IMD Forum for10/7/09: Julia Heyward
Speaker: Julia Heyward, independent artist
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 7, 6-8 pm
Location: Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
3131 S Figueroa Street (entrance on W 32nd St)
Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML), Room 201
Julia Heyward is currently working on a large scale triptych entitled collectively Nothing Random Access Memory. Part One: Miracles in Reverse, an interactive DVD-ROM, has been shown as a multimedia performance and an installation. Part Two: Points of View is an interactive installation of ‘faux windows.’ Part Three: The Gabriel Frequency is an installation as an electronic oracle. Nothing RAM looks at the nature and evolution of consciousness through our collective and subjective memories, mythologies and scientific theories. Nothing RAM is performative at times and ambient at others, but consistently travels between the personal and the global with a kind of slippery Jungian spirit, dipping reflexively into the collective unconscious, quantum theory, animism, neuroarcheology, science fiction and history. These quantum leaps find connections between the intentions of "local" crimes such as child abuse and "global" organized crimes such as war.
Julia Heyward's work centers around the orchestration of music, image and language, in the forms of multimedia, performance and new media. Heyward's No Local Stops won a 1984 BESSIE for Outstanding Performance of the Year. She has written, produced and performed in all of her multimedia works. Heyward's work includes music videos and pop television in the 80s, large-scale collaborative spectacles in the 90s, and interactive new media in the 21st century. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts. Heyward's work has been exhibited, presented and performed in museums, galleries, festivals and theaters throughout the world, including Lincoln Center in New York.
Heyward writes "Nothing RAM is the end product of a long evolutionary practice of merging multimedia, performance and new music. This process has led me to non-linear structures and interactive interfaces while retaining my cinematic aesthetic and deeply personal narrative. The ever-present aim in my work is to make multimedia, which speaks to and comes from the deepest internal reservoirs where fact and fiction, spirit and flesh, particle and wave mix and morph while simultaneously maintaining a fast connection to the outside world."