310k (netherlands)

310k is Paul Rickus (UK, 1972) and Ivo Schmetz (NL, 1974). The name 310k is a combination of Ivo’s ‘electronic live-band’ and artist collective 3-1 and Paul’s Ok, which was short for Ocktak (the name of his first design studio). Paul and Ivo joined forces in 2000 after they found out they both loved graphic + web design, video, music, snowboarding, chocolate and organizing events. Besides graphic design and video 310k is quite busy in music. They performed from 1999-2009 as 3-1, an electropunk band combining video, music and performance. They released several EP’s and albums and toured from Germany to France, Belgium, USA, Spain, Poland and Japan. Besides the band they own a record label called Basserk and do DJ/VJ sets on various parties and festivals. Together wit Peter Rutten, co-owner of Basserk records and also a former member of 3-1 they have been working on a new sound/video set that will be played for the first time at ®Nova in Sao Paulo. 310k enjoys working with different media (web, video, sound and print) and if possible they try to combine them in a project. It is the mix of making music and video, performing as vj’s, doing graphic design projects and organizing events that keeps 310k happy and sharp. But most of all it is important for 310k to initiate projects themselves. They like working for clients but they also love working on their own ideas. Doing both and to keep a good balance between the both is what 310k always try to achieve and so far it works pretty well.

www.310k.nl

88 (brazil)

Simulating day at night, here like a puzzle with juxtaposed pieces of different time-framed layers, creating an image of a parallel reality. The fictional narrative of the real landscape, using only recorded images of the real world documented. The magic of fusing opposing images by dislocating time in the same space makes accessible an aesthetic of a disclosed trick, in the action of displaced realities that reveal an imaginary landscape. These mechanisms of altering simple dynamics trigger unlimited ways to explore the image. Reality is used not as subject of representation but as material to be modified, creating a work of new significance; a new “Hyper Reality”.

www.oito88oito.com

Actop (spain)

Actop is a creative cell based in Barcelona and formed by Alvaro P. Posadas and César Pesquera. They operate as an open structure experimenting and collaborating with different agencies, collectives and artists and working on a wide range of media: print, animation, motion graphics, live visuals and new approaches to the moving image. Their work has been shown internationally in different festivals as Dotmov (Sapporo, Japan), Optronica (London, UK) or Sonar (Barcelona, Spain), and has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide like AMOADA (Texas, USA), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), DA2 (Salamanca, Spain) or Resistor Gallery (Toronto, Canada). Mass media clients include Canal+, MTV and Nike amongst others.

www.actop.net

Anna Taratiel aka OVNI (spain)

Anna Taratiel aka OVNI creates her own landscapes by transforming movements into visible forms. Her personal experiences develop their own dynamics; they become energy, movement, new forms and colours. The organic and the static, the two poles which make up our life, flow into OVNI´s work. These poles communicate with each other, unite, work against each other, change fronts, disappear and surprise in completely unexpected place and order. She pushes people and objects, machines, antagonisms and similarities to exchange, to communication. Without orientation, detached from former meanings, characteristics, valuations and determinations, OVNI commits herself and her works to the forces and their new statements being released in this process. Like the big bang, the organic and the static assemble new constellations with new rules and laws; they create new worlds. OVNI travels through the incoherent world of labyrinths, of paths and black holes to show that the dimensions, the horizons and the infinite are real. The limits that we are subordinated to are just created by our mind to feed our doubts and fears.

www.taratiel.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

B.Fleischmann (austria)

Bernhard Fleischmann. Born 1975 in Vienna, is an austrian producer who has successfully established himself as a crucial element to the European electronic experimental scene producing very digital, very German-sounding, electronic soundscapes with spacial electro beats and synthesized noise – all created on one device. His sound is summed up with different electronic “instruments” creating harmonies and fine melodies within a unique blend of soundscapes. The different kinds of generated noise should not disturb the harmonies of the songs, but should find their way to communicate with the other sounds – tracks to cruise to, during a long night, where the next morning is already near.

www.bfleischmann.com

Base-V (brazil)

Base-V is a group of artists from São Paulo, Brazil. It started in 2002 with the publishing of the experimental magazine “V”. Since the begining the group works with several medias, from artisan publications to graphic installations, mixing supports and materials, participating in gallery shows and street interventions. The group think any creative process pass by a juncture of fragments, of experiences, references, ideologies. During production of any work, individual skills lose their importance, creating a more open concept, a free boarding on the authoral issues. The finished works acquires a collective identity. It afirmes the work of the group over the individual approach, in order to create other spheres of communication inside the group, with other artists and audiences. Graphic installations and murals have been a strong field of production last years, with huge projects realized for many different purposes. The independent publications includes the second edition of ”V”, the digital art magazine ”Maguila” wich is now coming to its 12th issue and our Base-V BOX a new series of collective publications. BASE-V tries to create new fields, especially in graphic arts and publications, using milenar techniques or digital media, to expand the acess to all this production, from us and other artists around the world.

www.base-v.org

Bradien (spain)

Bradien is a band formed in 2005 and currently made up of three musicians Balbini, Pope and Mati?as Rossi. Bradien create a pop somewhere between laptop folk, the Ahornfelder label, the ocean’s swell of the Beach Boys, the delicate Japanese scene, Frank Pourcel vinyls and experimental deconstruction, as well as having post-rock reminiscences, and where references to a Hawaian luau and Czech animation soundtracks also sit comfortably. And these are surely qualities that have caught the attention of the people they have played with in their short career, opening concerts for Yo La Tengo or playing alongside Shiu-Yeung Hui (from Maher Shalal Hash Baz) or Tom Brosseau. Not only at the studio but also in their live appearences, Bradien exchange instruments: bass, trumpet, melodica, xylophone and guitar being passed from one to the other to catch the fleeting magic of the moment.

