The Bicycle Choir is a group of Seattle-based women (hailing from projects including the Infernal Noise Brigade, Circus Contraption, Dunava, the Esoterics, and Seattle Pro Musica) who formed to revive the once-commonplace tradition of casual communal singing and music-making in their homes, communities, and adventures. The choir’s members proclaim a variety of formal and informal musical backgrounds, and bring a far-ranging collection of secularized spirituals, story-songs, Bulgarian harmonies, early American shapenote music, and drinking tunes to train tunnels, bike-repair shops, backyards, and other unusual gatherings and celebrations. They welcome singing along.
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Matt Dillon is the widely acclaimed chef and owner of Sitka & Spruce, as well as his gem, The Corson Building, in Seattle’s blossoming Georgetown neighborhood. He’s been recognized by the James Beard Foundation and tapped as a Food & Wine Best New Chef, largely based on the extraordinary Mediterranean-inspired dishes he creates with fresh ingredients sourced from local farmers—or that he forages with best buddy Jeremy Faber.
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Sarah Kavage: “I am an artist and urban planner whose work crosses discipline and medium to address place, culture, and history. I have a masters’ degree in urban planning and work part time for a small research firm, an arrangement that has more often than not inspired my creative practice. Exploring the crossover between the two disciplines has led me to shift away from studio artwork and towards work that is process-based, non-material and ephemeral, most recently with the Industrial Harvest project, which used 1000 bushels of commodity wheat to make a tactile link between the abstract financial world of commodities trading and the real people and real food that it touches. A born and bred Midwesterner, I was raised in back-to-the-land style in rural Ohio in the 70s and now live in Seattle after stints in the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Washington DC, the Czech countryside, and Brooklyn. I have lived without a car for over 15 years and am fond of long perambulations, the longest of which was the New York Marathon.”
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NKO is a local curator and artist whose work investigates the social nature of geographic and architectural space. Co-founder of Free Sheep Foundation, past projects have included the Bridge Motel, the Belmont, 2300 Battery, Moore: Inside Out, and Wild Sheep Chase: a Public Performance of Private Acts among others.
dk pan is an installation/performance artist and arts programmer. A co-founder of Free Sheep Foundation, dk is currently working on the STart’s Capitol Hill Wall Project and as well as number collaborative projects involving memory and the urban landscape.
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SEAT is a collaborative group of Seattle Animators which began meeting informally in cafes, drawing and working together in what is usually a hermetic pursuit of animation. Part of our goal is to create surprising work and display new work in unprecedented ways.
Beginning in 2010 SEAT began hosting public alternative screenings to great success, being featured in Seattle Magazine and touring our shows to Portland and New York.
Members Clyde Petersen, Amanda Moore, Stefan Gruber, Britta Johnson, and Webster Crowell will be making trail inspired animations during The Long Walk.
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The Seattle Phonographers Union convenes to explore the ways in which we recognize, differentiate, map and navigate our sonic environment. Their intent is to move beyond the habitual experience of sound and uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign; to explore what we hear and relearn what we know. Some sounds will be familiar; others less so. Both novel and familiar sounds will be juxtaposed in ways unique to each event. The intent is to investigate and enrich both the intuitive and analytical relationship with sound. The goal is not to excite, confuse or entertain per se, but to attend to the world, which is much more detailed and diverse than any one person’s perception of it.
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Todd Shalom is the founder and director of New York-based conceptual walks organization, Elastic City. He works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. In this pursuit, Shalom often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, as Permiso, they conceive and stage interactive rituals in public and private environments. Todd’s work often includes improvisational music performances, soundwalks, poetry readings, installations, photography and sleepovers. He is an active member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology.
For The Long Walk, Todd will lead participants in various poetic exercises that will heighten their awareness of the environment, materials at hand, and relationships with each other.