2012 by David Colagiovanni and Melissa Haviland
Shot on RED, Stereo Audio

About the work:

One of the most important aspects of the work is that the sounds you are hearing are a direct representation of what you are seeing. In other words, we have captured both the image and sound of the moment a teacups opens up, bounces on the ground or violently shatters and subsequently found the musicality hidden within these transformative events.

Music for Teacups is a composition in image and sound that recombines captured footage of falling and breaking teacups. This work is part of a larger body of work exploring issues of class, etiquette, and family upbringing using a confined yet complex visual and auricular language.

Melissa Haviland and I are currently in residence at Florida State in Tallahassee, Fl. working on the Music for Teacups artist book and 7″ vinyl EP with Denise Bookwalter at Small craft Advisory Press. Music for Teacups will be an edition of 50 books which will include a 30 foot accordion book of teacup silhouettes, a 7″ record and custom record sleeve.

Our residency is made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Program
Enhancement Grant from the Council on Research and Creativity at Florida State
University in Tallahassee, Florida; Baker and Ohio University Research Council Grants from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio; and support from the RENCI Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The included 7-inch EP is currently being mastered by David McConnell at Thread Audio in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Music for Teacups artist book is based on our video and sound composition of the same name in which we explore issues of class, privilege, constraint, manners, family and beauty through the recombination of captured footage of falling and breaking teacups.

Above are a few images of the book in process. As we figure out the details and release date of the book I’ll be sure to post more here.

Seize This Domain, digital print in oblique frame, approximately 6ft wide

I created the site and accompanying object  www.SeizeThisDoma.in on November 29, 2010 in response to the US government seizure of 82 domain names for copyright infringement three days prior. The site is an exact copy of what was posted on domain names that were seized. It is an open experiment to see what might happen if I infringed on the government’s images and code. Would they seize my domain? If so, the site would essentially remain the same.

At the time of the first domain seizures the legality of such a practice fell into a legal limbo – now SOPA threatens to make this injustice common practice. I am against SOPA and PIPA because I feel that the proposed legislation will stifle free speech. Want to do learn more about it? Check out this wikipedia entry, and stay up to date in regards to your internet freedoms by visiting Electronic Frontier Foundation often.

My new animation is currently screening on Acid Rain in Lower Manhattan, NYC and Chapel Hill, Carrboro,and Durham, NC.

Here’s the info from the Acid Rain website:
Oakland, October 25th is a short hand drawn rotoscoped animation depicting Veterans for Peace member Scott Olsen after he was wounded by a non/less-lethal round by riot police on October 25, 2011 at 14th Street and Broadway in Downtown Oakland.

Colagiovanni’s rapid and less defined marks mirror the raw feeling of the energy of an event, then cluster and organize into more detail and care in the forms of the people participating, the vessels of said energy. His approach locates the extreme starkness of the situation deeper into the parts of the mind that try to understand, empathize, and otherwise connect through time and space with something meaningful. The layered surface nuance of a secondary participant – in addition to being a viewer – tracing over the kinetic recording and in essence rerecording it into a personal and then recasting of a public memory, could be described as a drawn version of “the people’s mic”. a people’s sketchbook.

The original source video was recorded by Ali Winston a reporter for KALW 91.7 FM. You can see it here.

Oakland, October 25th has recently shown up on Just Seeds and Globatron. Thanks for sharing.

At the eye in London Fall 2011

Fractures and Flight: An Interview with David Colagiovanni by Cameron Turner from Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination
Went live early october. Here’s a few excepts:

An artist whose engaging output spans gallery installation, new media, internet art, and video, David Colagiovanni’s work is a studied investigation into the bodily and spatial forces which tether us to the ground and which threaten to unmoor us. In the recent “Music for New Mexico,” Colagiovanni destroyed—or at least dented—a series of porcelain, glass, and metal bells by letting them plummet to a cratered surface somewhere in New Mexico. The result? A looped video sequence that plays with the film’s speed. As it picks up its pace, it suggests first a tolling, elegiac mourning for lost place, then a frenzied postmodern testament to place that is inseparable from YouTube documentation and an Internet audience, and finally a fractured unknowability of place that pays respect to the recalcitrant New Mexico landscape. The carnage is enrapturing as the bells implode, boom, violently fly off screen, squeak, gracefully toll, and turn to grainy powder.

