Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an artist talk and screening with New York-based artist C. Spencer Yeh, whose interdisciplinary art bridges projects in sound composition, improvisational performance, and experimental video. In this special hybrid event, which launches EAI's distribution of his moving image work, Yeh will explore the relationship of music and video in his art.

Yeh will screen several video works, including Scrub Study and Eclipse (both 2009), which acclaimed musician and composer Nate Wooley will accompany live. The evening will also feature a special "listening" premiere of Yeh's forthcoming LP, Solo Voice I - X, to be released by Primary Information this spring. This will be followed by a conversation between Yeh, Primary Information's James Hoff, and EAI's Director of Distribution Rebecca Cleman.

Invoking such influences as video art, sound poetry, and musique concrète, the event will highlight Yeh's abstracting of sound and image composition, and his use of technique and instrumentation to emphasize formal dimensions over performative theatrics.

The videos Scrub Study and Eclipse integrate some of the heterogeneous instruments at Yeh's disposal, from computer editing software to his own voice. In Eclipse, an extreme close-up of Yeh's open mouth, superimposed in several layers and issuing a grating squall, resembles a celestial phenomenon. In Scrub Study, the staccato rhythm of a vocal performance by Yeh is extended to the visual staccato of "scrubbing," an editing term that refers to the process of skimming through footage for precise edit points. The representation of physical gesture in this piece occurs on both sonic and visual levels. Wooley's live accompaniment will emphasize Yeh's interest in the evolution of a gesture through different iterations, especially as that gesture is impacted by the mediation of technology, or improvisation in a collaborative live performance.

These works will compliment a previewing of excerpts from Solo Voice I - X, the first of Yeh's records to focus solely on the voice. By editing out the breaths from his studio recordings for this LP, Yeh creates a continuous vocalization. The effect, as described by Primary Information, is "an elision of phrasing as an element of both linguistic and musical convention, and an uncanny protraction of the voice into vast, hypnotic slurs."

Music videos created by Yeh for Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, and Jason Lescalleet will offer a more literal representation of the correlation of music and video, demonstrating Yeh's appropriation and re-assembling of cultural references, such as the lo-fi graphics of early 8-bit video games, clips from Hollywood movies, television commercials, and YouTube videos—another approach to abstracted composition.

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James Hoff is an artist living in New York City. His practice is varied and consists of performance, sound, writing, artists' books, and painting. He is the cofounder of Primary Information (with Miriam Katzeff) and No Input Books (with Daniel Snelson).

C. Spencer Yeh was born in 1975 in Taipei, Taiwan. He is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, composer and improviser, as well as his music project Burning Star Core. In 2009, Yeh's first solo exhibition, Standard Definition, was presented at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Yeh has toured and performed widely, and has recently presented work at the 2014 Liverpool Biennial; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Kinomuzeum at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; the Kunsthalle Stavanger, Norway; and in New York City at The Stone; The Kitchen; and ISSUE Project Room, among many other performances and presentations. He collaborated with Triple Canopy for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In Fall 2014 Yeh was featured in a Modern Mondays at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Recent recorded works include Ambient, with Robert Piotrowicz, 1975 (as C. Spencer Yeh), Transitions (as CS Yeh), and Wake Up Awesome, with Okkyung Lee and Lasse Marhaug. Yeh volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, and co-organized Spectacle?s participation in NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial (2014), at the Museum of Arts and Design. He is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine. Yeh is a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn. Yeh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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About Primary Information

Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists' books, artists' writings, out-of-print publications and editions. Since its founding in 2006 by James Hoff Miriam Katzeff, Primary Information has published facsimile editions of Avalanche Magazine, Allan Kaprow's "How to Make a Happening, Destroy All Monster's Magazine, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry and new publications by Elad Lassry, Lutz Bacher, Florian Hecker, Sarah Crowner, Cary Loren and Cameron Jamie, among others. Upcoming releases include a facsimile edition of Fantastic Architecture, an anthology of performance transcripts by Title TK, an artists book by Daren Bader, and a new record by C. Spencer Yeh.

About EAI

EAI is one of the world's leading resources for moving image art. Founded in 1971, EAI is a New York-based nonprofit organization that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of video and media art. EAI holds a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media artworks, from groundbreaking early video by pioneering figures of the 1960s to new digital projects by today's emerging artists. EAI works closely with artists, museums, schools and other venues worldwide to preserve and provide access to this significant archive. EAI also presents public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels; extensive digital resources; viewing access; technical facilities, and educational services. EAI's Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and features expansive materials on media art's histories and current practices: www.eai.org

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Electronic Arts Intermix
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
t (212) 337-0680
f (212) 337-0679
info@eai.org

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.