Within the project POST ELETTRONICA
curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

In tribute to John Cage, the project Post Elettronica investigates territories of “post-electronic” experimentation revealing Cage’s contemporary inheritance and presenting artists who share a dramatic and gestural use of new technologies. Hybrid works that combine music, video, performance, sculpture, sound, noise become vocabularies of a composite language in which the management of advanced software is combined with the artifact in an attempt to dissolve the conceptual approach towards the involvement of the viewer.

In Tall Poppies, contact mikes on the stems of sparklers pick up the whoosh of the burning magnesium and the subsequent ping and pop of the wire cores as they cool. Video monitors synchronized recordings of individual sparklers onto the walls of the gallery, each image accompanied by its own sound channel. The vagaries in burn-time and cool-down produce an odd polyphony. All sounds are produced by the sparklers, and are not processed in any way.

New York born Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with David Tudor, and collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world.
He lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin.
Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, and since 1999 a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The second edition of his book, Handmade Electronic Music & The Art of Hardware Hacking, was published by Routledge in 2009. Collins has the distinction of having played at both CBGBs and the Concertgebouw.