Richard Brown

Musicologist
Los Angeles, CA

Richard Brown earned a Ph.D in musicology from the University of Southern California. He has published articles on John Cage, experimental music, sound art, film music and copyright in The Journal of the Society for American Music, Contemporary Music Review, Leonardo, and American Music Review.

He is the author of Through the Looking Glass: John Cage and Avant-Garde Film, forthcoming at Oxford University Press, and has lectured at numerous universities in the Southern California area, including USC, Chapman University, and Occidental College.

In 2015 he founded a consulting firm, Music Forensics, and in 2016 he joined Warner/Chappell Music, the world’s oldest and largest music publisher, where he serves as in-house forensic musicologist and public policy advocate for anti-piracy and royalty rate negotiations. Brown served as music consultant for CVM’s reconstruction of Oskar Fischinger's Raumlichtkunst.

Steve Cheatham

Electric Collage
Atlanta, GA

Born in Georgia, Steve lives in the woods of north Atlanta with his wife, 3 dogs and 2 cats. He runs MediaGuys.com, an Internet development company. Steve also produces music videos and documentaries. He is a FAA licensed drone pilot with a cinematic-capable camera on his drone, which he uses for various video projects.

Steve’s 1960s light show Electric Collage performed at concerts and festivals with major international rock bands. Recently Steve has been active filming concerts with Atlanta rock bands from the sixties. His involvement with light shows these days is part time. He is archiving the Electric Collage light show materials, and discussing mounting a revival and some local shows in 2019.

Fred Collopy, Ph.D

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

Fred Collopy is a Professor of Design and Innovation at Case Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. He has created numerous computer-based instruments, including imager, an instrument for playing abstract visual images. He has written and spoken extensively on visual music, including in Leonardo, Glimpse, and the Journal of Visual Programming Languages. In 2000 he produced the visual CD Unauthorized Duets. His website at RhythmicLight.com has been a reference in the field since he established it in 1998. He has been a visiting scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and at Cornell University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab.

Ted Davis

Academy of Art and Design
Basel, Switzerland

Ted Davis is an American media artist and designer based in Basel, Switzerland, where he is an Interaction Design Lecturer within the Visual Communication Institute at the Academy of Art and Design HGK FHNW. He holds a BA in Communication Design from California State University Chico and an MFA/MAS in Visual Communication from UIC/HGK International Master of Design in Basel.

His own work and teachings focus on image making via programming new and newer media, along with embracing the error and glitch while questioning the ideal and mimetic conditions digital media is asked to encompass.

Caitlin Denny

Archivist, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA

Caitlin Denny is an archivist and filmmaker. She received her Masters degree in Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2017. Denny earned a BFA degree in Media Arts from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Currently, she is working on a feature length experimental documentary with her husband, Miles Votek, about a lost film starring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters titled Atlantis Risen. She spent the last two years working to preserve and digitize 495 reels of film and magnetic tape from the Ken Kesey Collection at USC's Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive with the aid of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

She has exhibited her film and video work internationally and has curated exhibitions in California, New York, and France. Denny is co-creator of the former online based art gallery JstChillin, a landmark netart project that garnered critical attention towards internet-based artwork. She currently works as a media archivist at a major film studio in Los Angeles.

Bryan Dunphy

Goldsmiths, University
of London, UK

Bryan Dunphy is an Irish audiovisual artist based in London. His work has been performed and screened at venues across the UK and Ireland such as Seeing Sound (Bath), The National Concert Hall (Dublin), the Samuel Beckett Theatre (Dublin) and the Darklight Film Festival (Dublin). Recently, his digital artwork was used in the BBC documentary Weapons of Mass Surveillance (2017).

He holds a B.Mus from NUI Maynooth and an M.Phil from Trinity College Dublin. He has been a recipient of An Chomhairle Ealaíon’s (The Arts Council of Ireland) Travel and Training Award for 2016 and 2017, which has allowed him to pursue a PhD in Audiovisual Composition at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Paul Fletcher

University of Melbourne,
Australia

Paul has been creatively involved for many years in experimental music and short film/animation and media projects. His many animated and experimental films have been screened locally and internationally, including TecnoBunny (1995), and Pop Psychology (2014) at Ars Electronica. His animation Drive To Work won best Site Specific Installation at Zagreb MSU Animafest 2017.

Paul is currently a Lecturer in Animation, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Since 2005 Paul has created music and video installations and performances as solo and collaborative works including with Mark Pollard, Anthony Lyons, Sabrina Schmid, Dirk De Bruyn and Central Victorian art collective Punctum, and experimental music and film collective, Undue Noise.

Joseph Hyde

Composer, media artist
Bath Spa University, UK

Joseph Hyde (UK) is a composer, specializing in electronic music and work which incorporates visual media. His work has encompassed installations, immersive environments, and many collaborations around the field of contemporary dance. Alongside his own practice he maintains a keen interest in the field and history of visual music. He researched the musical scores of Oskar Fischinger at the Center for Visual Music in 2012.

