Wind in the Trees

source: artsmitedu

Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations have been presented internationally including at MASS MoCA, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Biennial of Sydney, the Cartier Foundation, Paris and in many public spaces. Vitiello is an Associate Professor in the department of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
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source: 12kcom

“Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, collaborating with such artists as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler and Dara Birnbaum. In 1999 he was awarded a studio for six months on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center�s Tower One, where he recorded the cracking noises of the building swaying under the stress of the winds after Hurricane Floyd. As an installation artist, he is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment.” Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain catalog for the exhibition Ce qui arrive/Unknown Quantity, 2002

CD releases include The Gorilla Variations, a collaboration with Molly Berg (12k), Box Music, a collaboration with Machinefabriek (12k), Listening to Donald Judd (Sub Rosa), Scratchy Monsters, Laughing Ghosts (New Albion Records), Buffalo Bass Delay (Hallwalls), Scanner/Vitiello (Audiosphere/Sub Rosa), Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Scratchy Marimba (Sulphur UK/Sulfur USA), Light of Falling Cars (JDK Productions) and Uitti/Vitiello (JDK Productions) and 17:48 from the Texas Gallery (Texas Gallery).

Recent solo exhibitions include Museum 52, London, The Project NY, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, The Project, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include the 2006 Bienale of Sydney, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Ce qui arrive at the Cartier Foundation, Paris, curated by Paul Virilio, Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest, also at The Cartier Foundation. Previous exhibitions include Greater New York at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, and a solo exhibition at the Texas Gallery, Houston, TX. In 1999, Stephen Vitiello was awarded a 6-month WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. The residency resulted in a site-specific sound installation that has been broadcast and exhibited internationally.

In 1999, Stephen Vitiello created music for White Oak Dance Project’s See Through Knot, choreographed by John Jasperse and featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY.

New media productions include work for the Internet, Sound Archive 7.01-7.31.01 for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with The Walker Art Center and ZKM and Tetrasomia, for the Dia Center for the Arts. In July 2000, Dia Center for the Arts published the CD-ROM Fantastic Prayers, a collaborative work with artist Tony Oursler, writer Constance DeJong, and composer Stephen Vitiello.

Past performances include The Tate Modern, London, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Kitchen,NYC, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, and participation in per/Son, Cologne, Germany—a concert series of solo and collaborative pieces also featuring Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, Frances Marie-Uitti and Andres Bosshard. Per/SON was broadcast by WDR radio’s Studio Akustische Kunst program.

In addition to music based work, Vitiello directed the videos Light Reading(s) (Visual Display), Nam June Paik: SeOUL NyMAx Performance, 1997 – Dress Rehearsal and The Last Ten Minutes and Nam June Paik: Two Piano Concerts 1994/1995. He also produced the audio CD, Nam June Paik: Works 1958-1979 (Sub Rosa) and a number of archival CDs from the archives of The Kitchen in NYC, published by Orange Mountain Music.

As a Media Curator, he organized the Sound Art component to the Whitney Museum’s exhibition The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000, Young and Restless a video program for the Museum of Modern Art and New York, New Sounds, New Spaces at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon.

Over the last 20 years he has collaborated with such musicians as Scanner, Pauline Oliveros, Frances-Marie Uitti, Andrew Deutsch, Machinefabriek and Yasunao Tone and visual artists including Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Joan Jonas and Eder Santos.

Stephen Vitiello is currently an Associate Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
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source: allmusic

A sound artist based in New York City, Stephen Vitiello started in music as an electric guitarist. His encounter with video artist Nam June Paik propelled him into a different world. Collaborations with Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, and Frances-Marie Uitti helped him gain recognition, but he is mostly known for his photocell recordings of the World Trade Center, for which he enjoyed (although the word seems out of place) some media attention following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Vitiello’s career trajectory is quite peculiar. He began to play guitar in punk bands in 1978 — he was 14 years old. When in college, he studied literature and plastic arts. Around 1988, he got a job at an arts center and developed a successful career curating video- and sound-art exhibitions in the U.S. Meanwhile, his quotidian contact with visual artists transformed his approach to music, and he moved to post-punk and later art pop bands. Nam June Paik, whom he met in 1991, had a particular influence. For him, Vitiello shot video, devised sound systems, and became his assistant for various projects. This relationship culminated in the production of the Sub Rosa CD Works 1958-1979 from tapes unearthed by Vitiello, who had access to the artist’s archives.

Vitiello began to experiment with guitar and electronics, finally focusing on the physical properties of sound, while keeping loose ties with rock (recordings with the Poetics and shows with She Never Blinks). His first works were collaborations with filmmakers and video artists. Enredando As Pessoas was the soundtrack to a Brazilian film; Chairs Not Stairs collected installation music. His first album of stand-alone music was the 1997 The Light of Falling Cars. In 1998, Vitiello participated in the per->SON festival in Cologne, where he performed on-stage with Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, and Frances-Marie Uitti. This event yielded a series of collaborations, from an album of minimal techno on Scanner’s label Sulphur (Scratchy Marimba, 2000) to a 3″ CD in duet with Uitti (Uitti/Vitiello, 1999).

The Light of Falling Cars garnered encouraging reviews and more people were finally getting interested in his music. Meanwhile, he kept a high art-related profile. In 1999, Vitiello was offered a residency at the World Trade Center. For weeks, he set up photocells to record the “view” from the 91st floor and translate them through algorithms into synthesized music. The material served as the basis for Bright and Dusty Things, an album released only a few months before the towers crashed. In the meantime, he had presented his first solo sound-art exhibitions in Houston and New York. Vitiello continues to perform in Rebecca Moore’s group, his only remaining link to the rock realm.