“localStyle’s work is deeply embedded in the dynamics of social and political life. Their critique and reflection on climate action offers more than an esthetic solution, but an ethical, political, and psychological sense of responsibility that raises awareness and makes a relevant contribution to society.” —Susan Liggett, in Creativity in Art, Design and Technology (Springer 2023)
Following a decade and a half of establishing their international artistic and musical solo careers, Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim founded localStyle in 2000 as a platform for collaboration, addressing issues of climate change and extractivism and expanding since 2006 to focus on non-human others via themes such as the mating behavior of non-binary marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish, speculative blackbird grammar, the illusory logic underlying human taxonomic systems, bootstrapping agriculture on Mars, an endangered bumblebee foraging on a Midwestern prairie, and the crisis facing coral reefs, whom they consider the voice of the Anthropocene.
These intermedia works—a practice that includes experimental 3D media, video, sound, interactive installations, live performance with electronics, audience participation, and site-specific sculpture—have been presented in museums, galleries, and alternative venues in more than fifty cities worldwide (a.o. Abu Dhabi, Albuquerque, Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Barcelona, Beijing, Belgrade, Berlin, Black Rock City, Boston, Brussels, Budapest, Camden, Carbondale, Chicago, Cologne, Columbia SC, Copenhagen, Duluth, Eindhoven, Edmonton, Den Haag, Helsinki, Huddersfield, Jerusalem, Kansas City, Korcula, Linz, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Minneapolis, Münich, New Orleans, New York, the Orkney Islands, Richmond, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, São Paolo, Sarasota, Shanghai, Sittard, Sydney, Szczecin, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Torino, Toronto, Valencia, Venice, Vilstal, Warsaw, and Wrexham). Exhibitions since 2020 have included Silicon Vilstal, Festival der Zukunft, Medientage München, Southern Gauge, Art on the MART, the Backward River Festival, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Commiserate Chicago, 150 Media Stream (all in Chicago), “Our Insurgent Ecologies” in New Orleans, “UNPOP” at Burning Man, “Overflow: The Mississippi in Every State Imaginable” at Q.arma Gallery in Minneapolis, “The Current” in Berlin at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and “Chlorophilia” in London as part of UNESCO’s international Year of Plant Health 2020.
Festival presentations have included the Deutsches Museum in Munich’s Festival der Zukunft, the National Art Museum of China’s (NAMOC) TransLife Triennial, Backward River Festival, Carbon Meets Silicon, STRP Festival, Visioni dal Futuro, Taipei Digital Art Festival, Ear Taxi Festival, Burning Man, Experimental Intermedia, the Wrong Biennial, The Universal Sea: Pure or Plastic? Festival, Charlottenborg Forårsudstilling, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Barcelona Arte Contemporanea, Site Unseen, EstacionArte, Warsaw Electronic Festival, Currents, and others. They have been commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), 150 Media Stream, One Prudential Plaza, siva)(zona (Croatia), the STRP Festival (Eindhoven), and the Chicago Cultural Center.
They were commissioned by the HKW & Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte as part of the Deutschlandsjahr project “Mississippi: An Anthropocene River” to make the video installation Timeslips, which is both a poetic meditation and critique concerning the entanglements wrought by human geoengineering, in the mind of a fictional scientist on Mars. In 2022, they won an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council Agency in the Digital Arts category. Since 2017 they have also been members of Deep Time Chicago.
Marlena Novak is a Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; in 2018 she received the Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award. Prior to that, she served as Associate Director of Northwestern’s Animate Arts Program, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago and visiting professor at the University of New Mexico. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Chicago, Cleveland Institute of Art, Amsterdams Instituut voor Schilderkunst, Pädagogische Hochschule (St. Gallen, CH), and a resident at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios (Loughborough, UK). She has received grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Other awards include four Faculty Enrichment Grants from SAIC, two of their Diversity Infusion Grants, two Research Grants from Northwestern University, and a Special Assistance Grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She was educated at Carnegie-Mellon and Northwestern Universities. Her work is included in public museum (a.o. the Corcoran in Washington, DC, the Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort, NL, the Davis Museum at Wellesley, and the Tweed Art Museum) and numerous private collections in Europe and the USA, and has been presented extensively in solo and group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In 2018 she was an artist in residence in Krems, Austria. [CV]
e: mnovak1@saic.edu
Jay Alan Yim studied music composition at the University of California Santa Barbara, the Royal College of Music, and Harvard, and computer music at Stanford and MIT. He has been a member of the faculty at Northwestern University since 1988, where he is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Composition and Music Technology Program. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council (five times, including three Artists Fellowships for his compositions), Tanglewood, Aspen, Dartington, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and many other awards, including prizes from the Kennedy Center, New York State Council on the Arts, BMI (three times), ASCAP (twice), New Music Consort, Concorso Alfredo Casella, American Music Center, Blodgett Foundation, New England Computer Arts Association, National Association of Composers USA, and the ISCM. His music has been featured at international festivals (Darmstadt, Ars Musica, Huddersfield, Wien-Modern, Gaudeamus, Almeida, Tanglewood, ISCM World Music Days) and has been performed by artists such as the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, l’Orchestre National de Lyon, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble SurPlus, Nieuw Ensemble, ICE, Dal Niente, the Arditti, JACK, and Spektral Quartets, Gareth Davis, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His work “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows” for bass flute and The Contraption (a live electronics sculpture) was premiered by Shanna Pranaitis at the 2021 Ear Taxi Festival, and he completed a commission for the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble which was premiered in December 2022. [CV]
e: jaymar@northwestern.edu
Both artists have had numerous invitations to present their work, individually as well as together, at institutions such as Harvard University, University of Chicago, Duke University, King’s College London, Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Cleveland Institute of Art, University of New Mexico, University of North Texas, Peabody Conservatory, Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam, Indiana University, Darmstadt, Pädagogische Hochschule St. Gallen, Amsterdams Instituut voor Schilderkunst, Wabash College, Wellesley College, Leonardo Education and Art Forum (NYC), Zone2Source, and others.
As authors they have contributed chapters to the books “Technology, Design and the Arts: Challenges and Opportunities” (Springer Open, London 2020), “Explorations in Art and Technology” (2nd edition, Springer-Verlag, London 2018), and to the Seventh International Conference on Internet Technologies & Applications. Novak has also been published in Antennae, IEEE Computer, Explorations in Art and Technology (1st edition, Springer-Verlag, London 2002), and for several years was a contributing editor for Flash Art International.
We want to acknowledge Chicago as the traditional homelands of the Council of Three Fires—Potowatomi, Ojibwe and Odawa, and as an important link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.