www.bradien.net

bRUNA (spain)

Carles Guajardo aka bRUNA has become a fact of life and a key name on the Spanish scene. With works released on spa.RK, Sofstar Records, Paradigma Musik and Natura Sonoris (among others) bRUNA’s palette of sounds fills the atmosphere with emotional and vibrant electronica, and illuminates it with infectious melodies.

www.myspace.com/brunasounds

Chicks on Speed / Alex Murray Lesley DJ set (australia)

Chicks on Speed started in 1997 as a fake group with fake records, fake t-shirts and fake interviews in the music press. A few years later the (“real”) music press was hailing them as a new phenomenon, and praising their (real) records as the beginning of a new genre, baptised electroclash. However, Chicks on Speed are much more than a music group. They may well surf the ephemeral categories of the music world, but – as their unauthorised biographer claims – they’d prefer to sleep with their fans rather than music journos! Chicks on Speed is in fact a multidisciplinary art project that takes a DIY attitude and turns it loose not just on music, but also on performances, clothing design, a TV-shopping program, the creation of huge collages, management of a suicide record label (that will disappear with its 10th release), and much more!

www.chicksonspeed.com

Coletivo Suspenso (brazil)

Coletivo Suspenso acts as a platform for development of interdisciplinary artistic cells, that take as proposal works of experimental character. At the present moment it disposes of an artistic cell, formed by the contemporary ballet dancers Andréia Guilhermina, Eduardo Fukushima, Isabel Monteiro, Joana Ferraz and Juliana Ferreira, with collaboration of the visual artist Ricardo Vincenzo. The group, leaving from its experiences with different artists, looks to develop a work focused in the relation between the dance and the visual arts. Photographies, installations, paintings, etc, serve as a starting point for the creation of new atmospheres, movements and images. Working these materials in choreographic composition games, based in improvisation technics, the group questions the ways how these images can move through the body and through the architecture of the space that surrounds them, offering new senses to the space, which is continuously transformed by the body occupation, and vice versa.

Craig “KR” Costello (usa)

A terrible art student, a semi-successful vandal, and an entrepreneur who learned everything the hard way. KR grew up in Queens in the ‘80s surrounded by graffiti writers, skaters, punks and B-boys. Graf was a part of the attitude as much as it was the landscape. Everything was very DIY: steal paint, illegal spots, make markers, emphasize your style, experiment with multiple tools and methods. A lot of it was also based in economy (or lack thereof): sharing and stealing were simply a necessary part of the creative process. In the early ‘90s KR moved to San Francisco. The scene he found there was thriving, yet different. Most writing took place in parking lots and specified spots. He arrived with a whole different attitude regarding materials and styles. Ignoring designated areas, he used the streets of SF as his very own research and development lab, experimenting with a lot of different tools and techniques to create bigger, drippy marker tags. He also began making his own inks, allowing him to get up bigger, bolder and, now armed with an endless supply of ink, much, much more. From these trials and errors, KR’s ink, or Krink, was created. He shared his concoction with a few friends and soon it’s silver markings dominated the city. In 1998 KR returned to NY and brought Krink back with him. Before long, it’s signature style was covering the streets of NY as well. This was around the same time writers began realizing they didn’t need to trade in their lifestyle in order to make a living. The Alife Store had just opened and was quickly becoming a Mecca for street art. They told KR that if he would bottle and sell Krink, people would buy it and they offered to help: it was more of a creative project than a business plan, something to work on collaboratively. It sold and people liked it and it just kept growing from there.

www.krink.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

F**k Buttons (uk)

The Bristol, England-based experimental duo F**k Buttons — Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power — formed in late 2004 and signed to the ATP label, releasing the “Bright Tomorrow” b/w “Little Bloody Shoulder” 7″ single during the fall of 2007, with live dates throughout England (with Liars, Stars of the Lid, and Deerhunter, to name a few) following soon thereafter. They released their first album, Street Horrrsing, which was produced by Mogwai’s John Cummings, in 2008. The duo drafted Two Lone Swordsmen’s Andrew Weatherall to produce the following year’s Tarot Sport, which found F**k Buttons moving in a blissful, more overtly electronic direction.

www.f**kbuttons.co.uk

Felipe Brait & Maíra Valente (brazil)

Relating body and specific contexts, in order to generate a dialogue between movement and landscape, unfolding into performatics proposition. They are artists that, since 2004, have yours trajectories marked by production of dress-objects, installations and urban interventions.

Fibla (spain)

Vicent Fibla was born in the early 70′s by the sea and lives in Barcelona. Fibla generates deep, evocative and cinematographic electronic sounds. He is the leader of what has been called the “emotional electronics” in the spanish scene, and even though his sounds may seem related to the german or british electronic scenes, there is something else, small details pointing out that Fibla is a place where the sun never stops shining.

www.sparkreleases.com

Flavio Samelo (brazil)

Since 1992, Flavio Samelo has walked through the streets of São Paulo, Brasil, photographing skateboarders. These images of street skate, allowed Samelo to introduce in his images, graffiti, pichação, and other urban elements which called his attention in the background of the skateboarding sessions. Samelo, as he is more commonly known, was often invited by those skaters who were also graffiti artists, and pichadores, to make images of their works on the streets as well. These elements became the trademark for his images in the skateboarding magazines of Brazil, showing much more than just skateboarding but the real life around it on the streets. Samelo attended the University of Communication in São Paulo, and subsequently worked as an Art Director, Photographer, Writer and Illustrator for both Brazilian, and international magazines. He has collaborated with magazines such as Revista da MTV, Rolling Stone Brazil, Adbsuters, Lodown and many others. After six years working with design, Samelo decided to return to his studies, and began a post grade with concentration on Art History. It was during this time that Samelo discovered the Brazilian concrete artists movement from the 50’s, and their research, and studies relating to photography, shapes, and colors. The works of Geraldo de Barros and Anatol Wladislaw were among his many influences. Following his discovery of the Brazilian concrete artists movement, Samelo dedicated himself to producing work with more graphic results, in which he could simultaneously incorporate his images of urban photography. Today, the works of Samelo have two fronts: the photographic output, an image with a circulation of one print, creating an indisputable original, and his works that mix his concrete studies with the urban images. Using photography as base for the paintings allows Samelo to push the limits of his images through the use of shape, line, and color, to communicate a new graphic reality. These work were showed at many exhibitions in Brazil and USA as well at last Bienal Vento Sul in Brazil.

