{Re}HAPPENING 12 Artist Lineup

Portal of Perception is an engaging and immersive audio-visual installation that utilizes a back-projection system with two screens to simulate a tunnel effect. This installation aims to captivate audiences by providing a unique and immersive experience through the combination of visual and auditory elements. The installation will be a walk-through tunnel-like structure, where participants can experience a mesmerizing journey through dynamic visuals and synchronized soundscapes. The illusion of depth will transport participants to an alternate reality within the confines of the installation.

Cilla Vee Life Arts presents The Rhizomatic Collective Unconscious Dreamcatcher, a performance sculpture installation that draws on the legacy of Anni Albers's weaving practice at BMC. This work explores the crucial networks and systems of unification and connection in the natural environment and in human society by comparing mycorrhizal fungi with the neural networks of the mind and our Collective Unconscious.

Drones in the Garden, founded by Lynn Fister (Farewell Phoenix), Sophie F. Hull (Sleep Number), and Patrick Kukucka (Falcon Mitts), will create an all-day immersive botanical installation entitled The Abandoned Garden Structures. Pyramidal structures covered with vegetation will serve as platforms for three experimental music performances interspersed with spoken word and poetry readings.

Choreographer, musician, and scholar Eric Mullis presents Technogenesis, an experimental dance trio inspired by Merce Cunningham and John Cage that merges aleatory techniques and digital software platforms to create unconventional choreography.

Swannatopia presents an immersive prismatic playground and color wheel simulator with choreographed movements and dance. Every hour, the performers will introduce a new playground prop, color combination exercise, and ambient track that will slowly transform the space into a full spectrum experience.

This interactive installation delves into the intersection of weaving and music. Converting auditory melodies into tangible textures, it translates Philip Glass's Opening into woven fabric. The project seeks to decompose and reconstruct common understandings of weaving and music history while using modern technology to interpret the relationship between the two.

Rattlin’ Bog is an interactive installation that uses projection, sound, animation, and digital fabrication to present a bog ecosystem. It is displayed as a single-channel projection with an adjacent interactive wall sculpture. The viewer-participant controls the water level in the bog and the temperament of the animals by fitting cutouts into a sculptural engraved scene. When the animals are in place, they adjust the dryness or saturation of the terrain. Creator Victoria Bradbury is an Associate Professor and Chair of New Media at UNC Asheville.

A collection of Michelle Yi Martin’s large-scale sculptures, made of monofilament, horsehair, and jute, will be suspended midair. The ethereal, amorphous forms present as beings in a transformative state – just at the threshold of life. Yi Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She has been a humanities educator for over two decades, weaving together history, literature, and the arts with her students. Her sculptures for the {Re}HAPPENING will recall the innovative sculptural work of BMC student Ruth Asawa, as well as the artist Kay Sekimachi.

The Trash Trout Motion Picture Show is a participatory workshop and multi-disciplinary performance that supports efforts to protect our rivers from pollution. The artists collaborate with water protectors to collect plastic from rivers, tape it to 16mm film, and project it to a live performance of traditional music and dance from the watershed where the trash was collected.

Noise // Space // Color // Time // Movement
// Radios // Timers // Lights // Fabric //
Ocean // Horizon // Sky

Radio Infrequencies: Horizons employs mundane alarm clock radios and to immerse the audience in an ocean of sound. A maximalist project inspired by John Cage's Radio Music, the installation envelopes the audience in noise, space, light, and movement.

Play, Life, Illusion 2 is a multi-channel video and performance based on Xanti Schawinsky's iconic Spectodrama. The performance incorporates dance, music, paperboard props, and costumes which re-awaken the experimental nature of Schawinsky's space-plays.

Circle of Attitudes will present the groundbreaking and virtually unknown work of Netty Simons, a lifelong friend of Stefan Wolpe who was a composer in her own right. Her work combines sound and movement/dance using a complex system of graphic notation, and creates a framework for truly beautiful improvised encounters. In the context of Black Mountain College, she remains a mysterious "what if," but from her friendships and artistic sensibilities, she belongs here. www.leahwilks.com

A circular installation of solar powered AM/ FM radios tuned to local frequencies which create an immersive, site specific sound collage. After the event, the radios will be donated to the local Asheville grassroots organization BeLoved who have enthusiastically agreed to distribute them to local unhoused people.

ELIZABETHS is a concrete compositional experiment between poet Rachel Allen and sculptor Nathan Carter.

Extrapolations from Otherwhere is a one person operetta set within Otherwhere, a fantasy realm existing parallel to ours: accessible to humans only through dreams and meditation, governed by magic and/or intention and chronicled through experimental operatic and terpsichorean expression.

