Sound Art / Artist Spotlight:Stephen Vitiello & Bob Bielecki
By Roslyn WertheimerGet to know our In the Garden of Sonic Delights artists a little better through our Sonic Delights Artist Spotlights!
Meet Stephen Vitiello (You Are The Sweet Spot) & Bob Bielecki (Wild Energy, We Fall Like Light & You Are The Sweet Spot)
Photo by Naoko Wowsugi
Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations have been presented internationally and are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Past exhibitions include MASS MoCA, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Biennial of Sydney, the Cartier Foundation, Paris, and in public spaces including on the High Line in New York City. Vitiello has collaborated with such artists and musicians as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Pauline Oliveros, Julie Mehretu, Taylor Deupree, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Vitiello has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts, Creative Capital funding in the category of Emerging Fields, and an Alpert/Ucross Award for Music. Originally from New York, Vitiello is now based in Richmond, Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor in the department of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. For over 20 years of performances, recordings and installations, Bob Bielecki has been a vital partner in many of Stephen Vitiello’s most ambitious projects. www.stephenvitiello.com
Photo by Marcella Robinson
Bob Bielecki
Bob Bielecki has worked in the media arts field for more than forty years, creating unique instruments and sound designs for installation and performance. He is known for his innovative use of technology to develop distinctive electronic effects and environments and is engaged in ongoing research in psychoacoustics, sound localization, and 3-D audio.Bob Bielecki has worked with many artists including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros. His association with Laurie Anderson dates from the mid-1970s and he has worked with Stephen Vitiello and Annea Lockwood since the 1980s. He produced and engineered the groundbreaking media-arts residency program, ZBS/AIR, and helped to pioneer the field of binaural radio. A recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, he is an Associate Professor of Music at Bard College and serves on the faculty of the Bard MFA Program.