12 Nights: Where is Chopin? An intermedia concert
Saturday, 02/21/2015 – 02/21/2015 03:00 pm – 04:00 pm
Bakehouse Art Complex
561 NW 32nd St.,
Miami, Florida 33127
Webpage Link
Cost: $10; free with student ID

The 12 Nights Electronics and Music series welcomes Jarek Kapuscinski, an innovative intermedia composer.
Jarek Kapuscinski is an intermedia composer and pianist whose work has been presented at New York’s MOMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Reina Sofia Museum in Marid, among others. He has received awards at the UNESCO Film sur l’Art festival in Paris, VideoArt Festival Locarno, and FNCNM in Montréal. He was first trained as a pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and expanded into multimedia during studies at the University of California, San Diego (1992-1997). Currently, he is Assistant Professor of composition and intermedia at Stanford University.
 
Kapuscinski is a musician, but his music is audiovisual. “It is made of sounds and images and more importantly with their relationship over time. I am interested in the emergent in-between – the intermedia,” says Kapuscinski. His pieces indeed emerge from the formalization of the elemental and the pure. “The piece is finished not when there is nothing more that I can add but rather, when there is nothing left to be removed. “ He believes in a thoughtful process of elimination of non-essential elements, aspiring to achieve a transparent and spacious form, that can generate complex emotional response. It is through the synthesis of complexity and simplicity that the stepping stone narratives (made of simple, haiku-like moments) mediate a rich experience. Kapuscinski is not shy to express positive feelings of joy, love, wholeness, goodness and transcendence. “I embrace everyday, familiar emotions and musical language that invokes them. There is richness and profoundness to be found in the common and seemingly simple.”
 
The program presents a retrospective of Kapuscinski’s works. It stretches from Mondrian Variations, an early work that defined my interest in composing with sounds and images both conceived simultaneously, “painted on a single canvas” to Where is Chopin a recent fascination with micro-expressions in faces of people from around the world as they listen to music. The first one was a result of rather solitary process while the latter involved travel to 12 different countries and private one on one sessions with over 150 people.  Each of the works has a rich story of its making. Having no space (or time) for that, I can probably say just a few words about the creative interests that unite them all.