Jeremy Stewart is an electronic musician, video artist, and programmer based in Boston, MA. After graduating with a degree in Jazz Composition from the prestigious Berklee College of Music, he worked for three years at Bennington College, where he taught courses in music theory, improvisation, and electronic music. His musical work frequently includes acoustic and computer musicians working side by side, often exploring original notation systems that push performers to improvise and interact in unfamiliar ways. As a video artist and programmer, he is interested in designing systems that interact with users’ movements to create environments that encourage exploration and play. Stewart’s current work stems from his recent project recording, analyzing, reinterpreting, and visualizing contact improvisations between professional dancers, and involves an audio/visual interactive environment that responds to touch and contact between observers. Stewart is currently pursuing an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at RPI in Troy, NY.

 

Project title:

Study: Unsustainable // Qualities

The characteristic I would most associate with bodily time is the unsustainable. Nothing in the body can be sustained indefinitely without qualities.” — William Forsythe

Featuring four professional dancer / choreographers, this project is alook at the imperfections of the human body; the way that eachperformer’s movement changes, evolves, and develops over the course of an hour, highlighting the unsustainable, and bringing about new qualities.

Each performer created a brief movement sequence (approx 15 – 90 seconds in length), which they then performed without pause for one hour.

This 4-channel video installation is a presentation of the raw video of each performance simultaneously, allowing for the observation of the slight changes in each iteration, while bringing all four bodies together in a contrapuntal performance — at times in tight harmony and at others in obvious dissonance.

Following my previous and ongoing work in the design of interactive digital systems for dance performance, this piece is a retaliatio against the frequent and flawed goal of creating the same performance time after time.

Audio is a stereo mix of the recorded sound of each performance..