Miwa Matreyek

Premiered January of 2020 at REDCAT in Los Angeles and New Frontiers at Sundance Film Festival.

Winner of Golden Nica award for Computer Animation, Prix Ars Electronica 2020

https://ars.electronica.art/prix/en/winners/computer-animation/

Please see this event page for touring updates:

http://www.semihemisphere.com/events/2020/1/3/2020-spring-updates

Further pushing her signature technique of layered projections, Miwa Matreyek creates an emotional, dream-like meditation on climate catastrophe and the Anthropocene - the proposed current era where human influence has effected almost all realms of earth’s natural systems. Miwa’s shadow traverses macro and micro scales, as her silhouette shape-shifts to experience the world from various perspectives. An earth overflowing with trash. A person drowning in a plastic-filled ocean. A school of fish caught in a trawling net. The work will be an emotionally impactful, embodied illustration of news headlines we see every day, and the complex harm humanity causes to the world – and what it might mean for all of us; humanity, as well as other life, and the earth itself — to be living in this changing world.

This project is supported by a 2019 Princess Grace Foundation Special Projects Grant.

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All music for Infinitely Yours Composed, recorded and performed by Morgan Sorne

www.sorne.com

soundcloud.com/sorne

The songs are from an avant garde opera composed by Sorne titled, "House of Stone," spanning six albums and composed using Sorne's five octave vocal range, self-made instruments and objects found within his house between 2006 and 2016.

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Jury statement from Prix Ars Electronica

Jury Statement:

Merging live performance, sculpture, and animation, Infinitely Yours depicts an all too familiar world drowning in the by-product of material abundance. Miwa Matreyek physically places her body at the center of this mess, navigating a kinetic journey through natural and man-made infrastructure that, like any memorable journey, is best experienced firsthand. Forefronting vaudevillian and pre-cinematic animation alongside late 20th century music video and installation art, Matreyek invokes a timeless yet assuredly timely collage of media history. The central axis of this piece is what’s at stake. Engaging the shadow of her whole body in the images, she invites us to see it is never objectified. Contrasting a materialist conception of the world in which capitalism plays a major role in the objectification of women’s bodies, her presence feels radical. Mired in mountains of garbage, the female body struggles and detaches itself both metaphorically and visually. Infinitely Yours finds a curious glow at the heart of environmental calamity, offering no simple answers. This salient work lingers in the imagination as both a banner for action and a recipe for magic.

https://ars.electronica.art/prix/en/winners/computer-animation/

This World Made Itself is a multimedia live performance work combining projected animation and the artist's own shadow silhouette, as she interacts with the fantastical world of the video, merging film and theater to create a unique kind of spectacle. This World Made Itself is a visually and musically rich journey through the history of the earth, from the universe's epic beginnings to the complex world of humanity. The piece is at once semi-scientific (like flipping through a children's encyclopedia), and emotional, surreal, and dream-like.

Please check out the events section for news for upcoming shows

This World Made Itself is made with support from Creative Capital and Princess Grace Foundation Special Project Grant.

Music by Flying Lotus, Careful (aka Eric Lindley), and Mileece

please see this page for music links

notable performances: MOMA (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Future of StoryTelling Summit (New York, NY), Meta.Morph (Trondheim, Norway), Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), Walker (Minneapolis, MN), Wexner (Columbus, OH), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), ICA (Boston, MA), Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL), Anima Mundi (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Sundance film festival (Park city, UT),  Museum für Gestaltung Schaudepot (Zurich, Switzerland) and more... see full CV/presentation history

This piece is a live performance with projected animation. The artist's shadow is constantly present in this piece from beginning to end - sometimes in semi close-up and sometimes as a full figure - as the world around her shifts and transforms. Her shadow becomes an integral part of her own fantastical animation worlds, as she traverses oceanscapes, cityscapes, and domestic spaces to conjure dreamlike scenes with light and shadow.

