Performance Cinema Night *

* (restored/revised)

 

‘The concept of performance cinema is still a fairly new and developing genre within media art that brings together experimental approaches to narrative and non-narrative film making, with live music and the performing arts. Rather than screening a traditional, linear edited film, a live cinema performance allows artists the freedom to experiment and improvise within a selection of different material, prepared video clips, audio visual samples or more generative code based plugins that can be run in VJ software such as VDMX. This freedom allows the artist to present their work as a fully live and interactive performance, adding different audio and visual effects to their material on-the-fly. These different feeds of video can be distributed across multiple screens, layered, looped and edited to create immersive, three dimensional works that are very different to a traditional cinema experience.’ — Super Everything

‘Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time.’ — San Francisco Cinematheque

 

Jürgen Reble
Thomas Köner
Trinchera Ensamble
Patrick Hébrard
Scott Arford
Michael A. Morris
Le Révélateur
Nervous Magic Lantern
Scott Stark/a>
Karl Lemieux
BJNilsen
Kerry Laitala
Raha Raissnia
Malic Amalya
Sally Golding
Lee Hangjun
Hong Chulki
Bruce McClure
Suki O’Kane & Tim Perkis
Greg Pope

 

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Jürgen Reble & Thomas Köner Materia Obscura
‘A doorway to the world of dark and unperceivable materials, using Jürgen Rebles 25,000 scans of 16 mm chemograms. A visual expedition into crystalized salts and dyes, showing the bizarre richness and beauty of films materiality. The quadraphonic staging of Materia Obscura expands the performance space, where the horizontal flow of time meets the sonic impulse. Thomas Köners music floats at the borders of perception, as if it is a means of communicating with the beyond.

‘Thomas Köner (DE) and Jürgen Reble (DE) have been working together since 1992 in the fields of film, installation and performance. Thomas Köner studied electronic music and extended his concept of time and sound colour to images, resulting in video installations, photography and net art. The works of film alchemist Jürgen Reble are often rooted in the manual processing of film footage using mechanical and chemical influences.’ — jacquestourneur

 

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Trinchera Ensemble Bis Repetita Placent & Livor Mortis
‘La Trinchera (the Trench) is an ensemble of artists who execute live audio-visual improvisations using analog technology, mainly with 16mm projectors. Operating as an impulse generator and calling out for experimentation in a “free fire zone,” this clash of individual creativity provokes a sense of immediacy with visual situations, to create unique kinetic experience generated through the fusion of image and sound converging in a particular space at a particular time. Since 2004, La Trinchera has taken its expanded cinema performances around the world including to the Museums Quartier and the Essl Museum, Vienna; the Engelman-Ost Collection, Uruguay; the CCEBA, Argentina; the 8th Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris; the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda and the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; FLEXfest, Gainsville FL; and Antimatter Media Art Festival, Canada.’ — SF Cinematheque

 

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Patrick Hébrard Splitting Time
‘ A place : a cistercian abbey. Walls, doors, windows, rooms, pillars, a park, trees, a pond… A man and a woman are walking together in this same park. Something, a presence behind each of them, will tear them appart. The woman on one side, the man on the other : one dancing soul. They will relive, reluctantly, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.’ — Midralgar

Excerpt

 

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Scott Arford Beware of the Image
‘This is an expansion and re-visioning of audio/video noise performances that I made between 1995-1999, many of which were presented at the Lab. The political/cultural context of current San Francisco feels hauntingly similar to the period when these were made. At that time, the Dot Com boom was in full swing, carrying with it in equal parts, a dystopian dread and a techno-utopian optimism. Google was just one of many competing search engines, a generation of tech workers were making their first fortunes, emerging technologies promised to empower us as individuals. At the same time, artist warehouses and art spaces were struggling to survive – many lost their leases to skyrocketing rents and venture capital funded startups. Long-standing communities suffered, and small businesses were forced out. The emotions and struggles from this period are being replayed now in a frighteningly similar fashion, the sites of this struggle are the same. This work comes from that uncertain moment.

