Film

  • Sendai Transmissions
  • GRANTEE
    Gene Coleman
    GRANT YEAR
    2013

Gene Coleman, Sendai Transmissions (spiral studies with score), 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Sendai Transmissions is a film and new media composition based on the architecture of the Sendai Mediatheque, a building designed by Toyo Ito. The work incorporates video projections of architecture, experimental and traditional Japanese music, and real-time telecast performance. The work’s initial form will be a live performances featuring multiple-screen video projections, Japanese instruments, and electronic sound, which will create an immersive sensory environment for the audience. Sendai Transmissions takes interdisciplinary practice in new directions, using Ito's building as a "text" to create an experience that blurs the lines between architecture, music, and cinema.

Gene Coleman is a composer and director. He is the recipient of the 2013 Berlin Prize in Music Composition and has created over fifty compositions for various instrumentation and media. Since 2001, his work has focused on global culture and music's relationships with architecture, video, and dance. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, as well as musician Robert Snyder. He has been a composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (Fall 2011); the Shofuso House in Philadelphia (2009); the Westwerk in Hamburg (2007); the Taipei Artists Village (2007); the Irtijal Festival in Beirut (2005); the Takefu Music Festival (2002); and in Tokyo, on a Japan–US Fellowship (2001). Many international organizations have commissioned and presented his music and film work, including: Konzerthaus Wien; the Japan Society; the Ernst von Siemens Foundation; Phace Contemporary Music; I-House Philadelphia; MoMA; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Maerzmusik Festival; and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.