www.flaviosamelo.com

Gustavo Gagliardo, aka Defi (argentina)

Gustavo Gagliardo, aka Defi, was born in Devoto, Buenos Aires, into a traditional Italian family living in a small neighborhood in a cosmopolitan city. His first pets were two ducks, Tota and Toto, who became important characters on his childhood block. What began as innocent and casual play developed over the years, accompanying his first experiences of intervening in public spaces He studied design at the University of Buenos Aires, but his flammable spirit burned beyond the limits of academia, where it nurtured itself in the beginning, later transgressing them and creating Fase with other artists, a movement that synthesizes illustration, motion graphics, music and experimentation. This movement served as the basis for a personal development, in which curiosity branched out into distinct plans of action. Small kittens inspired him to distort lines and fill walls, canvases, car doors and grass lawns with color. Around 2001, he played an important part in the birth of Street Art in Argentina, which emerged as a medium of direct communication with the spectator in a time of crisis, while at the same time generating alternative spaces due to a lack of galleries willing to appropriate its works. It was in this way that animals, friends and the street were spontaneously transformed into the material on which his explorations of color and his constant search for reaction express themselves. He evades categorization and definition, escaping them through perpetual mutation. The many facets of his work range from the kitchen to fashion design. Lindo Killer brings his art to unique garments that transform the person wearing them into a mobile painting. While the street is his natural environment, his work achieves its potential when his many creations are exhibited in a single gallery space, as was done in London in 2003, and continues to be done today in Berlin, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Milan, Buenos Aires. His ducks lived for 10 years. He doesn’t know if they never had offspring because he desecrated their nests. He has fish now. Some in the freezer and others that are quarreling or fighting in three fish tanks.

www.lindokiller.com

Isaac Niemand (spain)

Frank Kalero, aka Isaac Niemand. Photographer & filmmaker. Licensed on Media Communication at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. With a degree in Documental Photography at the International Center of Photography (New York). He was a resident at Fabrica de Benetton (Italia), and the founder and director of the OjodePez magazine (Spain). He co-founded Invaliden1 art Gallery and in 2009 he also founded the World according to magazine, both in Berlin. At present he is in charge of the upcoming pan-asiatic photography magazine, Punctum & directing the Ojodepez Photo Meeting Barcelona, the new must for the professionals and lovers of documentary photography. As a filmmaker he’s been doing below the line music videos, animation clips, and a couple of documentaries. He lives between Berlin and New Delhi.

elementarypenguinsingingharekrishna.blogspot.com/

isan (uk)

Robin Saville and Antony Ryan’s releases as isan are characterized by simple rhythms, pop-inflected song structures, and strong, committedly analog melodies. Originally from Reading, England, the duo emerged from the electronica underground in the mid-’90s, at a time when groups like Autechre and Aphex Twin were bringing increasing levels of abstraction and disjunction to electronic post-techno. Dodging that approach, isan joined artists such as Solvent, B. Fleischmann, Sweden’s Pluxus, and Krautrock-electronica fusionists To Rococo Rot in making their music warm, inviting, and accessible. Like many of those artists, isan (perhaps inadvertently) draw on the ’70s and ’80s electronic experiments of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Jean-Michel Jarre, early new wave, and Another Green World-era Brian Eno. Releases on indie-hybrid labels like Static Caravan, Liquefaction Empire, and Foundary — among them several limited-edition and hard to find 7″s — earned isan a crossover audience from the start. The group’s profile got a boost in 1999 when it contributed a remix of Seefeel’s “When Face Was Face” to the Warp label’s tenth anniversary release Remixes. Several albums for Morr Music followed, including 2001′s Lucky Cat, 2004′s Meet Next Life, 2006′s Plans Drawn in Pencil, and 2010′s Glow in the Dark Safari Set, this last one to be “premiere” at ®NOVA.

www.isan.co.uk

Javier Longobardo (spain)

Multidisciplinar artist living in Granada, he is the artists behind “Softmovies”, Sci-fiction landscapes made by 3D computer generated animations, and in which story is laid off in order to reivindicate the comtemplative experience of travelling. “Softmovies” is based in the cinematographic landscape resources and tricks, as a paradigm of generating fantasy unlimited worlds.

www.javierlongobardo.com

Jeffers Egan (usa)

Jeffers Egan’s Live Audio/Visual performance intertwines the worlds of abstract painting and electronic music, creating an advanced, dynamic relationship between the audio and visuals. Egan’s visuals are handcrafted abstractions developed entirely within the realm of the digital. By utilizing custom algorithims and animation software and without the use of prerecorded video or still footage, Egan’s works result in a hyperreal fluidity of audio and image mutations, ranging from tightly synchronized passages, to moments of free improvisation. Viewing Live AV as a platform for experimentation, Egan’s sets explore the inscription of sight and sound in time, suggesting new methods of viewership based upon the molecular parameters of Deleuzean “pure perception”. The static world of the cinematic frame is now replaced with dynamic movement that revitalizes video/film and enables the medium to address the mediaization of both culture and sign.

www.jeffersegan.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Kit Webster (australia)

