01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, September 29, 2005

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

PROVIDENCE -- When Walt Whitman titled one of his poems "I Sing the Body Electric," he meant it metaphorically, not literally. The "electricity" in question was a kind of life force or spiritual energy, not something that could fire up a drill or recharge a balky cell phone.

But for many artists and performers involved in Pixilerations v.2, the electronic-arts and new media component of this year's FirstWorksProv festival, "singing the body electric" is a pretty literal description of what they do. And they don't just sing: they also act, paint, dance and play the cello.

"It's getting to be a pretty big field," says Butch Rovan, an electronic-music composer and performer at Brown University and one of the organizers of Pixilerations v.2. "A few years ago, there were only a few arts festivals that really made an effort to include digital and new media people. Now there are a lot more outlets for artists working in sound, video and other electronic art forms."

Rovan, who's contributing a pair of live-performance sound and video pieces to Pixilerations v.2, is a case in point.

Two weeks ago, he was in Barcelona, Spain, presenting Hopper Confessions: Room in Brooklyn, an interactive composition inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Among other things, the piece featured a video montage created by Rovan's wife and frequent collaborator, Katherine Bergeron, and a live-music performance by German cellist Ulrich Maiss.

"It really changes each time it's performed," Rovan says. "The basic elements -- the video, the music, the spoken elements -- stay the same. But it changes depending on how the music is played."

Rovan says that he and Maiss will reprise their performance in Providence on Oct. 8.

"In European music circles, Ulrich Maiss is huge," Rovan says. "To have someone of his stature perform here is a major coup."

At tonight's opening session, Rovan will perform another interactive piece called Collide. Rovan describes the work, in which he manipulates sound and video elements with a special sensor-operated glove, as a homage to Surrealist artists such as painter Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Brunel.

"One of the hallmarks of Surrealism was the way it took seemingly unrelated things and put them together to make something new and strange," he says. ''Collide tries to replicate that using digital technology."

Dancing and drumming

In all, Pixilerations v.2 features works by about 40 artists working in a variety of computer- and electronic-based art forms.

Roughly half will be performed live over two nights -- tonight at 8 and Oct. 8 at 10 p.m. -- at the Pixilerations Gallery at 191 Westminster St.

The remainder of the pieces, including an array of sound, video and holographic installations, will be on display through Oct. 15 at the Pixilerations Gallery and the nearby Space at Alice gallery at 186 Union St.

In addition, both galleries are hosting free opening-night parties tonight from 5 to 8, with performances by Fusionworks Dance Company and West African drumming ensemble Timinandi.

"When we launched FirstWorksProv last year, one thing we really wanted to emphasize was new media and electronic art," says festival director Kathleen Pletcher. "Not only is it a very exciting field, but we have two of the best academic centers in Brown University's Modern Culture and Media department and RISD's new digital media program."

Brown, in fact, is taking the unusual step of allowing limited public access to the Cave, its state-of-the-art virtual-reality center at 180 George St. A selection of works created for the Cave will play continuously from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Oct. 8 and 9. (To visit the Cave, you must make advance reservations by calling [401] 863-2932.)

Brown, which boasts one of the country's top electronic music programs, is also well represented on the performance side of Pixilerations.

In addition to Rovan, tonight's lineup at the Pixilerations Gallery includes Kevin Patton, a Brown graduate student described by Rovan as "a phenomenal jazz guitarist," and Arvid Tomayko-Peters, a Brown undergraduate who's devised a number of digitally enhanced interactive instruments.

A virtual garden

Pixilerations' list of installation-based works is equally intriguing. Among the highlights are Light Garden, a holographic display by Boston-area artist Betsy Connors, and Cross Contours, a 10-minute computer music and animation piece by Northeastern University professor Dennis Miller.

Connors, who teaches at MIT, describes her work as a kind of virtual garden -- part natural, part technological.

"Basically, it's about the dialogue between the images, which are very natural, and the technology, which of course is manmade," Connors says. "It's not meant to be very polemical, at least not overtly. But it is supposed to get people thinking about the relationship between technology and the environment."

Miller, who's considered a leader in mixing music and computer animation, says his piece explores similarities between the two disciplines.

"As a composer, I'm used to dealing with rhythms, tempos and other time-based signatures," he explains. "One of the interesting things about animation is that it, too, is time-based. For me, it just seemed very natural to combine these two time-sensitive art forms and see how they developed."

Though it's not formally part of Pixilerations v.2, FirstWorksProv is also hosting a Nov. 4 appearance by performance-art pioneer Laurie Anderson. Anderson, who typically uses a Radio Shack's worth of high-tech gear in her live stage shows, will perform The End of the Moon, a multimedia piece inspired by her stint as an artist-in-residence for the NASA space program.

"In a sense, the Laurie Anderson performance brings us full circle," says Pletcher. "Where Pixilerations is really about cutting-edge uses of art and technology, Anderson shows how those elements can be incorporated into a performance that's more mainstream, though still artistically challenging."