FILM/VIDEO: As New-York based artist Julia Heyward will be in residence at CalArts in the Spring 2009 and will offer two classes in the Program of Film/Video, we are proud to offer this introduction to her ground-breaking work.

Heyward will be performing with her interactive work Miracles in Reverse (1999-2003), a time-based self-portrait in the form of an audio visual album… a hybrid of a family album and a music album. It is structurally and conceptually composed of loops (musical and visuals). These designs explore the rhythms of the vicious cycles of associative and obsessive thoughts as well as other mantras. Within the programming design there is room for interpretation: the performer can literally play her 'life movies' like a musical instrument which evokes sounds and pictures. The narrative is centered around trauma and memory consistently traveling between the personal and the global with a slippery Jungian spirit dipping into the collective unconscious, quantum theory, animism, neuroarcheology, and history reflexively. How we survive the memories, how we distort the memories, and how we store and access the memories gets equal time in this life’s reflections.

Miracles in Reverse is an interactive DVD-ROM written, directed, produced and performed by Julia Heyward. The music is by Heyward and Greg Smith with Michael Kott, Dwight Loop and Greg Bowman. Lingo programming by Aishwarya Saigal.

This will be followed with elements from Points of View (1998-present), a multimedia work about trauma and transcendence, personal and collective: samples of the installation version of this work which will take the form a 'faux' windows – several of them located in 29 Palms.

Julia Heyward's work centers around the orchestration of music, image, and language in the forms of multimedia, performance and new media. Heyward's No Local Stops won a 'BESSIE' for outstanding performance of the year for 1984 presented by DTW New York Dance and Theater Award. She has written, produced and performed in all of her multimedia works, notably two other large scale multimedia performances entitled respectively Mood Music, premiered in May 1988 and Miracles in Reverse, premiering in Potsdam, Germany in 1996.

In 1991 Heyward was signed as a recording artist to Columbia Records but left the label because of 'artistic differences.' The following year Heyward was commissioned to produce visuals for a large scale multimedia performance piece for the 1992 World Expo collaborating with the Barcelona theater group La Fura del Baus and musician John Paul Jones. In 1995 Heyward was nominated for a CalArts / Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in the field of music composition and again in 2004-05 in Film/Video/New Media. In 1999 Heyward received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Multimedia, and in 2001, was awarded grants by the Rockefeller Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts in New Media.

For the past six years Heyward has been totally submerged in digital and interactive technologies. The DVD-ROM version of Miracles in Reverse has been shown at The Daejeon Municipal Museum in Korea (curated by Lawrence Rinder), Art Interactive in Boston (curated by Kathy Brew), the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City as an installation. Heyward and her band, The Multi-Gnats, performed at Lincoln Center in NYC in July of 2006. Heyward’s commercial work includes directing for pop television including many music videos as well as shorts for MTV and M2.

“The future of art DVDs may well belong to interactive feature films like those of the new-media artists Toni Dove and Julia Heyward." Heyward's autobiographical feature Miracles in Reverse invites single players to navigate a labyrinthine, Blair Witch-style tale by "scratching" hot spots in the film with a mouse, much the way D.J.'s scratch vinyl records to alter their sound." – Linda Yablonsky/New York Times

“Julia Heyward's Miracles in Reverse, an ambitious challenge to classic cinematic technique, is driven by a vision that transcends cyberspace.” – Joanne Silver/Boston Herald