Artist Mark McCoin and his Piano Cart
TRAFFIC JAM
TRAFFIC JAM is a performance project about Austin's relationship with transportation. Showcasing choreographed ensembles of automobiles, motorcycles, and amplified bicycles, our culminating performance will feature a live participatory concert featuring an all-star roster of Austin artists.
Our next performance is 7:30PM, June 9th, State Parking Garage B at 1511 San Jacinto Blvd, 78701
Showcasing choreographed ensembles of automobiles, motorcycles, and amplified bicycles, our culminating performance will feature a live participatory concert featuring an all-star roster of Austin artists.
TRAFFIC JAM is produced by Collide Arts and directed by Steve Parker.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Austin Soundwaves provides high quality music education to youth as a means to strengthen resiliency and awaken intrinsic motivation to leave, create and achieve. Programming consists of ensemble musical training along with specialized individual instruction and mentoring. We envision a world where every child has access to music, intensive ensemble learning and performing to promote positive youth development and thriving communities
Called “the quintessential modern composer” by the London Independent, Austin-based composer-bandleader-improviser Graham Reynolds creates, performs, and records music for film, theater, dance, rock clubs, and concert halls with collaborators across a multitude of disciplines. Heard throughout the world in films, TV, stage, and radio, he recently scored Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying with Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne for Amazon Studios, the Rude Mechs’ Stop Hitting Yourself for Lincoln Center Theater, Ballet Austin’s Belle Redux, and a multi-year commission from Ballroom Marfa, The Marfa Triptych. He’s performed on an array of legendary stages, from the Kennedy Center to the Green Mill Tavern to the Conan O’Brien Show. His Creative Capital Award winning project, Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance, a bilingual cross-border opera created with librettists Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Mexico City) and director Shawn Sides (Rude Mechs), is currently touring.
Henna Chou (周世涵) has traveled the world as an environmental scientist and musician for the past two decades. She is currently the Music Curator at Salvage Vanguard Theater and Managing Director of COTFG, a community organization dedicated to the proliferation of creative sound and counter culture expression. As a cellist, guitarist, keyboardist or sound designer, she has performed in Austin theater, touring ensembles, created string arrangements for bands and improvisations for film.
Formed in 2009, line upon line is considered “a riveting, always-surprising and delightful trio” by the Austin American-Statesman. The Austin-based trio has premiered over 40 new works for percussion trio by composers such as Aaron Cassidy, Laurent Durupt, Andrew Greenwald, Jessie Marino and Claudia Molitor and has worked with composers at Stanford University, the University of Huddersfield, City University of London and Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). In Texas, the group has taught at UT Austin (Spring 2018), performed at the 2013 and 2017 Fusebox Festivals, Menil Collection (Houston), Victoria Bach Festival, International Festival-Institute at Round Top and is currently a member of the Texas Commission on the Arts Touring Roster.
Seetha Shivaswamy performs as a soloist and chamber musician in concerts throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. She has toured the USA with Global Rhythms World Music Ensemble, performed as a guest flutist with the Orquesta Sinfonica in Monterrey, Mexico, and performed a solo flute recital at the Hong Kong City Centre. She has toured internationally with and recorded for Grammy/Oscar winning composer A.R. Rahman, and is the featured flutist on his single ‘Pray for Me Brother’ written for the United Nations. Her flute playing can also be heard on NYC-based experimental artist DJ Spooky’s album ‘The Secret Song’, the soundtrack to 2012 film 'Bernie' starring Jack Black and Shirley MacClaine, the UK feature 'Bombil and Beatrice’, released at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, and on the soundtrack for Terrence Malick's film 'To The Wonder', starring Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams. She has been a featured performer at South by Southwest Music Festival, Fusebox Festival, SAARANG at IIT Madras, and Austin Chamber Music Festival. Seetha's flute playing can also be heard on several recordings for PBS documentaries, TV commercials, and video games.