An emerging talent in cutting-edge technological art and design. Kit Webster from Melbourne, Australia, has been gaining wide recognition for his enigmatic audiovisual installations. Ranging from site-specific projections to digital sculptures, his works utilise precision programming and visualisation techniques to create captivating immersive environments that challenge sensory perceptions. In continually pushing the boundaries of technology and art, Kit is unafraid to present highly experimental concepts designed to expose the potential for the creation of a new audiovisual aesthetic.

www.kitwebster.com.au

Koen Delaere (netherlands)

Koen Delaere’s studio is filled to the brim. In the low-ceilinged space on the outskirts of Tilburg, paintings are hanging on the walls, leaning against cabinets, lying around on the floor. As a visitor one first tends to think that they’re all in various states of completion. Until the painter says that he has difficulty with the idea of ‘completion’. For about six years now, Koen Delaere (1970) has been producing solely abstract paintings in which he employs all sorts of combinations of techniques and methods. In one series the colors blend into each other like banks of fog; in another the paint almost becomes thick ridges of acrylic. There is also a series where Delaere fills one half of the canvas with vertical colored stripes and the other with horizontal ones in roughly the same hues. All of these paintings are multicolored and lush and seem to bristle with ideas, but sometimes they have a slight air of arbitrariness, as often does happen with abstract art. That is, in fact, the persistent problem with a great deal of abstraction, definitely where the good work is concerned: by having been so successful in removing itself from the everyday world, it has in fact lost its points of reference. Even the best abstract painters run the risk of having their works qualified with words such as ‘beautiful color’ and ‘air of tension’. Delaere is well aware of that very problem. To be more precise: he has made that problem pivotal to his work. Just how he does that is very visible in his studio. Unlike most painters, Delaere does not work toward a result; instead he regards each new canvas as an experiment that will have an unexpected ending. Every year he produces about 100 to 150 paintings, and twenty to twenty-five of these are given his ‘approval’ after lengthy consideration. Those are permitted to leave the studio, to go out into the world for exhibition, sale and installation in galleries, living rooms and museums. The rest is destroyed. As a visitor to the studio, one soon begins to wonder which paintings will ‘survive’. And above all: how Delaere makes that choice. When is a painting merely an experiment? When does something still need to be improved in it? And when, I ask him, does it finally turn into a ‘real Delaere’? The painter lets his gaze pass over the work. “Hmmm, that’s difficult to say. I make those choices almost every week, but I find it hard to put that into words. Usually I do have to think about it for a long time; sometimes a canvas can be in the studio for a good half year before I make the decision. It usually has something to do with surprise, with innovation. With the occurrence of things that I’ve never seen before.”

www.koendelaere.nl

Ljudbilden & Piloten (sweden)

Ljudbilden & Piloten (pron. “yude-bill-den oak pee-loe-ten”) is the result of Kristofer’s relentless search for new sounds. Based in Malmö, Sweden, Kristofer has worked with a variety of different bands over the past decade, yet it is his solo work as Ljudbilden & Piloten where he can really flex his creative muscles, which combines video work, illustration and his trademark use of unusual percussion objects. He says he is inspired by everything and everyone. “I can’t put my finger on just one thing that inspires me the most. It depends from time to time. One day it could be an e-mail from someone, another day the silence. Movies, photos, art, friends, music. I can’t decide what inspires me the most. It wouldn’t be fair to the tree with no leaves if I turned around and said I got more inspiration from looking at its friend who has leaves.”

www.ljudbilden.com

Lolo (argentina)

Lucy McRae (australia)

Lucy McRae is an Australian artist straddling the worlds of fashion, technology and the body. As a body Architect she invents and builds structures on the skin that re-shape the human silhouette. Her provocative and often grotesquely beautiful imagery suggests a new breed; a future human archetype existing in an alternate world. Trained as a classical ballerina and architect her work inherently fascinates with the human body. The media call her inventor, friends call her a trailblazer. Either way, she relies on instinct to evolve an extraordinary visual path that is powerful, primal – and uniquely Lucy McRae.

www.lucymcrae.blogspot.com

M.Takara 3 (brazil)

Mauricio Takara was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1983. Mauricio is the drummer of the bands Hurtmold, Instituto and São Paulo Underground (with the trumpetist from Chicago Underground, Rob Mazurek). Mauricio Takara, also take control of the samplers, synthesizers, drums, effects and computer on his solo project call “M.Takara 3”.
M.Takara 3 has gained visibility in the international contemporary musical scene due to its tours through England, U.S, Canada, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Portugal, India and Brazil, his home country. Mauricio collaborates with many artists like Otto, Nação Zumbi, Naná Vasconcelos, Damo Suzuki, Scotty Hard, Vanessa da Mata, Marcelo Camelo, Prefuse 73, Joe Lally (Fugazi), Thavius Beck, Josh Abrams (Bonnie Prince Billy), Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orquestra), Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Roscoe Mitchell (Art Essemble Of Chicago), Bill Dixon and many more. M.Takara 3 reveals itself as soundtrack with some points of jazz, brazilian rythms, experimental electronica, hip hop, and rock.

www.mtakara.com

Marcio Shimabukuro aka Shima (brazil)

Since 2005, daily life and performance art are the main source of Shima’s research and art pieces. While in work Shima deconstructs ordinary quotidian practice to analyze patterns and traditional schemes of doing things. The performance art platform (time x space x action x context) is a powerful tool for Shima to think the process and the final result, which can be installations, objects, video, photography and also performance pieces. Shima likes to create unusual ways to see the common things, combining different disciplines and playing with it’s similarities, differences, contrasts and harmony, to purpose new lenses to see/feel/think reality.

www.shima.art.br

Mario Zoots (usa)

Mario Zoots is engaged in the excavation, reimagination and manipulation of contemporary cyber culture and networked popular culture. His imagery presents a steady stream of pop-data that has been abjectly obscured in some way, the content and imagery becomes hyperlinked and jumbled leaving viewers questioning media realities and ones perceptive lens.

