From "One Song, Three Composers"

Guest blogger Danielle Marie Georgiou is the artistic director and choreographer of DGDG: Danielle Georgiou Dance Group. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the UT Arlington’s Dance Ensemble.

On Saturday, CentralTrak’s current exhibit, “One Song, Three Composers,” will be closing with a colorful bang and poetic lyrics.

Synesthetic Ars Poetic — the closing party for Shannon Novak’s exhibit, “One Song, Three Composers” — will feature a special presentation by Richard Merrick and a reading by local poets. “One Song, Three Composers” forms part of an ongoing study into the relationship between color, sound and shape — it examines sound as fragments exploding outward from a focal point. In this instance, the focal point represents the fusion between three theories that relate color with sound in different ways.

Taking these ideas, each of the presenters has formed his or her own unique perspective on synesthesia.

Merrick is the founder and CEO of Postfuture, a pioneering rich-media communications provider for Best Buy and Microsoft, and his work spans diverse areas of digital media, including search engines, graphics operating systems, multimedia applications, interactive games, voice-response Web agents and dynamically personalized Internet communications. Because of this, he has been invited to speak around the world on the future of digital media and cited as an expert in leading publications.

Outside of technology, he is a jazz pianist and composer, an artist who works in oils, a writer and an independent researcher. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude) and M.S.C.S. degrees from UTD.

Following Merrick’s presentation will be readings by local poets Amanda Preston and Allene Nichols. Their collaborative performance, Synesthetic Ars Poetic, includes original work created in response to Novak’s installation.

From "One Song, Three Composers"

Preston is a graduate student at UTD between two disciplines.  Dec. 17th she will graduate with a Master of Arts in Humanities, the focus of which dances between literary and aesthetics studies, making way for a second Master’s in Applied Cognitive and Neuroscience the following semester.  Amanda’s poetry has been translated and read in Germany but will be presented stateside for the first time here in Dallas.  An emergent poet whose passions rend her in divergent directions – the arts and sciences – her reading focuses on the synaesthetic experience where sight and sound inform cognition and imagination as an organic process.  She hybridizes what are often thought of as compartmentalized, distinct systems to form more intimate, reflective bonds between them.  Coming from a neurophenomenological approach to poetics, Amanda takes Fransisco Valera’s idea that “the emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions” (like academic departments) and demonstrates perception and experience as an interdisciplinary interpretive act.

Allene Rasmussen Nichols is a doctoral student in humanities at UTD. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Naugatuck River Review, Hinchas de Poesia and New Plains Review, and anthologies, including Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa. Her plays have been produced in California, Texas and New York.

Synesthetic Ars Poetic is a free event, and CentralTrak will be open from 6-9 p.m. And it can just be one of your stops that evening, as other galleries, including, RO2 Art Downtown and the Dallas Contemporary, will also be having openings.