The Making of & the Humans Behind RETROCHROMA

Let's highlight some of the amazing artists that made RETROCHROMA possible!

Artist Spotlight 1: Cidaria

Cidaria brought deep vibes and mindbending photons in an audiovisual performance. It was be a sight AND a sound to behold.

Cidaria is a multimedia artist based in Santa Cruz, CA. Her music features original electro-pop bass beats and vocalization written and produced by her as well as collaborations with other electronic music producers. Cidaria's vision goes beyond her dark ethereal sounds, with colorful projections and live flow performance, supplying an eclectic experience that guides the audience through her unique, creative journey.

Cidaria started DJing in 2018 at small parties and has since built a library of original video art and unique visual styles using feedback looping, datamoshing, other forms of glitch art and video mixing to create an immersive, colorful experience for audiences and performers. She has provided visuals for many electronic acts including Zeke Beats and An-ten-nae at festivals and events all over the West Coast.

Artist Spotlight 2: Morticai

Boundaryless livelooping, a voice for the soul, organic sounds, flowing harmonies and unlikely tones are the norm for this one-human band.

Jeddy Grant aka Morticai is a life enthusiast and connoisseur of cyclical arts. His work in Spirography and live looping explores non-ordinary reality, inviting his audience to reflect on the self and the collective.

If you're lucky, you just might get the chance to find Morticai vending spiro-art (postcards, buttons and larger scale drawings) and live looping ambient sounds out in the wild.

Artist Spotlight 3: Ben and Clare

Ben and Clare straddle the music, visual, and tactile art realms at Liminal Space. Kicking off the night with an experimental live-sampling and electroacoustic performance, we all got a chance to interact with the playable sculpture concept that they have been building together.

Clare is a visual artist who works in a wide variety of mediums, tangible and intangible. Fiber arts and digital collages have been primary focuses in their praxis. Crafting warm and vibrant wearables and glitch topography, their work explores the visual and tactile aspects of texture, the necessity of play, and the importance of not taking yourself too seriously.

Ben is a sound artist and excavator, sifting through micro-samples and varieties of found sounds, physical and digital. Working primarily with open source sampler scripts, various forms of delay, keyboards, and found objects, their current practice explores echolocation and resonant bodies/spaces taken in and out of their contexts. They continue to develop a musical language that allows them to participate in and observe the shapes and patterns that emerge from rhizomatic play structures.

Ben and Clare have been sharing work and living space for a while now. They are currently cohabitating in a van and working alongside each other on a small farm.

Artist Spotlight 4: Emery & Katrey Morgan

Here we've got a unique local family working together to get their art to us! Our friend and fellow organizer Emery Morgan showcased her grandmother Katrey's marble paintings, and had an interactive installation on display to play with.

Katrey has a background in jewelry, raku pottery, fashion, and painting. When quarantine hit she turned her living room into an art studio and began filling it with these incredible marble pours!

Em feels passionate about supporting and spreading artists work out into the world for the world. On top of showcasing these works of art, Emery had a booth set up for Tarot & Astrology Readings throughout the night.

Artist Spotlight 5: Allen Riley

Allen has a breadth of knowledge and impressive repertoire of creative analog video art. Allen uses VHS mixers, CRT TV sets, analog cameras, all meshed together in an ecosystem of hypnotic feedback loops, circuit hacks, and interactive tweaking to create something brand new, with all of the retro aesthetics we hold dear in our memories. Allen shared an installation of analog video feedback loops for us to experience at RETROCHROMA.

Allen Riley is an artist and educator working with video and electronic media. Allen is a PhD student in Film and Digital media at UC Santa Cruz.

Artist Spotlight 6: Emily Erin

Emily is a long time supporter of Liminal Space. She is an incredibly inspiring artist of many mediums, a talented hip-hop dancer, and most of all a sweet soul and friend. Emily sells commissioned paintings and likes to be involved in the live painting community; she brought her latest creation to life in real time on a large outdoor canvas at RETROCHROMA.

Emily Erin is a professional Visual Development Artist and Illustrator with her sights on the entertainment industry, working in film, animation and games. She specializes in producing creature and character concept art, with an innate ability to capture lifelike ethos and motion in her unique designs. She especially loves drawing monsters and humanoids!

Her mission is to bring people around the earth closer together through interesting and relatable characters, and empower them by using a more diverse range of ethnicities and body types on screen professionally, and on canvas in her personal work.

Contact Emily and check out more of her work here: https://www.artstation.com/emilyerin

Artist Spotlight 7: Elliot Bliss

Elliot is a local legend, and if you don't know about him already, you've definitely seen his art all over the city and peppered throughout the world. With a unique ability to combine lifelike color theory and tangible depth with psychedelic palettes and dreamlike perspectives, Elliot's work is unmistakable. At RETROCHROMA, Elliot did some live painting and vended finished works.!

Born and raised in Santa Cruz County, Elliot feels most at home and inspired here. He doodled on just about every paper during school growing up. He attended UCSC, and Cabrillo with an art major, and Academy of Art SF. He began selling custom painted vans in 2003 and custom paintings in 2009 and has been fully self employed painting ever since.

Elliot supports himself by selling art full-time through local shops, Instagram, and is often commissioned for custom portraits and murals. He hopes to continue indefinitely and cover all the walls he can get his hands on with beautiful art, and send paintings all around the world.

Artist Spotlight 8: Avi David Sinai

Avi has been a Liminal Space supporter since day one, bringing his unique artwork to each of our events, be it t-shirts, prints, canvases and live painting. At RETROCHROMA, we were lucky enough to have Avi holding down the "Human Caricature Drawing station" at Liminal Space.

If you'd like a live caricature/drawing done of you (and maybe some friends!) in the unique and unmistakeable style of Avi Sinai, be sure to come back to more of our events!

Avi makes artworks, sells 3d art cards and prints. For more information, visit https://avidavidsinai.wixsite.com/artbombs

Artist Spotlight 9: Oskar and Weston

Oskar and Weston are two of the many core organizers of Liminal Space, bringing music, visuals, and interactivity to the space, bridging the gap between technology, art, biology and humanity.

At RETROCHROMA, these two hosted a collaborative art project called '50 Shapes of Slime'. Over the course of the night, attendees of Liminal Space painted on a recycled surfboard while a biological Slime Mold simulation was projected onto the surfboard, which reacted to paint as if it were food.

Oskar Elek is a researcher at UCSC Computational Media. He explores how biologically inspired algorithms can shed new light on questions in astrophysics, linguistics and design. At Liminal Space he creates interactive visual performances with the help of a slime mold simulation. Find more at elek.pub

Weston Mossman is a UCSC Electronic Music and Computational Media alum. He is currently an active software architect, guitarist, electronic musician, and event organizer. Liminal Space has been his main creative outlet, and the collaboration he's had the opportunity to witness and join in on is a huge source of inspiration. Weston hopes to spread this outlet and inspiration to the Santa Cruz art community.

Oskar and Weston met while mountain biking and have since been adamantly discussing art, computational media, music, society, fractals and the nature of reality. The 50 Shapes of Slime art project is the result of many months of collaboration and brainstorming, and years of Oskar's research into free-agent Slime Mold simulation.