Matthew Steinke [b. 1972] is an American artist and composer. His work explores the “inner voices” of objects portraying the construction of their identities through the intersection of text, sound, video, installation, sculpture, performance, code, electronics, and robotics. Attached to each construct is a background narrative, a continuously running monolog, part of a larger layered collective allegory. As an object-maker, Steinke tries to view all materials equally and uses them to suit the purpose of an end goal. He works with found, hand-made, and digitally fabricated materials but maintains a personalized DIY aesthetic. Even with his most organized or designed works, one could discover artifacts of repurposed objects like rulers, pill bottles, cat litter containers, obsolete electronic components, or metal tins. The unbiased approach extends to the media and found text that he incorporates into his audio and video work.
Laura Brackney is currently pursuing her Master of Music in Composition, studying with Michael Ippolito at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She is a gamelan enthusiast, published composer, and a founding member of an avant-garage improvisation group, Leaf Chimes. Additionally, she serves as the Co-Creative Director of an arts nonprofit, COTFG, organizes seasonal concerts for bicyclists, and works on her vegetable garden. Since earning her BM in Theory and Composition from Southwestern University in May 2014, Brackney’s work has premiered at the Look and Listen Festival by Grit Collaborative and Oh My Ears, the Blanton SoundSpace, the 78th Birthday of the UT Kniker Carillon, the New Media Art and Sound Summit, the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium, by the AURORA trio, and by Quince Vocal Ensemble.
Mark McCoin is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and educator. He received his MFA in film and studio art from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he also taught audio and interdisciplinary art courses in the Film, Digital Art, and Dance programs. Currently he is a professor who heads the New Media art program and directs the "UTSA New Media Collective" at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He has performed music in a host of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Merce Cunningham Studio, the Smithsonian, ruin sites in Peru, and villages in Bali, Indonesia. As a scoring composer he has written works for dance, theater, film, art installation, radio, and for multiple seasons of episodic television. His creative collaborations include works with Michelle Ellsworth, Mark Amerika, Bruce Odland, Dr. Andrew Weil, Joanne Shenandoah, and grammy winners, Tom Wasinger and Mary Youngblood.
Max Bernstein was born in Buffalo, NY where he received his BA in Media Study with a concentration in film and video production, from the University at Buffalo. Bernstein also received an MFA in film production and studio art from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has worked as a technical artist with the Wooster Group, a video and sound designer with Michelle Ellsworth, a video and sound designer with Kaki King, a video designer with Cindy Kleine, and a video designer with Aynsley Vandenbroucke. In addition, he is one half of the piano harp duo Outlier, a founding member of media art performance group the Flinching Eye Collective, a video artist for Friends Of The Tank, drummer and video designer for the band Eupana, composer, and sound engineer at Tribal Studio, and a lifelong multi-instrumentalist. Bernstein has taught film history and production at the University of Colorado Boulder, and video art at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Most recently Bernstein has become SCUBA certified and hopes to explore bodies worldwide as a method to further inform his various practices.
James Parker is a composer, sound designer, and saxophonist from and residing in Austin, Texas. He is very interested in giving performers more ownership of the music, so that they have the opportunity to let more of their personality into their playing. He does this in several ways, most commonly by creating environments for improvisation that let performers explore and have fun within a certain structure. They get to decide certain elements of the structure of the piece based on what they hear form the other performers, a live electronics element, or some other environmental factor.
Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and curator who creates communal, democratic work to examine history, systems, and behavior. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles. He is the recipient of the 2018 Tito's Art Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Harrington Fellowship, the Best of Austin Award, and the Austin Critics' Table Award.
Workshops
This project is augmented by a series of community workshops.
Upcoming workshops:
May 11, 2019 - Musical bike ride
11AM-2PM at Ai Wei-Wei's Forever Bicycles
Waller Delta, 74 Trinity
Presented by the Waller Creek Conservancy and CapMetro
Sept 2018 - Musical bike polo
Bentonville, AR
Prestented by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,
Nov 2018 - Carhorn concerto
San Antonio, TX
Presetned by the Luminaria Festival
This project is generously supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc, the Texas Music Office, and the Mid America Arts Alliance.
collideATX@gmail.com