www.mariozoots.com

Mark Jenkins (usa)

Mark Jenkins is an American artist most widely known for the street installations he creates using box sealing tape. His work has been featured in various publications including Time, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Independent and on the street art blog Wooster Collective. He has shown indoors in galleries in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Brazil and is represented by various galleries including Lazarides Gallery in London. He maintains the Website tapesculpture.org and teaches his tape casting process in workshops in the cities he visits. Mark Jenkins said the following about the illegal aspects of street art during an interview with art critic Brian Sherwin, “There is opposition, and risk, but I think that just shows that street art is the sort of frontier where the leading edge really does have to chew through the ice. And it’s good for people to remember public space is a battleground, with the government, advertisers and artists all mixing and mashing, and even now the strange cross-pollination taking place as street artists sometimes become brands, and brands camouflaging as street art creating complex hybrids or impersonators. I think it’s understanding the strangeness of the playing field where you’ll realize that painting street artists, writers, as the bad guys is a shallow view. As for the old bronzes, I really don’t see them as part of what’s going on in the dialogue unless addressed by a new intervention.“

www.xmarkjenkinsx.com

Matt W. Moore aka MWM (usa)

Matt is the founder of MWM Graphics, a Design and Illustration Studio based in Portland, Maine. Matt works across disciplines, from colorful digital illustrations in his signature “Vectorfunk” style, to freeform watercolor paintings, and massive aerosol murals. Matt exhibits his artwork in galleries all around the world, and collaborates with clients in all sectors. Matt is also Co-Founder & Designer for Glyph Cue Clothing.

Matt graduated from MECA in 2006 with a BFA in Graphic Design. Prior to MECA he studied at Decordova Museum School, RISD, SCAD, and Boston University. After college he worked as an Art Director at The VIA Groupand a Designer at Burton Snowboards before officially launching MWM Graphics.

Matt lives by the motto “Range is conducive to growth” and feels his greatest work happens when he is required to step out of his comfort zone and look at things from a new angle. When he’s not working on client projects he is busy in his art studio playing and exploring.

www.mwmgraphics.com

Max Hattler (germany)

Max Hattler is an animator and experimental filmmaker best-known for his 2005 abstract political short film “Collision”, and his experimental animation works “Drift” and “Aanaatt”. Max Hattler was born in 1976 in Ulm, Germany. He is the son of Hellmut Hattler from Krautrock band Kraan. Max Hattler graduated from Goldsmiths in 2001, and with a Master of Arts in Animation from the Royal College of Art in 2005. He lives in London and Germany. Hattler’s films have been screened internationally, including Edinburgh, Melbourne, San Francisco, Rotterdam, Onedotzero, Resfest, The Animation Show, Annecy Animation Festival, Zagreb Animation Festival, Image Forum Festival and the European Media Art Festival. His short ?lm “Collision” (2005) won several prizes including the LUX Award for Best Experimental Film, and the Award for Best Film at 700IS Festival in Iceland. It was awarded a Prädikat Wertvoll by the Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden, Germany. Hattler’s “Drift” (2007) won Best Digital Film at London International Animation Festival, and Best Experimental Film at Muuuvi International Short Film Festival, Romania. “Aanaatt” (2008) won the Host Award at Videofestival Bochum, Germany, and Best Design at Eksjo Animation Festival, among others. Hattler also works extensively in the field of audiovisual live performance, and has created concert visuals for The Egg and Basement Jaxx.

www.maxhattler.com

Maya Hayuk (usa)

Leaving no surface, discipline, or location untouched, Maya Hayuk makes use of an unbounded and unpredictable matrix of sources, mediums, and styles. Her relationship to the images she invents is an intricate and complex free association and a perspicacious act of unfailingly putting all the parts together to make the whole. She employs intense yet pertinent colors, complex geometries, and fine lines in order to collect the constituents that make up her present and visceral world. A veritable workaholic who at once possesses the expertise of an entrepreneur and the spontaneity of the works she makes, it is immediately obvious that she is much, much more: muralist, photographer, printmaker, designer, curator, player of records, writer, performer, collector, Barnstormer, painter, illustrator, videographer, documentarian, and on.

Her obsession with symmetry and her collection of images of mandalas, playing cards, hexes, totem poles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, quilts and bandanas play out in works that espouse the traditional as well as the innovative. A cat’s cradle of six magic hands seemingly spinning, a burst of strings in the sky like liquid streamers, and giant two faced birds with faceless people made of elaborate patterns, dappled wood grain and loads of hair exist in ambiguous landscapes scattered with oil wells, flags, flowers, feathers, and fingers. Longhaired couples matter-of-factly stick their limbs into each other’s bellies and turn into tree branches that twist into mountains of wood, walls, and paper made with paint, ink, and gusto. Maya Hayuk’s wild and unabated imagery may appear chaotic but she has mastered an exact and resolute practice.

Hayuk continues to produce work that is social, dynamic and out there for anyone and everyone to take in and discover. She continuously gives herself over to places, people and projects in a true communal bohemian fashion, working collaboratively as well as in a reproducible way, in her murals and prints respectively. The immediacy of printmaking as well as mural making has long endured history as a collaborative, politically charged and often underground activity. Works in multiples are accessible, distributable, and relatable in their abundance. Murals reach the masses and speak to an audience often inaccessible and disregarded. Hayuk’s degree in Interrelated Media and Philosophy gives her foundations in leftist principles and her work embraces the vernacular of the people.