TURNER: You’ve described how one of your current goals as an artist is to make video more spatial, visceral, and bodily, which is evident in your innovative, immersive work at the Morehead dome. I love this idea, since planetariums often symbolize both a “magic lantern” escape from physical reality as well as a more thorough understanding of that reality when an audience witnesses the cosmos’s bigger picture. You’ve mentioned that your work is preoccupied with flight and escape; I’m wondering how you’ve engaged or played with the planetarium’s more didactic, educational, or grounding roles in your art at Morehead, if at all.

COLAGIOVANNI: The planetarium has amazing spatial potential. It’s also a space that transports us to the stars and other planets, a magic lantern (as you say), a time-machine, an education device, and much more. I am constantly thinking about its uses and history when I create an experience for the dome. My initial interest in working with the Morehead Planetarium comes from its history as an astronaut training simulator for the Apollo missions. From 1960 to 1975, The Morehead Planetarium was used to train American astronauts on celestial recognition. The training they did here allowed them to properly orient their spacecraft and successfully complete missions in the event of an automatic guidance or navigation systems failure. If you sit in the planetarium and look up at the dome, you are experiencing the same space as every astronaut who ever walked on the moon—an inspirational thought given that the Morehead serves about 90,000 school children per year and has had over 5 million people visit since it opened. My first work for the dome, “Charting Course for the Unknown,” is an homage to the Apollo astronauts and the surface of the planetarium. Like an early astronaut simulation, it describes a space that has yet to be fully explored. Read more here

In addition to the exhibition, a free limited-edition compilation CD will be available with hand screen-printed covers by artist Scott Cook and an essay by curator Jeff Thompson. The CD was also be released as a free digital download, available here.

David Colagiovanni & Melissa Haviland, Music for New Mexico (video still collage), from Coupling

Coupling: Dedicated to the Man and based on the Work of Stan Brakhage. An audio and book release The first release by Silent Media includes the above image by Melissa and I from our series Music for New Mexico. Check them out if you get a chance and support their new venture by buying a copy.

ThankYouForVisitingTheInter.net a solo show was at Lump from April 1 – April 30, 2011. During the show, the site’s background image refreshed every 45 seconds.
ADomainNamePurchasedAndAllowedToExpire.com expired on April 23, 2011. A small service was held at Lump Gallery.

ThankYouForVisitingTheInter.net exists both online and physically in the gallery with objects that reference and complete meaning from both their online and physical presence. Through a series of self referring feedback loops, the objects in the show are transposed from one space to another and call attention to the in-between or non-space and the political and material gated communities that exist within our spaces of contemporary life.

www.ThankYouforVisitingTheInter.net was/is live ‘online’ accessible by visiting with your web browser and available for viewing in the gallery from April 1st – April 30th, 2011.

Charting Course for the Unknown showed at Full Dome UK March 12-13, 2011 at Think Tank Planetarium in Birmingham, England and at IFF ’11 at Centro Multimeios Espinho, Portugal April 29th – May 1, 2011 where it won Best Immersive Short. ADomainNamePurchasedAndAllowedToExpire.com April 23, 2010 – - April 23, 2011 is featured as part of the online exhibition Celebrate 2010 at the JavaMuseum. The work www.ThisIsNotA.TV was on view at Future Tenant Art Space in Pittsburgh, PA in January, 2011

The work Music for New Mexico. a 13 minute sound and image work screened in Albuquerque, NM. November 2010. Music for Teacup an earlier work from the same series screened in Timisoara, Romania early October, 2010 and the work OilAndWaterDont.Mx was on view at the Front Gallery in New Orleans as part of the Exhibition Black Gold in December.