The Night Bears (Japanese: YoruGuma)
performance, photography, puppetry, lighting, video
2011-15
The Night Bears was my collaborative project with Daniel Munkus, Sophia Remolde, and an extended group of artists that was active in New York City, Sparta/Athens, Greece; and Tokyo/Osaka, Japan from 2011-15. Projects ranged from multimedia theater & dance performance to photography, puppetry, laser & lighting design, and video installation.
Working with themes of nanotechnology and the approaching technological singularity, we produced a large and diverse body of work in a few years of intense collaboration.
A whimsical Night Bears video: what we do, in a nutshell. Performance photos/video excerpts from: Meat&Light - a theatrical work utilizing long-exposure digital photography algorithms to create graphic novels interactively during live performance. The Red Room, NYC, 9/2012. Clytemnestra 3.0 (based on Charles Mee’s Agamemnon 2.0) - theatrical work utilizing motion capture to drive sound synthesis and laser illumination of live performers. with The Night Bears and the I.S.E. Ensemble. Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, Greece, 10/2012. Assumptions Made in the Dark - interactive performance in near-darkness. Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, 12/2011. Long-exposure photographs by Tim Hospodar. The Air Was Thick With Nanobots - a visual environment in a social space based on our "Nori/Noir" performance project. Commissioned by interior design technology company RAMENWERK. Dassara, Brooklyn, NYC, 1/2014.
Music: "Chiisana Inori" by Ritsuko Okazaki from "Fruits Basket" and "geese&static" by Daniel Munkus
More on The Night Bears. Music: "Easy (Remix)" by Emily Danger - www.emilydangerband.com