‘For me, the work is particularly important because it expands upon an experiment that was never truly completed. Flickering and strobing linear analog video, radio noise and TV static…. I don’t know what to call it, but it was raw and unfiltered. Searing but beautiful, like staring at the sun. With the technological revolution, video and audio became digital, non-linear. Resolutions expanded, screens flattened, effects became slicker, and the cathode ray tube disappeared. Everything became, well… focused. And with that a particular type of expression vanished. I want to bring this work to a new generation of San Franciscans, struggling with moral, ethical, financial, and practical decisions that affect our city, its future, and the technological narratives now being written.’ — Scott Arford

 

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Michael A. Morris Second Hermeneutic & Third Hermeneutic
‘Second Hermeneutic is the second in a series of works that explore the nature of interpretation. In this case, a pair of 16mm projections are overlapped while being captured by an HD video camera. The analog component signal is fed into an audio mixer without any further filtering. All audio in the piece is produced by the camera’s output. The video waveform is manipulated by the film projection to produce a real-time, synaesthetic cinematic experience using the artifacts of one medium interpreting another as raw material.

‘Third Hermeneutic is the third work in the continuing series of expanded cinema performances exploring the hermeneutical process as it might be applied to cinema and technology. In this entry, the text-based filmic image is overlaid with a digital video projection that is controlled by custom software. The hybrid moving image is re-interpreted by the computer to control immersive audio synthesis. The viewer is questioned about her relationship to history, meaning-making, and cinematic experience.’ — Michael Morris

 

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Le Révélateur Fakeaway Haptics (excerpt) & Mirages
‘Le Révélateur started in 2008 as a solo venture for Montreal-based electronic musician Roger Tellier-Craig. It has since then expanded into an audio-visual duo with the inclusion of video artist Sabrina Ratté in 2010. Together they explore a common fascination for the combination of electronic image and sound, using a varying array of digital and analogue technologies. They have performed extensively in Europe and North America, presenting their work at Museu Serralves in Porto, RIXC Festival in Riga, the Lampo series in Chicago, Resonate Festival in Belgrade, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Digital Quebec (Mutek/Elektra) in London, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, Pop Montreal, Sight+Sound in Montreal, Send+Receive in Winnipeg, Micro Mutek in Barcelona, Mutek.Mx in Mexico, Mutek in Montreal, On Land in San Francisco, as well as touring through Europe with Black To Comm and No UFO’s in April/May 2015. They have also shared bills with Ben Frost, Robert A. A. Lowe, Pete Swanson, Caterina Barbieri, Pulse Emitter, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Steve Hauschildt, Forma, Xela, Ricardo Donoso, Oneohtrix Point Never, Greg Davis, Hair Police and many more.’ –LR

 

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Nervous Magic Lantern (Ken Jacobs & Aki Onda) 2007
‘Ken Jacobs has long been a restless innovator, and his rebellious projection performance apparatus known as the Nervous Magic Lantern is a development that would not have been out of place in the pre-cinematic era of prestidigitation and exotic attractions. Working without film or electronics, the Nervous Magic Lantern uses lightweight fans and an exterior spinning shutter – along with the hands and creative mind of an active projectionist – to fill the screen with moving 3D forms that can be seen from every possible angle, no special glasses required. A breathtaking and all-around mystifying head/body experience, Jacobs surmises that, “It’s the cinema that should’ve happened following live shadow play.” After years of committed research and development, it is clearer than ever before that Jacobs’s Nervous Magic Lantern is a direct outgrowth from his early training in the 1950s with abstraction pioneer Hans Hofmann. In a sense, this latest body of work is as much a return to painting as it is another step deeper than ever before into the depths of the moving image.’ — NML

 

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Scott Stark Traces
‘Worldly surfaces, shifting shadows and overlooked patterns: a series of short 35mm films generated from digital still images and printed onto movie film. The top and bottom half of each image alternate in the projector gate, arranged in a dizzying array of rhythms and patterns. The images also bleed onto the optical soundtrack area of the film, generating their own unexpected sounds.’ –jkl

 

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Karl Lemieux + BJ Nilsen Yujiapu
‘Karl Lemieux’s (CA) films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues and film festivals. He is more commonly known as the ninth member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Montreal music collective for which he does live 16mm film projections. His collaborations include works with sound artists such as Philip Jeck, BJ Nilsen, Francisco Lopez, Roger Tellier-Craig and Alexandre St-Onges. Together with Daïchi Saïto he founded Double Négatif, a Montreal-based collective, dedicated to the production and dissemination of experimental films.

