JAVA July:Aug 2018

CASEY FARINA
Digital Media Artist
By Jenna Duncan
Annually, the Contemporary Forum group of Phoenix
Art Museum nominates one mid-career artist and
several emerging artists from the community to
receive grants. This year, the pool of talent spans
traditional art media as well as those that look
forward to the future.
Digital media artist Casey Farina is one of the
latter. By day, he’s a full-time professor at Glendale
Community College, instructing students in
animation, computer-assisted art and nonlinear video
production programs from the Adobe suite. But in
addition to his teaching duties, Farina is a musician,
artist, composer and now an animator and filmmaker.
And add contemporary artist to the list on his resume.
Farina completed his PhD in music technology from
Northwestern University. “When you do that, you
end up playing way more new music than if you play
violin or piano,” Farina says. “There are no ‘classical’
percussion pieces written [for drums]. There are just
a handful of parts for orchestra pieces.” Most of
what he studied and practiced was very new, very
contemporary and minimalist, he says.
Farina’s mother signed him up for high school
marching band as a way to get him to socialize more.
But he discovered that he loved drumming, and it
became more than just a hobby. Percussion led to
electronic music, and that led to video and then
animation. Along the way, he developed an interest
in filmmaking and cinematography, and got into
graphic scores. What are those? Well, it’s almost like
you see the notes come to life, Farina explains.
“Electronic music and generative art, especially
now, have systems that do the same stuff,” he says.
“Like Max MSP, Jitter and all the digital multimedia
systems can control sound and video at the same
time. Whereas, for the last 15 years, those tools
and controls were separate, and they took a lot of
coordination – timing.”
The medium is kind of young; there isn’t a lot of
work out there that does this kind of annotation
with video, Farina says. “Writing percussion music
using standard notation is really kind of a hack,” he
says. “Everyone comes up with their own systems,
especially for the non-pitched stuff.”
In this way, percussion and graphic scores become
a new, abstract medium. There is a lot of room for
interpretation and choices to be made by the performing
musicians. With his own compositional work, Farina
leaves a lot of space for improvisation. He provides very
minimal instruction to the players. With his piece Force.
Line.Border, for example, the composition is written
for “a trio of indeterminate instruments.”
Farina’s experiments in combining music with a
visual score have led to performances with large
video projections in accompaniment. He has shown
his work at the Icehouse, at Hayden Flour Mill in
Tempe and at a residency at the Atlantic Art Center.
At these live performances, the video is projected
on a massive exterior wall while Farina or another
percussionist plays along.
But Farina’s art evolution has morphed again, and
more recently he’s gotten into the practice of creating
smaller-scale, more tangible art objects. The works
on view at Phoenix Art Museum represent a new
direction: smaller-scale, sellable art pieces, each
about four feet square in dimension. The wallmounted
works are made of screens covered by
acrylic laser-cut overlays. On the screens dance many
of Farina’s animations, inspired by cellular and cosmic
processes.
Farina is represented by Reyes Contemporary Art in
the Phoenix area.
2017 Contemporary Forum Artists’ Grants Recipients
exhibition
Marshall and Hendler Galleries
Phoenix Art Museum
Through Nov. 4
phxart.org
Micrologies 1.1
Micrologies 1.2
Morphologies
18 JAVA
MAGAZINE