"Fools Paradise": is a collaborative
project by Paul Hertz, a visual artist working
with digital intermedia, and Stephen Dembski, a
composer, performer, and conductor of new music.
Paul Hertz makes art in both
digital and traditional media. He has worked in various positions
at Northwestern University. In 2003—04 he was Co-Director
of the Center for Art and Technology. As a Visiting Artist in 2001
and 2002, he taught the university’s first course in virtual
reality for artists. He also developed and taught a course in Interactive
Multimedia from 1999–2003. A grant from Northwestern’s
Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts helped him to
develop VR performance artworks and software. With the support of
the journal Leonardo, Hertz is curating an exhibition of pioneering
computer graphics for the Block Museum at Northwestern University,
for April 2006. He supports his art habit with a day job designing
networked multimedia applications for the Collaboratory Project
at Northwestern University, where he is currently working with a
terabyte astronomical database in a project funded by the National
Science Foundation.
Hertz spent many years in Spain producing
paintings, music, and intermedia performance works with traditional
media. He earned his MFA degree at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, where he began to develop digital intermedia works as
a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Art and Technology.
His work has been exhibited in various international new media festivals
and conferences.
Stephen Dembski has been
writing music for public performance for three decades. Recognized
by major awards from the NEA, the Howard Foundation, and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, that music has been described by the
NYTimes in terms of "the sensuous, ecstatic quality
of late Romanticism" even while the London Telegraph
detects in it "a pedigree reaching back to Ravel." Lately,
he's worked increasingly as a conductor with ensembles of improvising
musicians; the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD called his Sonotropism
(Music and Arts) "an exquisite piece of chamber jazz."
Recent premieres of his concert music have taken place in New York,
Florence, Bologna, Prague, and Madison, where for a long time (following
a checkered career of gainful employment) he has managed the graduate
composition program at the University of Wisconsin. Dividing his
time between Madison and New York, where he works with a variety
of musical organizations, he's currently working on an interactive
installation of sources of sound and light, and on an opera entitled
Crow Soup, with a libretto written for him by the classic
surrealist painter, author, and sculptor, Leonora Carrington.
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