The collaborative projects and interactions that Hayuk has become increasingly known for have an impact in a productive way that a lot of contemporary or fashionable work completely lacks. Her instinctive large-scale paintings directly effect public spaces and are genuine interventions that enrich their environment. They are completed with the help of friends such as the Barnstormers collective and Hayuk remains expectant and accepting of the give and take associated with such joint efforts. There is something very classic rock punk folk rainbow peace freak out about Maya Hayuk that is very hard to put a finger on, but really it’s all about love. As if kindled by her distinguishing heart-shaped insignia signature, Hayuk’s disposition and practice eschew unpleasantries and welcome the irony and satire of real life.

www.mayahayuk.com

Modern Witch (usa)

Modern Witch is a collective of visual artists who create dark electronic soundscapes. The appropriated moving image and collage video’s that the collective plays to at live shows is a large part of the performance. The music becomes performative in that the group creates site specific installations when performing, using costumes, projectors and smoke machines. What the audience is left with is a mystical experience.

www.modernwitchmusic.com

MOMO (usa)

MOMO is known for tagging his name the width of Manhattan, creating over sized collage, faking a New Yorker magazine cover, and building a totem pole in the East River, a computer script which makes his art for him, a mural project with Melissa Brown that destroys their art for them. Tide powered sculpture with Eltono, and prints, paintings, and videos that rely on chance for fun and substance. In 2009 ROJO® published his first monograph “3am-6am”, and Y-3 created the MOMO shoes.

MOMO grew up in San Francisco and traveled extensively, before settling in New York. He joined a graffiti crew in 1999 while living in Spain, found his use of color while employed in the Caribbean, and fell for outside art while living outside; in a cave for a year, in a truck for a year, in a tent for a year. He now lives in a former bodega in Brooklyn.

www.momoshowpalace.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Mulheres Barbadas (brazil)

Mulheres Barbadas, aka the Bearded Ladies, are Henrique Lima and Julio Zukerman, in that order. Working together since 2006, they joined forces to fill any empty spaces they come across with monochromatic doodles. They are known for their extremely busy black and white line drawings, and for having most of their work available online for download so people can print them out and do whatever they want with it. They have been part of various projects from many different countries, and worked for clients like Coca-Cola, MTV, Nestlé and Nike, among others. Also featured in publications like IdN, Clone and Empty, even being picked by Computer Arts UK as one of the most influential up and coming illustrators in 2007. In 2008 they had their first solo show in São Paulo at ROJO Artspace. They later were part of the group exhibitions Lapis Lapin, at Surface2Air and Ocho, once again at ROJO Artspace. In 2009 they worked on a partnership with furniture overlords MiCasa, where they drew on many pieces of furniture like custom freezers, saarinen chairs and even a Mini Cooper. They also spent a week drawing on all the 4 walls and ceiling of a room, and had their audience keep up with the work live, via webcam, on their website. Their work now varies between digital mediums, ink on paper and installations, but always with too much information and very little colors.

www.mulheresbarbadas.com

NOIA (canada)

Throughout Montreal, the 8bit furry of NOIA has left a trail of crushed dance floors in their wake. With projectionist in tow, the band’s live show is a benevolent maelstrom of 3-dimensional light and psychedelic sounds of the most sincere ferocity. 2008 is the year Eduardo Noya studied sound design in Montreal discovered the powers of the LSDJ Gameboy program. Accompanied by his bass guitar, keyboard and effect pedals, he went on to play a few audiovisual shows to try out his material accompanied by his VJ. It is only in the early months of 2009 that Noia became a duo with the addition of Pierre-Luc Simon on drums. The now band received extremely good reactions after playing for Montreal Festivals Toy Company, Biennale, MEG and OFF Festival in Quebec City. Seeing all this positive feedback, local upstart label from Montreal l’Oeil Du Tigre and A Tutiplen from Lima, Peru have now chosen to release Noia’s first self-titled full length album. These songs were recorded by the band themselves with a little help from their friends in October 2009 and released on March 27th 2010. This year NOIA has had the opportunity to play shows in Lima Peru and blow people’s minds. Back to Montreal they have played already in Boston and New York. OFF Festival from Quebec has chosen NOIA to perform once again and open for Duchess Says, the most important electro-synth-rock band from Montreal. To hint you on the sounds Noia create, let’s just say that electronica, punk-rock and dance-noise are staples in both musicians musical worlds. From the energy of Lightning Bolt to the innocence of 80’s and 90’s video game soundtracks and electro kitsch influences, Noia come off as eclectic yet complimentary.

www.myspace.com/noiasound

Noriko Okaku (japan)

Noriko Okaku graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art Media, and from the Royal College of Art with an MA Animation. Her first animated film Diametric Artimaid won the Beck’s Futures Student Prize at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Since then, she has shown her works internationally at film festivals and exhibitions, including Anifest in the Czech Republic, Tricky Women Festival in Vienna, London Fashion Week, temporarycontemporary gallery in London, Amuse Artjam in Kyoto and Uplink gallery, Tokyo. Noriko has directed idents for Japanese music video channel Space Shower TV and for fashion brand Hall Ohara. She has also worked as an animator and illustrator on many projects, including an ad for World / United (Final Nominee, New York Festival 2008), an animation for retail brand Gunze, and several music videos for the band Kuchiroro from Ryuic.

www.norioka.net

Quayola (italy)

Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer-generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm. Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking.

www.quayola.com

Rafael Calazans aka Highraff (brazil)

Rafael Calazans aka Highraff was born in São Paulo in 1977. Highraff ‘s first exposure to painting was graffiti. Using organic forms rendered with a very hallucinatory quality, Highraff builds his forms with a high degree of precision, although there is also a certain element of improvisation in his work. On canvases, his forms will appear deeply-rooted, conveying a great sense of movement of shapes, growing upwards like a tree. Building forms in this way led to his incorporation of sculpture to enhance the illusion. Using MDF material, Highraff has developed a cutting-and-fitting system to create a three-dimensional component, turning his once flat murals into sculpted sceneries of elaborate depth. The result is fantastic imagery in vibrant psychedelic colors and complex layers, heightening the experience of the urban landscape. Highraff’s colors and shapes are derived from various sources of inspiration, although he has a special fondness for comics and animation. Other influences include Moebius, Gaudi, Mucha, and Escher. Highraff describes his work best when he says, “imagine all of these artistic styles together in a psychedelic rave party.” Highraff graduated from university in 2001 and immediately began showing his work in galleries and museums. He has also traveled to Europe, where he painted in the streets of Paris and Barcelona.

