Art on the Wall Virtual Gallery
Featured Artist Ron Herrema
October 1-31, 2010
Dancing Wu Wei
Click image below to view exhibit
Dancing Wu Wei is offered as an audiovisual ambience of contemplation and meditation. It is meant to be an experience that evolves but is not goal-oriented or demanding, and its sense of movement is informed by my personal experience of Tai Chi, Chi Gong, and meditation. Both sound and graphics are ‘generative’, which means that what occurs flows from the computational following of a simple set of rules and is somewhat different each time the process is initiated.
For all these reasons I have connected the work with Wu Wei, the Taoist concept referring to 'effortless doing'. Effortless doing is also one way of thinking about dreaming, as is the evolution of richly textured, non-goal-oriented actions. I am thus delighted to have Dancing Wu Wei included in the 15th Annual Dream Festival and hope that all dreamers can find a comfortable dreaming place within it.
Ron Herrema - Biography
Ron Herrema is a composer, teacher and researcher working at De Montfort University’s Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre in Leicester, England. He is a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan and received his PhD in composition (2001) from Michigan State University, where he studied with Mark Sullivan, Charles Ruggiero, and Jere Hutcheson. He has also studied with Gerard Pape and Julio Estrada at the Center for Computer Music Iannis Xenakis in Paris.
He composes both acoustic and electroacoustic music, specializing in algorithmic composition and in interdisciplinary approaches to music composition. In recent years he has also been creating photographic art and generative graphics, and his account of his formation as a photographic artist will appear in a forthcoming issue of Visual Studies. His other writing and presentations have focused on the relationship between music and architecture, on music technology and politics, and on the evolving relationship between composers and programming.
His solo CD ‘Changing Weights’ is available through Capstone Records, and his compositions have been played internationally in concerts presented by such organizations as the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, ABC Classic Radio, Sonic Arts Network, Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, the International Computer Music Association, the Society for Electroacoustic Music in Sweden, the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the United States, blip, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Society of Composers, Inc, and Cathedral, among others.