Hyde has a BA(Hons) Music from the University of Nottingham, an MA in Composition for Film and TV from the London College of Music and a PhD in Musical Composition from the University of Birmingham. He teaches at Bath Spa University, where he runs the MA Sound Arts program and regularly hosts the Seeing Sound visual music symposium.

Cindy Keefer

Center for Visual Music (CVM)
Los Angeles, CA

Cindy Keefer is an archivist and curator, and director of CVM in Los Angeles. She curates and presents film and media programs and lectures at museums, festivals, universities and archives worldwide, and has co-curated and developed exhibitions. Keefer publishes on Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Visual Music and experimental animation, and edited the recent book, Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967): Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction.

As Adjunct Faculty, she taught the History of Experimental Animation at Cal Arts, and has given invited lectures at NYU, ZKM, University of Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, Cal Arts, UCSB, UCLA, USC and numerous other universities and museums. She restored and curated Oskar Fischinger: Raumlichtkunst, a three-screen HD reconstruction. Keefer has also restored dozens of short experimental films by artists including Fischinger, Belson, Jules Engel, John and James Whitney, Charles Dockum, Mary Ellen Bute, Jud Yalkut, and John Cage, and produced Fischinger, Belson and Visual Music compilation DVD releases. She has a degree in Film and Television from New York University. She is a member of the Society for Animation Studies, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (former Chair of its Access Committee).

Braden Malnic

Independent Researcher
Washington, D.C.

Braden Malnic is from Tampa, Florida. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English (Tendency in Film History and Criticism) from University of Florida and his Master of Arts in the History of Decorative Arts from George Mason University-Smithsonian Associates.

His thesis on James Whitney was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, Inc. Braden currently lives and works in the Washington, D.C. region, where he is a curatorial assistant at Art in Embassies, U.S. State Department.

Jasmine Moorhead

Jack Ox

Pierre-Jacques Pernuit

Ph.D candidate, Art History
Sorbonne, Paris

Pierre-Jacques Pernuit is a third-year doctoral candidate in Art History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. His research interests include the history of technology, media studies, Visual Music and abstract art in America. He is currently at work on his dissertation In Media Res: Light as Intermedia in American Art 1911-1952.

Henrique Roscoe

Federal University
of Minas Gerais, Brazil

Henrique Roscoe is an audiovisual artist, musician and curator. He has degrees in Social Communication (UFMG, Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Electronic Engineering (PUC/MG, Pontifícia Catholic University of Minas Gerais), and also studied Art and Culture at the Foundation of Education and Culture. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Technological Poetics at UFMG.

He has worked in the audiovisual field since 2004, exploring the paths of generative art and visual music; and investigating the relations between sound, image and abstract symbolic narratives. He seeks in a dialogue with the machine to expand creative possibilities and to explore the boundaries between the determinate and the random.

Margaret Schedel

Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY

Margaret Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is the Director of cDACT, the consortium for digital arts, culture and technology. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts. Schedel holds a certificate in Deep Listening and is a joint author of Cambridge Press’s Electronic Music.

She recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on the aesthetics of sonification and visual music, and two of her pieces are featured on the REACT recording by Parma Records. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra the percussion ensemble Ictus, and the reACT duo. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data. She sits on the boards of 60x60, the International Computer Music Association, is a regional editor for Organised Sound and an editor for Cogent Arts and Humanities. In her spare time she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound.

Heike Sperling

Institut für Musik und Medien
Düsseldorf, Germany

Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling is a communications expert. She spent two decades as a creative director producing on air design for national broadcaster, commercials, and experimental music videos. Her domestic and international recognition includes awards from the Art Directors Club Germany, the Broadcast Designer Association International, the Cannes Lions International Festival, and the New York Festivals. Currently she is a tenured professor, creative consultant, and mentor.

In 2004, Dr. Sperling was appointed by Düsseldorf's Robert Schumann conservatory as professor for Digital Visual Media at their Institute For Music And Media (IMM). She serves as chair of their Master of Music program in Sound and Reality. Dr. Sperling is also the chair of the post-graduate Motion Design program at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Germany's leading film school, since 1998. She serves on the Advisory Council of the Center for Visual Music.

Ralph Whyte

Ph.D candidate
Columbia University, NY

Ralph Whyte is a doctoral student in Historical Musicology at Columbia University, New York, where he is writing a dissertation on the relationship between music and light and color from color organs to liquid light shows. He also holds bachelor's and master's degrees in music from King’s College London. At Columbia he has taught a film music course and the core-curriculum class "Masterpieces of Western Music" and serves on the editorial board of Current Musicology.

Speaker TBA