"names, erased" is a solo performance for modern and baroque cellos that combines contemporary experimental music with 17th century Baroque works. The program is inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s "Erased de Kooning Drawing", the physicality of Rauschenberg's work, and the artistic relationship of Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, who first met at Black Mountain College. As the performer's body retraces the movements of past cellists and composers, it reworks earlier patterns of movement, uncovers new forms of sonic expression, and explores the art making—and “art erasing”—that results from artistic encounters across time.

A 4-6 hour reading performed at a distance. Listen to the reading through a radio receiver and watch through a telescope. You are encouraged to write as you listen, and writing will be incorporated into the durational reading.

Double Double or Nothing is a collaborative performance by filmmaker Madison Brookshire and composer Laura Steenberge. Two projectors, running without any film in them, each produce a low mechanical hum and a sine tone plays out of a nearby speaker creating a chord that quietly fills the room. Brookshire (harmonium and voice) and Steenberge (viola da gamba and voice) respond to this low chord with long tones that are tuned to the overtones to produce subtle textures that simultaneously feel ever-changing and invariable.

Learn to build lightweight geodesic structures using dowels and zip ties. The inventive possibilities are numerous and the forms can grow organically, allowing for more variation than the classic Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes. Participants can range from ages 8+ and do not need any prior experience.

In this ongoing workshop, participants can learn simple book-making techniques with artists from Local Cloth. There will be several 30-minute instructional periods throughout the event, and an opportunity to add to a large community book that will be collectively created. Books will be made with provided recycled materials, and participants are welcome to bring additional materials from home. Appropriate for any experience level.

A collection of happenings in three phrases with disciplines spanning sound, installation, performance, art and technology, and dance by the Chicago-based Sound Performance Land Collective.

Shadows Unveiled, a Butoh dance performance, aims to explore the essence of transformation and darkness that engulfs our existence. This nomadic dance journey will take the audience on a captivating exploration of emotions, symbolism, and movement, reflecting the various shades of a darkening world.

An audio-visual alchemical synthesis that revisits John Cage's use of chance operations, exploring perpetual transformation within nature, voice, music and visual elements. www.elisafaires.com

This performance explores place-based simultaneity and interdisciplinary collaboration through music, dance, and sound sculpture. It connects the formal strategies of Asawa, Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg with the deskilled and deranged compositional techniques of grunge and today’s experimental music landscape.

Inspired by overgrown mountain walking trails, Longing Limbs playfully represents the dread from "what hangs over your head." Combining a familiar quilt embrace with the strangeness of hand-tree limbs, Clay finds safety in uncertainty.

Through an embodied herbal tea party and improvised singing, this circle opens a door for people to use song for cross-species communication, honoring the intelligence of plants and acknowledging the importance of remembering how to learn directly from them. Humans do not need to figure out how to save the planet - we simply need to remember how to listen.

Grounded in the work of Black Mountain College faculty M.C. Richards and David Tudor, “Destruction is desirable” is a two-person site-and-community-engaged performance piece inspired by monotropa uniflora, the ghost pipe. The collaboration between Kiran Jandu and Michael Medeiros is a participatory happening involving clay, movement, and live improvisational sound.

The set is original compositions by Ben Hjertmann: Surrealist Songs in Just Intonation including invented instruments and polyrthymic (Just Intonation rhythm) grooves. Spiral Garden is composed of: Emmalee Hunnicutt, Graham Thomason, Jonathan Snead, Will Beasley, and Ben Hjertmann.

This durational performative experiment offers a layering of physical bodies, projections, fabric, sound, and surveillance cameras. It aims to interrogate the artist’s “performance of self” through self-conscious interactions of the physical body and projected image. The audience is encouraged to take control of the camera’s frame, resulting in a real-time manipulation of the performance. www.seanmulcahymusic.com

In Klee-tomania, Greenwell and Buffington revisit the instructional traditions of Black Mountain College. By coaxing live mixed sound recordings and video projections of historical footage into what Joseph Albers described as “constructive thinking,” Klee-tomania reanimates legacies of art pedagogy.

aloud is a participatory moment of remembrance and creation of an emergent vocal soundscape that invites participants to be in the flow while invoking the spirit of the late artist Connie Bostic— a local legend and formative voice in Asheville’s art scene and shaping BMCM+AC who passed earlier this year. Drawing on the legacy of happenings, Amanda Wiles guides participants through a practice of somatic connection, movement, reflection, and a calling forth the words and imprints left by Connie (or others in your life who have passed). Invited guest contributors as well as participants will contribute to layering and echoing vocal elements to build a soundscape for the moment.