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Kasumi 

is a Cleveland-based video/sound artist whose interdisciplinary activities have included professional activities as a concert musician, exhibiting painter, published writer, theatrical designer, and film producer.

© Phil Kibbe

 

Kasumi is one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound and video in live performance. She has won global acclaim for her work in venues worldwide: from Lincoln Center with The New York Philharmonic to collaborations with Grandmaster Flash, DJ Spooky and Modeselektor. She performed at Wuerttembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart and at the Chroma Festival de Arte Audiovisual in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work, BREAKDOWN, premiered at Carnegie Hall in concert with the American Composers Orchestra. She was awarded an EMPAC Dance Movies Commission 2009-2010 by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

 

Her film The Free Speech Zone, cited in The Encyclopedia of Underground Movies, was featured at the Nemo Festival at the Forum des Images in Paris, the Milano Film Festival, Expresion en Corto, Mexico City, and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival where it won First Prize. The Stuttgarter Nachricten described her work as "a modern age version of Francesco Goya's Disasters of War”.

 

Her work has been screened at festivals in Iran, the Slovak Republic, Turkey, Japan, Korea, Romania, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Holland, France, England, the US and Canada, and at distinguished institutions including Muzeul Florean, Romania; Itau Cultural Center, Sao Paulo; The Butler Institute of American Art; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; San Diego Museum of Art; Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires; Anthology Film Archives among others and has received the Adriano Asti Award for Best Experimental Film at Montecatini Terme Short Film Festival, Italy; Director's and Program Staff Citation at the Black Maria Film Festival; the Seoul Film Festival's Special Jury Award; IFP Chicago's Best Experimental Film award and many others.

 

Source: Vimeo

 

 

Why she's interesting... An experimental media artist and Cleveland Institute of Art professor, Kasumi has traveled the world creating groundbreaking installations. BREAKDOWN the video, a piece she compiled from thousands of public domain film clips, won a 2010 Vimeo award for best remix.

 

The tools of her trade... Kasumi paints on film, uses Sharpies to scribble on celluloid and employs dancers, the electric guitar and emerging technology in her work. "Because no one's done it before, because it's so, like, What is she doing?, I can work comfortably in so many different realms. My work isn't in a compartment. It can't be classified because it's still growing."

 

Kasumi, the creation... "My mother was an artist — really, very experimental, using found objects. My father was literally a rocket scientist. I have both those things that made me at least not fear technology."

 

Source: Cleveland Magazine

 

 

Kasumi, found footage, choreography

Reading

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture (2006) edited by D-Fuse. A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term denoted the presenter who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and in sync to music, whether at dance clubs and raves or art galleries and festivals. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this dynamic audio-visual experience. (Laurence King Publishing)

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SEE ALSO

Hexstatic is a UK music duo, consisting of Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson, that specializes in creating "quirky audio visual electro." Formed in 1997 after Hill and Brunson met while producing visuals at the Channel Five launch party, they decided to take over for the original members of the Ninja Tune multimedia collective Hex that had disbanded around the same time. They soon collaborated with Coldcut for the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, including the critically acclaimed A/V single Timber. (Wikipedia)

Paul Sharits (2008) edited by Yann Beauvais. Known primarily for his experimental cinema and pictorial works, Paul Sharits developed an oeuvre that evolved around two central themes: one, closely related to music and the world of abstraction, the other, within the psychological and emotional arena of the figurative. This complete monograph, drawn from a recent exhibition, explores the connections between these two practices, and in addition provides a general introduction to a remarkable body of work. Illustrated throughout, the monograph also includes several essays, texts by Paul Sharits and interviews. (les presses du réel)

Funkstörung: The Zoo (2004) - Zeitguised's interpretation of The Zoo by Funkstörung is a lighthearted piece that affirmates the facility of synthetic constructions against the heavy, serious notion of established constructions, including CG's own means of photorealism. (Zeitguised)

Visual Kitchen explores the semantics of live AV performance and video art from a background of VJ’ing and music video production. As designers of moving images, VK adapts any kind of (non-)narrative structure into dazzling trips of visual flux, combining rigorously structured loops with soft- or hardware-generated chaos. The output is very diverse and versatile, from analogue photographic to digital minimalism, exploring the parameters of the canvas. (Visual Kitchen)

VJing (2010) is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article VJing, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010 and was produced as a physical outcome of the wiki-sprint, a collaborative writing workshop that was held 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva. (Greyscale Press)