www.flickr.com/photos/highraff

Rebecca Ward (usa)

Rebecca Ward’s installations are site-specific works dependent upon the space they occupy. Utilizing existing lines, beams, and angles, each piece Rebecca creates is informed by the individual site and its unique linear movement. Thus, her installations are inherently architectural. She chooses patterns and shapes according to detailed measurements of the installation site. Ideally these patterns are numerically symmetrical or somehow numerically balanced, producing a dialogue between line and space. Rebecca initially began working with tape because of the broad range of colors in which it is available. Additionally, She have always been drawn to its unique textural qualities. She began making videos to create a dialogue with the tape installations. Rebecca sees the videos as a way to animate the tape installations, and further explore my architectural manipulation of space. When using tape, rather than leaving evenly-placed two-dimensional lines upon a wall, she expands upon the material’s sculptural potential and bring these installations into a third dimension. When using video, Rebecca angles projectors and use multiple intersecting projections to create animated, two-dimensional shapes. This creates an illusionary space, a perceptual play of pattern, color, light, and texture that is realized by the viewer’s experience of, and interaction with the work.

www.rebeccasward.com

Robert Seidel (germany)

Robert Seidel (1977) began studying biology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and finished his media design diploma at the Bauhaus University (Weimar, Germany). His films have been shown in a museal context at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany, “Art_Clips .ch.at.de”), Wilhelm-Hack Museum (Ludwigshafen, Germany, “Abstract Art Now – Floating Forms”) and Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Antwerp, Belgium, “GORGE(L) – Opression and Relief in Art”) as well as over 250 festivals (Prix Ars Electronica, onedotzero, DOTMOV, IFF Rotterdam, EMAF), galleries, magazines, books and TV programmes worldwide. They have been honoured with several prices like an Honorary Award of KunstFilmBiennale (Cologne, Germany) and the Prize for Best Experimental Film at Ottawa International Animation Festival (Ottawa, Canada).

In his films Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of organic beauty and their emotional perception with visual and scientific technology. By layering different structural, spatial and temporal concepts organically he creates a slowly evolving complexity. This multifaceted perspective, a kind of narrational skeleton is filled by the viewers own memory and creates a seamless blend with the artwork itself.

Recently he began to expand his experimental films to an architectural canvas. As one example he turned a natural history museum (Phyletic Museum, Jena, Germany) into a “breathing creature” with a combination of full façade film projection, synched light choreography and a dramatic soundtrack or created a gigantic virtual sculpture (100x125x80 meters) for the Art Center Nabi (Seoul, South Korea). Besides his personal art he works as a director, curator and journalist with clients like Universal Everything, Goethe Institute, Channel Five, Atlantic Records, IdN, Mutabor, Sleek, ARTE/ZDF, Digital Production and Addison-Wesley. For his Zero 7 music video he was chosen as one of “30 directors to watch” by Canada’s leading commercial production magazine ‘boards.

www.robertseidel.com

Roll The Dice (sweden)

Working with set rules, limitations and always forcing themselves to narrow their options, gives the duo ‘Roll the Dice’ inspiration to constantly move forward without doubt or hesitation like settlers in the early landscape of acoustics and electronics. The result can only be described as heartfelt ,emotive and always aiming to find that streak of gold within….

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Ryoichi Kurokawa (japan)

Japanese audiovisual artist. His works take on multiple forms such as screening works, recordings, installation and live performance. Kurokawa composes time based sculpture with digital generated materials and field recorded sources, and the minimal and the complexities coexist there. Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a unit not as separately, and constructs very exquisite and precise computer based works with the audiovisual language. That shortens mutual distance, the reciprocity and the synchronization of sound and visual composition. He also performed live-visual for musicians such as Human Audio Sponge (ex.YMO: Sketch Show + Ryuichi Sakamoto). In recent years, Kurokawa is invited to numerous noted international festivals and museums in Europe, US and Asia including Tate Modern (uk), Ars Electronica (at), transmediale (de), Shanghai eARTS (cn), Mutek (ca), and Sonar (es) for concert and exhibition, and he continues to be an active presence on the international stage.

www.ryoichikurokawa.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Sin Fang Bous (iceland)

Welcome to the Wunderkammer. Pop music with a bow, a present from Reykjavik and from Sindri Mar Sigfusson. A present that he gave to us and especially to himself. At the beginning there was an atmosphere of breaking up. Whereas on the one hand face and body of his band Seabear (whose debut was released on Morr Music in August 2007) gained their outlines more clearly, there remained a deliberately left open game with the sounds on the other hand. The name for this game was soon found: Sin Fang Bous. Sindri Mar Sigfusson took his time. And he let time blow through the tracks. Gravitation processes, drifts, accumulations. What began as a miniature – a voice, a guitar – changed its textures and re-coloured its leaves. “I wanted to try to do stuff with my voice I hadn’t done before so there’s some singing above my range there and singing through lots of effect stuff.“ Still there is this direct, intuitive sound – a reliance in sounds that also characterises Seabear’s music. Embraces in pop, distinctive naivety. And yet Sin Fang Bous knows about the process-relatedness of pop music’s production.

www.morrmusic.com

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Soley(iceland)

