St. Augustine, Fla. – Two new media artists, a poet and an engineer have collaborated to create a 20-minute mix of live video, text, animation and sound that prompts audiences to consider what experiences are “live” and to reimagine their most familiar selves. The multi-disciplinary performance, by Matt Roberts, Dengke Chen, Terri Witek, alongside sound engineer Amandine Pras, is titled “implement for removing foreign bodies” and will be held at Flagler College’s Crisp-Ellert Art Museum on Friday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m., in conjunction with First Friday Art Walk.
Matt Roberts is a new media artist specializing in locative media, physical computing, augmented reality and real-time video performance. His work has been featured internationally, including exhibitions in Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, Italy, Mexico and nationally in New York, San Francisco, Miami and Chicago. In 2015, his collaboration Dream Garden, with poet Terri Witek, was performed at Orlando’s Art in Odd Places, and has since been featured through the United States and abroad, in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Manizales, Colombia; Porto and Lisbon, Portugal; and Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee. In May 2016, Roberts was nominated for the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art by the Orlando Museum of Art, where his work was also on view. Roberts received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently an associate professor of Digital Art at Stetson University, in DeLand, Florida.
Dengke Chen’s creative art works involve 2-D and 3-D animation, illustration and augmented reality interaction. His work has been presented in festivals and exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and China. Chen received his bachelor’s degree in animation from China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and his MFA in New Media from Pennsylvania State University. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Creative Arts at Stetson University.
Terri Witek is the author of five books of poems, most recently “Body Switch.” Her poetry often traces the breakages between words and images, and has been included in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has collaborated with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes since 2005; their works together include museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. Collaborations with Roberts use augmented reality technology for smart phones to poetically map cities and have been featured in Manizales (Colombia), Glasgow, Vancouver, Lisbon, Miami, Santa Fe and Orlando. Witek is the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University, where she directs their undergraduate Creative Writing program, and with Lopes teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas.
For further information on the exhibition and related programs, please visit the website at www.flagler.edu/crispellert, or contact Julie Dickover at 904-826-8530 or [email protected]. The museum’s hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