This piece was premiered at TED Global 2010 in Oxford, England, and have since toured internationally to various festivals, theaters, and schools. Some of these include ISEA Conference (Albuquerque, NM), Anima Mundi (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), New Frontiers at Sundance FIlm Festival (Park City, UT), Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), TBA festival (Portland, OR), Theatre de la Cité (Paris, France), Animasivo (Mexico City, Mexico), City of Women (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Chilemonos! animation festival (Santiago, Chile), Vimeo festival (NY, NY), Le Forum des Images (Paris, France), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Today Art Museum (Beijing, China), S8 Peripheral Film Festival (a Coruña, Spain), Manipulate Puppetry Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland) among many more…

Created in 2010 with Special Projects Grant by Princess Grace Foundation, Seed Grant by Under the Radar Festival and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

Original music by Anna Oxygen, Caroline, and Mileece

Additional music by Mirah

see this page for music links

Please check out the events section for news for upcoming shows

notable performances: TEDGlobal 2010 (Oxford, UK), Sundance film festival (park CIty, UT), Houston Cinematic Arts festival (Houston, TX), Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), Theatre de la Cité (Paris, France), PUSH festival (Vancouver, Canada), and more… see full CV/presentation history

(I am not currently touring this piece)

With Dreaming of Lucid Living, Matreyek steps behind the screen as a shadow into the fantastical world of her own animation. 

Dreaming of Lucid Living was made as my thesis project for my MFA in Experimental Animation at CalArts.

Created with Support from the Princess Grace Award for Film (2007). Dreaming of Lucid Living won the Student Grand Prize at the Platform International Animation Festival in 2007

Music by Anna Oxygen and Miwa Matreyek

see this page for music links

Dreaming of Lucid Living has been shown at various festivals internationally - 

New Frontiers at Sundance FIlm Festival (Park City, UT), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), Platform International Animation Festival (Portland, OR), San Francisco International Film Festival (San Francisco, CA), First Works' Pixelerations at Brown University (Providence, RI), S8 Peripheral Film Festival (A Coruña, SPain), Questfest Visual Theater Festival (Baltimore, MD), Houston Cinematic Arts Festival (Houston, TX),  - among other places

Half Life

A lamentation of fierce urgency, the latest multimedia production from Cloud Eye Control is an imagistic, visceral work inspired by the nervous fear felt in the wake the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Half Life explores the psychological fallout of global disaster, and how it affects our emotions and imaginations. The Los Angeles-based collaborators— Miwa Matreyek, Anna Oxygen, and Chi-wang Yang —bring their signature mix of projected animation, live performance and music to summon the unseeable forces that govern our collective sense of personal safety and control.

Performance History

REDCAT, Los Angeles [World Premiere]

New Genre Art Festival, Tulsa

FirstWorks, Providence

SFMOMA

For touring and presentation inquiries, please contact us at cloudeyecontrol@gmail.com.

Half Life is funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project with lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the LEF Foundation; and The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Half Life is produced with Los Angeles Performance Practice, and was made possible in part by creative residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, CalArts Center for New Performance, and Duke University.

Original Production Credits

Miwa Matreyek: Director & Animation
Anna Oxygen: Music Composition & Direction
Chi-wang Yang: Director

A-ko:  Jenny Greer
B-ko: Anna Oxygen
Musicians: Robert Barber & David Scott Stone

Scene Design: Efren Delgadillo & Shannon Scrofano
Lighting Design: Christopher Kuhl
Video, Systems, and Sound Design:  Jackson Campbell
Sound Design & Pre Show Music: Robert Barber & David Scott Stone
Costume Design: Kate Fry
Technical Direction: Efren Delgadillo
Music Production: David Scott Stone & Anna Oxygen
Choreography: Jennie Liu
Additional Video Content & Video Operator: Daniel Jackson
Stage Manager: Kate Eipl

Produced with Miranda Wright & Los Angeles Performance Practice

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Assistant Technical Director: Matthew Kenichi Muranaga
Scenic Build Crew: Matt MacCready, Matthew Kenichi Muranaga
Costume Fabricators: Laura Brown, Eileen O’Brien, Leah Olbrich
Production Assistant: Nora King

Cloud Eye Control is a collaborative performance group from Los Angeles comprised of three CalArts alums: Chi-wang Yang, Miwa Matreyek, and Anna Oxygen. We are co-founders and co-directors of the group.

