Animalia is now being animated by collaborator Bart Woodstrup!

ANIMALIA, Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure is an animation, a performance and an illustrated artist book. The animation, a work in progress project produced with collaborator Bart Woodstrup, uses motion graphics to bring-to-life a series of mixed media drawings on found paper created by Ryder in 2009, which now form the pages of the Animalia Book. The performance combines live music on accordion, upright bass & singing saw with movement, aerials and projections.

Exploring metaphors of flight in response to violence & war, Animalia invokes visions of human-animal relations, secret bee societies and haunted circus scenes. When a girl falls under the spell of a mystical deer, she achieves flying powers by renouncing her humanity and becoming an antlered deer creature. By appropriating the masculine power symbol of the buck rack and reinserting it onto feminine characters, Animalia blurs the divisions between masculine/feminine identities and human/animal forms.

This project was developed in part at the Byrd-Hoffman Watermill Center and with the support of NYFA, ETC Presentation Funds, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

Albany Times Union video

TWENTY MILES Radio Research Walking Performance by C. Ryder Cooley with reembodied deer, June 13, 2010.

Created for Deep Cycle Mobile 49 Radio Project by Maximillian Goldfarb

On June 13th 2010 I walked for twenty miles with my collaborator, a taxidermy deer. Travelling from Hudson to Cairo, NY, we carried an illuminated oil lantern from the Fire Fighters Museum to a Lukoil gas station where we intersected with the Deep Cycle-Mobile 49 radio lab. Along the way, we investigated the roadside landscape, gathering data for radio transmissions and transporting the roadside dead to a burial.

32 goose feathers were stitched into my skin over the course of 7 days. Performances lasted 2.5 hours, occurring once or twice a day. The final performance occurred in a tree, located in front of the house.

Responding to the military history of the island, images of flight and post-violence residue filled two stories of this family home on Colonels Row. Open birdcages symbolized military prisons once located on this now public island. Recorded names of women and children extracted from cemetary records echoed throughout the rooms, along with other fictionalized military texts.

Curated by the Robert Wilson Watermill Center as part of the New Island Festival, Governors Island, NYC. Sept. 2009.

For additional photos-video please see "Installation" page: http://carolynrydercooley.org/installation.html & visit photographer Tod Seelie's work: http://todseelie.com/rydergovernorsisland/index.html

Trapeze performance and bridge installation created during an Artist Residency at Contemporary Artist Center, North Adams, MA August 2006.

outdoor site-specific aerial performances, created during a residency at Yaddo, 2009

Interactive musical improvisation series, 2006-2009

Three hour musical performances occured within video-sound installation environments. Hudson Opera House. Hudson, NY. December 2006 & 2007.

musical collaboration between Todd Chandler and Ryder Cooley. Recordings available as CD's and iTunes downloads via http://www.myspace.com/fallharbor

Shadows, stilts, recorded audio, video and live music. Collaborative performance with Sara E. Worden, presented at the Sanctuary for Independent Media (Roots Nests & Limbs event), Troy NY March 2007

Musical collaboration with dancer & writer Anah-K, 1996-2003, San Francisco CA.

For more information and recordings please visit Out of Round Records