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World premiere Morton Subotnick's Until Spring Revisited Thursday, February 10 at 8pm Peter Norton Symphony Space (Leonard Nimoy Thalia) New York City Morton Subotnick's Until Spring Revisited is performed by Subotnick and Miguel Frasconi on three laptop computers. The performance is based on the idiosyncratic vocabulary of pulsating and sculpting gestures that the composer has developed during the last 40 years. Subotnick's software interprets the position, speed, and gestural quality of the mouse movement, as well as which keys are pressed and when they are pressed, and translates that information into musical variation and spatial motion. Two large-scale video screens, one on each side of the stage, display the hands of the two performers manipulating keyboard and mouse. At the same time, Sue Costabile, photographer and light artist, improvises a video performance using a laptop, lightpad and digital video camera to build abstract, layered worlds of light and texture out of hand-painted papers, photographs and fabrics. Until Spring Revisited marks Subotnick's first live performance of a full evening-length work of surround sound and projected images that together create an immersive audio and visual experience. Interview with Sue Costabile EMF: How did you get involved in digital video composition? SC  I became interested in photography when I was about 8 years old because of my grandmother and father. Over the years this evolved into an exploration of digital video as technology became readily available. In the late 90's I was encouraged and inspired by alot of my electronic musican friends to try some live video performances and I eventually developed a technique that I could improvise with: using a live camera to film photographs and drawings in real-time. This ability to improvise made performing much more interesting to me and now I am constantly striving to express my emotions about music through my visual compositions. EMF  How did your imagery fit Mort's music? SC  I think the nature of my imagery has an inherent resonance with Mort's aesthetic so there wasn't that much fitting that had to be done. I think the audience is probably better equipped to answer this question but from my perspective I was having a visual dialogue with the music, sometimes mimicing it, sometimes answering it, sometimes ignoring it, sometimes trying to lead it. EMF  How would you describe your sense of image and color? SC  My sense of image is very abstract and textural, often minimal and lately quite dark, a bit creepy even. There is an organic quality to everything since all the motion is a result of my hand movements. I work very closely to the lense so I can quite drastically change the amount of light that the camera sees, this is the main dynamic element. Color to me is secondary, an accent to light. It is for me most effective to use color in a subtle way and my color palette is generally earthy and desaturated. EMF  How do you do it? SC  I have a light pad normally used for looking at slides that provides a really even, soft source of light with a slight blue hue to it. On top of this I move photographs, hand-made papers, line drawings, watercolors and various found objects that are translucent. I also use a very small, bright white led to reflect light off of shiny surfaces. There is a firewire camera very close to these objects that goes directly into the computer where a Jitter patch composites video buffers together with the live feed. The resulting image is dependent upon the time that has elapsed between the video buffers and the live feed, the means of compositing the images and individual manipulation of each buffer. I build up layers in the computer with the buffers and also in physical space with objects stacked ontop of each other. EMF  What are your plans for the future? SC  To continue performing and to develop similarly themed light sculptures that don't require a live concert setting to experience. |||

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