We create original works that uniquely combine media with live performance. Since our inception in 2004 we have created four original works that have been presented nationally and internationally.

Under Polaris confronts head-on the tension between primal nostalgia and modern technological optimism, in an expressive, playful capacity. In Under Polaris charts an epic journey across a vast arctic expanse — a sublime icy landscape illuminated under the ethereal lights of the Northern sky...or the cold quality of the projector beams...

In this piece, Anna is a hubristic scientist who distills the essence of all humanity and goes on a journey to preserve this "seed" in an Arctic Vault. (inspired by the seed bank in Svalbard Norway)  Anna must transform herself to survive in the Arctic landscape, until eventually she realizes that human fate is not in her hands.

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Under Polaris has shown at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), EXIT Festival (Paris, France), Fusebox festival (Austin), National Performance Network Conference (Knoxville, TN), New Genre Festival (Tulsa, OK), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (portland, OR), and Theater de Mil Festival (Santiago, Chile)

Under Polaris is a National Performance Network Creation Fund project co-commissioned by REDCAT, PICA and Leslie B. Durst. Created with support from the Princess Grace Foundation Special Project Award.

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purchase the music from Under Polaris

Older work from Cloud Eye Control

- Ocean Flight

- Subterranean Heart

- Final Space

All of these pieces have toured internationally

Ocean Flight was originally made in 2005 as a collaboration between Miwa Matreyek and Chi-wang Yang in our first MFA year, via the Center for Integrated Media. The piece is based on Bertolt Brecht, "Der Ozeanflug" about Charles Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic. This piece uses live-camera to capture a performer via video to be projected in the cinematic space of the projection. 

Already from this original collaboration, we were thinking about finding moments and interesting juxtaposition of body/space/media via experimentation and play, and about constantly changing the relationships of the media to the body and space throughout the piece.

Ocean Flight was later re-envisioned by Chi-wang Yang in 2009

Subterranean Heart was created in 2006 as a collaboration between Miwa Matreyek, Chi-wang Yang, and Anna (Oxygen) Huff. It is an original hyper-opera about a oppressed Miner (Anna) who falls ill and is herself mined for her resources, and within her, finds a diamond that is her voice. This piece takes on a playful tone, playing with the transformation of space (the two screens open up to reveal a door to enter her chest cavity, or a crystal cave inside of her heart.

Final Space was originally created in 2007 as a collaboration between Miwa Matreyek, Chi-wang Yang, and Anna (Oxygen) Huff. It tells the story of Anna who is over whelmed by the modern world and decides to go to  the moon to find solitude and quietness - but once there, she finds space has no air to support her, and she must find inner peace to find her grounding again.

Final Space was revisited in 2012

originally conceived to be shown in conjunction with Myth and Infrastructure, this installation project was put on hold and will be revisited in 2013.

A short film made as part of an artist residency at California Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, August 2020.

https://www.calbg.org/events-programs/artist-residency

Originally inspired by a visit to Mt Wilson Observatory, this film explores the human desire... and ultimately the whole earth's desire to find connection with the universe. Features the song Quite, by Careful. https://careful.bandcamp.com/track/quite

Panorama City

Originally made as an large scale triptych installation for a gala at the REDCAT, Panorama City was made as an atmospheric, textural video about the cycles of birth/construction and decay.

It was originally displayed at the REDCAT as a 60 ft wide panoramic video that were mirrored on opposing sides of the theater (the two videos had slight variation)

Digitopia was made as my first year short film at CalArts.

​a collection of old reels and short films from CalArts and earlier...

collection of collages made for fun - a lot of physical collages made from old magazines (mainly NatGeo) plus some digital collage, postcard design, etc.