity. Generous support of Times Square Arts is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Visit www.TimesSquareNYC.org/Arts for more information. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @TSqArts.

Clocktower Productions
Clocktower Productions is a non-profit art institution working in the visual arts, performance, music, and radio. Founded in 1972 in Lower Manhattan by MoMA PS1 Founder Alanna Heiss,Clocktower is the oldest alternative art project in New York, and its radio station, Clocktower Radio, was founded in 2003 as one of the first all-art online museum radio stations in the world. The institution functions as a laboratory for experimentation, working closely and collaboratively with artists, musicians, curators, writers and producers to develop, realize and present innovative and challenging work in all media, ranging from installation to performance and from experimental music to radio theater. By engaging both the physical resources of its partner organizations and Clocktower Radio's access to a broad and international online audience, Clocktower disseminates experimental work to numerous communities, and promotes a rich cultural and social dialogue between artists, audiences, and institutions worldwide.

Clocktower produces multidisciplinary art projects all over the city through these creative collaborations with Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Knockdown Center in Queens, Playland Motel in Far Rockaway, and Times Square Arts, Red Bull Studios, and Jones Day in Manhattan. These spaces host Clocktower exhibitions, performances, residencies, radio, and administrative activities.

UNDERVOLT & CO.

UNDERVOLT & CO. is an internet-based collective involved in the circulation of time-based art across varied presentational formats. Founded in 2013, their work has been exhibited widely, often taking the form of installations, screenings, performances, workshops and ongoing online projects. With an emphasis on the immediacy of image and sound, as well as the mutability of technologies, Undervolt & Co. has cultivated a closely-knit network of international artists earnestly challenging the possibilities of their medium.

In additional to providing a distribution framework for its artists, Undervolt & Co. works closely with curators, programmers and educators in the programming of audio-visual performances and event-based work to public audiences worldwide.

Peter Burr

Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn specializing in animation and installation. His work has been presented across the world by institutions including Documenta 14, Athens; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; and MoMA PS1, New York. A master of computer animation, with a gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Burr has in recent years devoted himself to exploring the concept of an endlessly mutating labyrinth. Existing as stand-alone places, much of his work is also in the process of expanding into a video game through the support of Creative Capital and Sundance. Previously, he worked under the alias Hooliganship, and in 2006 founded the video label Cartune Xprez, through which he produced three DVD compilations, live multimedia exhibitions, and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation.

Sabrina Ratté
Sabrina Ratté lives and works between Montreal and Paris. After a BFA and MFA in Film Production at Concordia University in Montreal, she focused on video as a medium. Her interest in early video art led her to work with analog technologies such as video synthesizers and video feedback. Later on, she integrated 3D animation to her process, which allowed for more complex imageries while creating a timeless aesthetic. From utopian architecture to painterly textures, she investigates the ambiguous line between the virtual and the physical realm. Her work includes single-channel videos, installations, sculptures, live performances and prints.

Previous exhibitions: Dolby Gallery (San Francisco), Young Project Gallery (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum of Art (NYC), Variation Media Art Fair (Paris), Chronus Art Center, (Shanghai), Paddles On! 1st Digital Art Auction at Phillips (New York), HEK (Basel), EMPAC (Troy), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), International Digital Arts Biennal - Bian (Montreal), PHI Center (Montreal), Arsenal (Mtl), the Lampo series (Chicago), Atonal Festival (Berlin), Elektra, MUTEK (Mtl, Mexico, Barcelona). She is represented by the Laffy Maffei Gallery in Paris.

Jlin

Jlin is one of the most prominent producers of the current generation. She grew up in Gary, Indiana, just 20 miles from downtown Chicago. Though previously using samples in her work, she now refuses to, and her tracks are composed of all original material. Her album Black Origami was recently selected as the 16th best album of 2017 on NPR Music's "The 50 Best Albums of 2017."

Lightning Bolt

Over the course of its two-decade existence, Lightning Bolt has revolutionized underground rock in immeasurable ways. The duo broke the barrier between stage and audience by setting themselves up on the floor in the midst of the crowd. Their momentous live performances and the mania they inspired paved the way for similar tactics used by Dan Deacon and literally hundreds of others. Similarly, the band's recordings have always been chaotic, roaring, blown out documents that sound like they could destroy even the toughest set of speakers.

Sun Ra Arkestra

"Founded in the mid-1950s, the Sun Ra Arkestra became the primary conduit through which polymath jazz composer, bandleader, pianist, poet, and philosopher Sun Ra expressed his visionary perspective... When Sun Ra left planet Earth in 1993 ... Marshall Allen assumed its helm [in 1995]. An alto saxophonist, flautist, and electronic valve instrument player who joined the Arkestra in 1958, Allen lived, rehearsed, toured, and recorded with Sun Ra almost exclusively throughout his musical career. At age 93, Allen is the only living member of the Arkestra's original core group, but maintains that its current incarnation is no ghost band... Allen and the other members of the Arkestra continue to live at the Sun Ra residence in Philadelphia... There, Allen writes fresh arrangements of Sun Ra's tunes and composes new music for the Arkestra, committed to a life of discipline centered on the further development of Sun Ra's musical precepts. With such a massive, joyous songbook that encompasses spiritual grooves, sing-along chants and ecstatic fire music, the Arkestra continues to traverse their namesake's spaceways." - Blank Forms, www.blankforms.org

Sadaf

Sadaf H. Nava is an Iranian born, New York City-based producer, violinist, vocalist and multi-media artist. SADAF's visuals, sonics, and confrontational performative tactics confound and upend the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance art, simultaneously drawing from and subverting the language of advertising, celebrity, and the gaze. SADAF has presented work at the 9th Berlin Biennale, MOMA PS1 Warm up and Sunday Sessions, Issue Project Room, 47 Canal and Performa in NYC, as well as: Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, SALTS gallery Switzerland, TreizeGallery Paris. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Wire, ID magazine, FADER, and the Guardian UK.

Irreversible Entanglements

Irreversible Entanglements are a liberation-oriented free jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Months later the group added trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes (a duo who also performed at the MAPB event) for a single day of recording at Seizure's Palace in Brooklyn, and the full quintet's first time playing together was captured for this debut. In four relentless bouts of inspired fire music the instrumentalists explore and elaborate compositional ideas drawn from their deep individual studies of free jazz improvisation, but the tone of each piece is driven decisively by Ayewa's searing poetic narrations of Black trauma, survival and power. The message is the undeniable essence of the music. Though free jazz with voice is an uncommon approach in the modern day landscape of the genre, the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenant of the sound as it was founded - to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As creative and adventurous as any recording of contemporary avant-garde jazz but offering listeners no abstractions to hide behind, this is music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.

YATTA

YATTA is a Houston-born interdisciplinary artist, digipoet, and musician currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Using incantations born of loop pedal drones, folk acoustics, and electronic beats, they alchemize and creolize jazz vocals w/ Krio cries to create music to lie down in. Their most recent project, 'hey! don't let your subconscious run the show!' is a poetic exploration of psychosis in relation to generational trauma, healing, and magic. The zine and accompanying audio is soon to be released with the support of Clocktower Radio. Past performances, readings, and workshops have taken place in friends' backyards, community farms, Afrofuturism conferences (Cornell University, Vassar University, Wesleyan University, The New School), The Brooklyn Museum, Powrplnt, The Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival at Knockdown Center, MOMA PS1, Issue Project Room, Roulette, and about 73 other places. Their music and poetry has been featured in ArtNews, Dazed Digital, Mask Magazine, Thump, Tiny Mixtapes, and more.

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