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2019 news coming soon...Check out the Timeslips and Choral projects! And our first collaboration on a sound installation Ignis Noster.

2018 began with continuing exhibitions in Amsterdam and online in The Wrong Biennial. There was also a single-night screening of Frontier at The Cube Art Project in Lincoln, NB's The Railyard. Current localStyle projects include a large-scale commission from 150 Media Stream in Chicago, and a newly-begun Timeslips, aiming for the fall of 2019. Novak will be artist-in-residence in Krems, Austria during the middle of the summer.

2017 began with a group exhibition (3 February-11 March 2017) including Naming Things at the Charlottenborg Forårsudstilling, at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in the heart of Copenhagen. The work traveled next to Münich, for an exhibition at Galerie Royal (19 May-14 June 2017); during the week of the opening, localStyle led a three-day workshop for students from the Akademie der Bildenen Künste München and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität/Center for Virtual Reality and Visualisation at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum, titled Alternate Worlds. The trip was co-sponsored by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Media, Energy and Technology, and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

A new panoramic version — Dancing Cranes 2017 (2002/17) — of our very first work was commissioned by One Prudential Plaza for their large LED wall (42.4*6 feet / 13*2 meters), now in a permanent looping public video installation at 130 East Randolph St, adjacent to Millenium Park in Chicago.

A highlight of the summer (8-10 August 2017) was joining our colleagues from Deep Time Chicago as visiting artists to lead a series of Anthropocene-themed workshops for the young resident artists at ACRE, located in Steuben, Wisconsin. localStyle's component was Aimlessfulness, a multiple-team dérive in the spirit of Counter-Tourism through the landscape of the Driftless Region.

[photos, Andrew Yang]

On the heels of the success last year, we were re-invited to North Wales in September, to deliver a presentation at Carbon Meets Silicon II, a symposium and exhibition at the Oriel Sycharth Gallery in Wrexham, curated by Susan Liggett and Mike Corcoran. Works shown this time were Frontier, Coast, Station 504: Mare Australis Subglacius, Enceladus, Saturn, and the documentary videos for scale and Bird. 

The fall segued into winter with concurrent presentations in Amsterdam (Dining Tsars at Arti et Amicitiae (2 December 2017–7 January 2018)) and at The Wrong Biennial in The Wrong Water pavillion, (...After & Before) hosted online by Peripheral Forms (1 November 2017–31 January 2018).

Naming Things received its North American premiere during October 2016's Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago, on their new 16-panel LED screen array in the ground floor lobby of Millennium Park's Harris Theater. This follows exhibitions in Wrexham (Wales, UK) and Los Angeles, subsequent to the world premiere in summer 2015 on the island of Korcula, Croatia. Darko Fritz commissioned the new work for siva)(zona, the exhibition space he curates there.

The European premiere of Bird took place in Amsterdam's Amstelpark, 21 June-24 August. Secret Signals, curated by Alice Smits for the Zone2Source program, presented a new version of Bird in Het Glazen Huis, in the heart of the park. The 2014 version follows after presentations in New Mexico at the UNM Art Museum and Taipei's Digital Art Festival in 2012; it was site specific for this spectacular venue, and featured a six channel spatialized sound installation in a floor-to-ceiling glass box, four meters high, twelve meters on each side, with computer-cut vinyl graphics mounted on the windows. This space led into an oval-shaped interaction chamber with video projection and an additional two channels of audio. Visitors saw their own motion in this space represented by a corresponding, dynamic "unmasking" that revealed the video scenes playing underneath. Accumulated data fed back into the system by altering the spatialization of sound in the front room and by affecting the probabilities of the video sequence playlist order. A never-before-seen series of 3D modeled 'dream sequences' inspired by the blackbird joined close-up videos of Dutch merels singing and the Amsterdam environments where birdsongs were originally recorded. Also new to this version was an experimental algorithmic grammar that took a vocabulary of 466 individual Dutch blackbird lexemes and reconcatenated them into a constantly shifting chain of new phrases, for the Amstelpark's native population of merels to listen to and react to the Virtual Bird.

In May, Driving School was screened to an audience in the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ as part of a two-day festival Louis Andriessen 75 which celebrated the life and work of The Netherlands' most famous living composer.

London's APT Gallery premiered a new video work, Station 504: Mare Australis Subglacius, Enceladus, Saturn during April's AstroLAB [catalog available here] show, organized by Nicola Rae and Paul Malone with the subtext of "a playful interpretation on themes astronomical". localStyle's contribution imagines a future underwater research station deep below the southern polar icecap of a Saturnian moon that the very latest data suggests is a candidate for supporting extraterrestrial life within our solar system.

TriTriangle in Chicago was the location of a pop-up laptops-on-crates event sparked by Jennifer Chan, called STUFF ON STUFF ON STUFF. localStyle joined in with Chew. Also in February, the Caochangdi art district in Beijing was the site of The Gallery's N-folded Spaces show, where the videos Frontier, Fluid Mechanics Remix, Dancing Cranes were screened, alongside Novak's solo photographic series Double Reflex.

Meticulously produced London-based journal Antennae published an interview with Marlena Novak conducted by Tiffany Funk in its Summer issue 'Wet Once'. You can download the PDF here.