Interview with Audiovisual Performance Group Fan Letters
Handmade electronic instruments. Generative video. Violin. Max/MSP. The group Fan Letters combines different media to create their audiovisual compositions. Fan Letters is a collaboration between video artist Alex Nathanson and musician Dylan Neely. We are very excited that they will be performing at the Artificial Retirement opening reception. Using found materials and video, their two new pieces explore the themes of malfunction, error, and mechanization.
Alex Nathanson is an artist, curator, and educator whose work spans video, sound, performance, and interaction design. His work has been featured at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, USA), Anthology Film Archives (New York, USA), La MaMa (New York, USA), Dome of Visions (Copenhagen, Denmark), and the Art Prospect Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia), among other venues. He is a long-term artist-in-residence at Flux Factory.
Dylan Neely is a composer and music supervisor whose projects include electroacoustic violin performance, opera, sound installation, and various multimedia collaborations. A Fulbright Fellow, Dylan has participated in residencies through The Watermill Center, SiMN, The New York Youth Symphony, Flux Factory, mpa-B, and highSCORE, with performances at venues including Symphony Space, The Museum of the Moving Image, Issue Project Room, Lincoln Center Film Society, The Stone, MoMA PS1, and La MaMa.
When and how did you start working together?
We met in college in 2006, but started collaborating together for what would eventually become Fan Letters in early 2012. Alex had begun working with performative/live video a couple years prior and was developing a video that he thought would pair nicely with Dylan’s music.
How do you begin a new composition? Do you usually start with music or visuals?
Every piece is different. Some pieces will start with concrete musical or visual ideas, but we may also begin by thinking about specific technologies, concepts, or performance contexts. The construction of our work is highly collaborative both in the ways we compose the work, but also in our willingness to trust or critique each other’s aesthetic decisions.
What attracted you to the open call?
We had already been thinking about two new pieces that were exploring similar themes as the show, so it seemed like a perfect fit.
What should the audience expect at your performance on Friday?
That’s a difficult question to answer, because we’d like to leave space for audience interpretation without prescribing too much. Perhaps, just that these two pieces both explode tiny indeterminacies within the pursuit of larger structures. We’re looking forward to presenting them, and we hope the pieces are engaging for audience members.
Artificial Retirement opens August 19th at Flux Factory with an opening reception at 6pm. Performances by Byron Rich and Heather Brand, Niki Passath, and Fan Letters start at 7pm. AR is a Flux Factory major exhibition.
