News

“MO-SO,” a new multimedia work combining the dramatic video art of Kasumi with the powerful music of Fang Man, comes to Northeast Ohio after its premiere at EMPAC in New York last month. The piece, accompanied by a live electronics and chamber orchestra, will be shown on Saturday, October 30, at 8pm and Sunday, October 31, at 4pm on the 30-foot screen of the Kulas Musical Arts Building’s Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin-Wallace College.

What crosses your mind in the slow, last moments of your life? Kasumi, a professor in the T.I.M.E.-Digital Arts department at The Cleveland Institute of Art, uses traditional and modern media to imagine the complex processes of the human brain. “MO-SO,” she says, “is an otherworldly elegy to the dying—where memory and sensation collide with the dreamlike mystery of galaxies moving through space, sparking an ultimate visionary experience.”

Earlier this month the video-sharing website Vimeo announced that Kasumi’s work “BREAKDOWN the video” won the Remix category in the inaugural 2010 Vimeo Awards. In addition, Kasumi has taken a sabbatical this year to focus on multiple projects around the country. Her work QUADRASCOPE premiered with The Cleveland Orchestra in April 2010, and "Panoptical Delusions" was featured at the 2010 Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland this September. And Aardvark, an indie film she executive produced, will have its American premiere at the AFI Festival the week of November 4.

Kasumi is internationally celebrated as one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound, and video in live performance. She has won global acclaim for her richly expressive and compelling compositions in venues worldwide: from Lincoln Center with The New York Philharmonic to collaborations with Grandmaster Flash and DJ Spooky. She has performed and exhibited new work at Carnegie Hall in concert with the American Composers Orchestra, at Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart, and at the Chroma Festival de Arte Audiovisual in Guadalajara, Mexico.