The poverty that dominates Brazil's Northeast interior is apparent in the images Batsry recorded in the town of Iguatu, on the set of a new (yet untitled) film by Karim Ainouz (Madame Satã). But the people shown are not reduced to their economic and social circumstances. The Yellow Line is one part in an ongoing cycle of works that originate from material shot by Batsry on the sets of three Brazilian feature films.

The first in the cycle, Set, a multi-channel video installation and architectural outdoor projection was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2003-2004. "(Ms. Batsry) displays an unusual ability to draw rich pictorial, symbolic and poetic resonances from the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and she shows a sure grasp of the inextricable unity of form and content, or structure and meaning, that is scarce in contemporary art." -- Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 1/9/2004.

The second, Through the Looking, an exhibition including installations, video and photography was recently shown at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

The Yellow Line: produced by Irit Batsry Studio; curated with Montgomery Knott and Karyn Riegel.

Irit Batsry is the recipient of the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award in 2002. She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1992) and the Grand Prix of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001). Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries including shows at the National Gallery (Washington), the National Film Theater and the ICA (London), Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio). These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here), her feature length work, was recently acquired and screened by The MoMA (New York).

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John Arroyo: Eingen Rhythm Software
Using machine learning statistical analysis a rhythmic synthesizer
was created. It is a rhythm composer of sorts that is trained instead
of user programmed. The end result is an intelligent groove box where
interpolations of the seed rhythms are possible to generate in real-
time. Each of the seed rhythms is automatically extracted and
projected into a space, the user can then move around in this space
and morph one rhythm into the next. More intelligent instruments are
on the drawing board...moving towards a new paradigm in music
software synthesis.
http://www.rhythmicresearch.com

Jeff Han: Multi-Touch Interaction Research
While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact,
multi-touch systems enables a user to interact with a system with
more than one finger at a time, allowing for the use of both hands
along with chording gestures. These kinds of interactions hold
tremendous potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and
intuitiveness. Multi-touch systems are inherently also able to
accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful
for collaborative scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.
We've developed a new multi-touch sensing technique that's
unprecedented in precision and scalability, and I will be
demonstrating some of our latest research on the new sorts of
interaction techniques that are now possible.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch

John Huntington: Synchronizing Live Performance with Musical Time
Modern entertainment and show control systems run in many different
ways, but are often used in a linear mode, where all the elements of
a show are locked to a fixed time base (and the time base is often
linked to some linear media). For example, a prerecorded video might
be played in a live show, and lighting and sound cues might then be
programmed to trigger at precise times, down to the video frame. This
approach is cost-effective and relatively easy to program, but, of
course, the actors, dancers, musicians and other performers have to
synchronize themselves to this pre-determined, rigid clock structure,
and this severely limits the performance. Even with those
limitations, however the majority of media-synchronized live shows
today sacrifice flexibility in order to gain precision and control,
and execute all lighting, video and other cues from a rigid clock.
Professor John Huntington and Dr. David B. Smith, colleagues at NYC
College of Technology's Entertainment Technology department, believe
that that the technology should track the performers, not the other
way around, and this is the focus of our research into the use of
Musical Time as a synchronization source. Music runs on "musical" or
"metric" time, where the musician or conductor has total control over
the tempo, down to a beat level. Unlike linear time, Musical Time can
slow down or speed up, allowing the music to respond to the actions
of singers and other performers.

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