Women in Resistance Film Festival

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: dance • film • installation
23 Oct

One of my longest collaborator is the Bulgarian choreographer, dancer and film maker Zornitsa Stoyanova (BodyMeld). One of her films, Explicit Female, that I did the music for was featured in the German festival Poetry Film Festival – Women in Resistance.

“Explicit Female” is a visual poem that takes on pregnancy and the act of birth as its theme. Making another human in one’s body is often thought of as magical, beautiful, and peaceful. This film illuminates all that, plus the hidden trauma of the experience. Using mirror psychedelic effects, the body gets transformed into sensual ever-changing vaginas, organic-looking aliens, shapes and colors that later remind of DNA division. Deeply sensual, the sci-fi imagery lures the imagination while furthering the feel of otherness and alienation. An automatically generated voice speaks of the female body’s durability and the complete destruction of identity that happens to a new mother. “Explicit Female” is part of a bigger performance of the same name that evening.

Here’s a preview of the film from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival:

dwell

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: film
22 Feb

Improvised performance using piano and the iPad application Samplr. Merging technologies from different centuries, composer and sound artist Mikronesia creates a real-time soundscape of sampled and live piano tones.

Camera and lighting: Dan Tabor
Performance and Editing: Mikronesia

More about the App: samplr.net

Antarctica

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: film • installation • performances
08 Nov

For The Fidget Fall Experimental Music Festival Nora Gibson and myself were asked to create a music and dance work. We decided to show a work-in-progress for a large media project Antarctica. Antarctica is the story of the end of human data, the end of history, the end of information. It was presented as a 20 minute film projected on three translucent floating screen and with singing by Steve Quaranta.

Below is an excerpt from the film:

ANTARCTICA Development Preview from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.

Assembling Minutiae

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: dance • film
05 Sep

For the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2008. I composed a piece of music called “Pure” for a new dance / film piece by my colleagues Perpetual Mvmt<>Snd. The music I came up with was a slowly building wash of sine waves that uses frequencies found in the note middle C on the piano. The hypnotic sequence builds slowly and almost inaudibly as the lowest frequencies are introduced.

The live dance performance (by Emily Sweeney) was presented at NEXUS/Foundation for Today’s Art at the Crane Arts building. The set was designed by interdisciplinary artist bilwa. The minimal white washed film was created by Blaine Seigel and had movement by Emily Sweeney, Rebecca Patek and Jil Stifel.

Below is an excerpt from the film.

Assembling Minutiae (Excerpt) from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.

Harold Budd – Midnight Leaves of London

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: film
08 May

As part of the 2008 Bath Music Festival prolific pianist and composer Harold Budd put out a call for people to create videos of themselves recording his composition “Midnight Leaves of London”.

Filmmaker Derek Moench and I did a few variations for this project including a cool David Lynch inspiried reverse performance. We also did this more glitchy one below:

Art@Sophi Piano Improvisation

Posted by: mikronesia
Categories: film • performances
20 Oct

For the POST (Philadelphia Open Studios Tour) in October of 2007 I did a four hour long piano + electronics improvisations at Art@Sophi. Our friends and frequent collaborators Monica Turtle and Mike Murray invited me to create a living soundscape in the foyer of Art@Sophi. It was a fun and challenging night to play for four hours straight!

Don Brewer taped some of my performance and posted an 8:00 compilation which you can view below: