iii member Jonathan Reus has been shortlisted by musician Du Yun as part of Forecast’s Fifth Edition, with his project Electric Folkways. He will be giving a public presentation in October.
Jonathan Reus is an experimental composer and sound artist working at the meeting points of music and (post)digital culture. He proposes a multidisciplinary project that encompasses music composition, electronic instrument-making, myths of musicology, and technoculture. Electric Folkways looks to build on the networks of cultural transmission in American folk music—an idiomatic example of the pluralistic American identity, tracing isolated communities and musical trade routes through myriad cultural folkways in European, African, and Indigenous American music cultures. Reus will work toward developing a new musical and instrumental language through a remix approach to musical folk technologies: His project draws together folk instruments, oral traditions, local notation systems, twentieth-century recording technologies, musicological archives, and contemporary artificial intelligence systems.
Forecast is an interdisciplinary network for knowledge transfer. It offers artists and creative thinkers from anywhere in the world the chance to work with accomplished mentors toward bringing their projects to fruition. Forecast transcends neatly defined disciplines and genres to provide insight into creative production processes, and carve out space for the questions on the minds of the next generation of trailblazers.
Out of nearly 500 applications from 98 countries, the six distinguished mentors for the fifth edition of Forecast—chef Manu Buffara (Brazil), curator Koyo Kouoh (Cameroon), writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov (Belarus), visual artist and theater director Markus Öhrn (Sweden), musician Du Yun (China), and photographer and filmmaker Tobias Zielony (Germany)—have each selected three proposals.