Soley Stefansdottir, a 23 year old girl from Reykjavik, student of composition and a member of the Icelandic indie-collective Seabear. Songs are held together by Soleys piano play and her voice – because every of her compositions come into being while she is singing to the piano. Soley loves this: by her own account she’s actually singing all day long. On her brand new EP ‘Theater Island’ she uses a lot of instruments though: Strings, guitars or just some electronic crackles and noises. There’s something vague and unreal, that sticks to all of her songs. This applies to the lyrics, too: Like Alice, Soley walks through her very own wonderland, where things happen, that can only occur in the surreal logic of a dream.

www.morrmusic.com

Sosaku Miyazaki (japan)

Born in 1975 in Japan, Sosaku Miyazaki lives and works in Tokyo and Barcelona. Strongly influenced by urban life, Sosaku’s creations first could be seen in Barcelona’s streets in 2005. In Sosaku Miyazaki’s works, from street art to more recent realizations, unusable and nonsense technologies have always been mixed with bitter and unexpressed feelings. Sosaku Miyazaki interprets naive art with sarcasm. His work ranges from painting to sculpture, covering photography, music, video, ready-made, installations and performance art. “Experimentation, through new techniques and support, is the main driving force of my research; sometimes it is almost compulsive for me because I seek in every way to represent and give visibility to that beauty which hides under our noses in everyday life.”

www.sosakumiyazaki.com

Talita Hoffmann (brazil)

Talita Hoffmann (Porto Alegre/RS/Brazil, 1988) is an artist, majored in Visual Design. Develops her work inspired by nature and it’s different connections and relations, creating an unique universe where mythic and hybrid animals exist. Currently lives and works in São Paulo/SP/Brazil.

www.talitahoffmann.com

This Time (japan/argentina)

This Time is a sound, video and performance project by Lolo and Sosaku formed in 2006, looking for a light from boat in a forgotten memory. It is in between painting and noise, sound and music, sculpture and instrument, metal and strings, hear and listen, time and distance, awake and dream, formless and shape, new and future. This Time is making original instruments in this moment of time to find out something new under a law of nature.

ABSOLUT VODKA presents:

Tofer Chin (usa)

Visual artist Tofer Chin has put a youth-impacted spin on contemporary art, imagery, and photography. His carefully stylized paintings capture the controlled and the insane with a uniquely identifiable, rainbow-hued aesthetic. Tofer’s artistic accomplishments range from designing urban art installations in Sao Paolo to working with of-the-moment interior designer Kelly Wearstler, who commissioned him to create original works for Los Angeles’ Avalon Hotel and Miami’s Viceroy Hotel. He’s also finished painting a life-sized sculpture for Wearstler’s personal collection. In 2006, Tofer published his first book of photography, and in 2008 published a highly anticipated follow-up, “Vacation Standards”, a photographic portfolio of the beautiful and grotesque. His works appear in The Los Angeles Times, Flaunt, Nylon, Trace, Big, Vice, ROJO®, and Idn among many others.

www.toferchin.com

Tunng (uk)

Though the core members of Tunng, Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay, began their musical partnership composing scores for softcore porn, they soon decided to form a band that would bring together Genders’ gentle vocals with Lindsay’s guitar playing and songwriting. To fill out their sound, the duo added more guitars as well as female vocals, turntables, programming, and other percussion. Often labeled as either “future folk” or “folktronica” by critics who had a hard time placing the band’s sound, Tunng released a handful of singles in their native Britain before their full-length debut, This Is…Tunng: Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs came out in 2005 (the album was later re-released in the U.S. the following year on Ace Fu). In 2006 their follow-up, Comments of the Inner Chorus, hit shelves. By this time more of a collective than anything else, especially because initially Genders had opted out of performing live, the six-piece (Genders and Lindsay plus vocalists Becky Jacobs and Ashley Bates and multi-instrumentalists Martin Smith and Phil Winter) released Good Arrows the next year. Time off and touring meant four years would pass before the group returned with …And Then We Saw Land.

www.tunng.co.uk

Vidderna (sweden)

Vidderna is etheral and modern pop, a cinematic and emotional music that signals a sort of hopeful melancholy. The spritual angle is a constantly present. In songs such as “Dubbelliv” and “Villfarelser”, the themes at hand are those of death, reincarnation and the search for meaning. What is of importance here is not the context, but rather the subject matter in itself – the exploration of the self. That which is most important often takes place in the outskirts of an ongoing phenomenon, where one must take time to search and find it. The swedish word that serves as their bandname is, by its very meaning, also a map of the infinite directions that one with a gaze can behold. It is not so much about the fact that Niklas Tjäder and Markus Clemmedson are Vidderna, but rather that they explore them.

www.myspace.com/vidderna

Yochai Matos (israel)

Yochai Matos Born 1977, Lives and works in Tel Aviv. Graduated in 2004 at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. His work deals with the public space as a property, taking place in both fields; on the streets and inside the established Art world – searching the cross points between the two disciplines. Matos uses in his works basic and simple images derived from the Modern Culture; images which already contain layers of replication and recycling – an evolution which leads both to the depletion and the over-readability of these images. By dealing with pop and kitsch icons (such as sunsets; flames of fire; a heart; a couple of dolphins jumping over the water; or even the nostalgic logo of the television series Fame) Matos wishes to touch once again the romantic, authentic and lost emotions, suggesting a simple and comforting way of confronting the contemporary disease of emotional disability. Furthermore the hypnotic WOW effect of the flickering fluorescent lights functions as a warm welcoming hand to join and feel and experience the artifact and simultaneously alienates the viewer (on stage or at the Museum) by literally dazzling and flattening the space – this ambiguous sensation reflects and emphasizes our atmosphere, the way our surrounding culture progresses, emotionally, physically and virtually. Matos has exhibited solo shows and has attended in group shows in Europe, US and in Israel.

www.yochaimatos.com

Yusk Imai (brazil)

Yusk Imai was Born in 1982, in Chicago Illinois, and believes we are all going to burn in hell.

www.yusk.blogspot.com