‘BJ Nilsen (SE) is a Swedish composer and sound artist based in Berlin and London. His work is primarily focused on the sounds of nature and how they affect humans. His two latest solo albums, released by Touch, Eye Of The Microphone (2013) – based on the sound of London – and The Invisible City (2010), explore the urban acoustic realm. He has collaborated with Chris Watson on Storm and Wind, also released by Touch (2006, 2001). His original scores and soundtracks have featured in theatre and dance performances and film, including Microtopia and Test Site (2013, 2010, dir. Jesper Wachtmeister), Enter the Void (2010, dir. Gaspar Noé), and, in collaboration with Jóhann Jóhannsson, I Am Gere (2014, dir. Anders Morgenthaler).’ — Sonic Acts

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Kerry Laitala Electric Salome & Afterimage
‘Kerry Laitala is an award-winning moving-image artist who uses analog, digital, and hybrid forms to investigate the ways in which media influences past and present culture. She considers this type of approach to making art a type of media archeology. Laitala’s work resides at the crossroads of science, history, and technology, and her uncanny approach to evolving systems of belief manifests through an array of media including films, videos, installations, photographic works, performances and kinetic sculpture. She studied Photography and Film at Massachusetts College of Art and received her Masters degree in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute.’ — KL

Watch the film here.

Watch the film here.

 

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Raha Raissnia Free Way
‘Tehran-born, Brooklyn-based artist Raha Raissnia works in film, painting, and drawing, with each medium informing the other. Her film works are the result of an iterative approach: footage shot on Super-8, 16mm, digital, and even mobile phone is manipulated in the studio; Raissnia projects the footage onto paintings and screens, integrating found materials and additional film and digital imagery, and refilms the whole to yield densely layered celluloid films. These films, in turn, are often screened superimposed with handmade slides or fashioned into film loops that Raissnia manually manipulates on projectors, which take on the role of instruments. One recent body of work, derived from video recordings of East Harlem street scenes, oscillates between keenly observed portraits, by turn stoic and vibrant, and the sublime nature abstracted images achieve through texture and rhythm.’ — MoMA

 

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Malic Amalya Towards the Death of Cinema
‘Accompanied by a live synthesizer score, projected 16mm film melt and burn from the heat of a film projector. Cutting off the sprocket holes located on the edge of the film frames, the projector’s forward momentum is bypassed. In the path of the bulb for longer than 1/24th of a second, the film warps, smokes, and bursts.

‘Individual film frames document cycles of destruction, resilience, and transformation within the Bay Area. Shots include the abandoned Parkway Theater in Oakland, closed in 2009; filmmaker Mary Helena Clark in her Berkeley studio; the Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, founded by Tooth; historical images of the 1906 San Francisco fire; pool tides in the remaining structure of the Sutro Baths, first built in 1896 and knocked down by arson in 1966; and the dormant Woodminster amphitheater, built in the late 1930’s under Roosevelt’s New Deal project.

‘If, as Paulo Cherchi Usai argues, “cinema is the art of destroying moving images,”* Towards the Death of Cinema expedites this inherent process of destruction for the viewing audience to witness in real time.’ — MA

Excerpt

 

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Sally Golding Spirit Intercourse & An Other Face: Spell for Living and Dying
‘Spirit Intercourse: Composed with light sensitive audio devices, handmade synthesizers, a voice sampler, and a contact microphone on a 16mm projector, the audio recording surmises moments experienced during the live performance of expanded cinema. The visual track mimics and interferes with these ideas – toy lights, torch and strobe lights shine directly into the lens of a smartphone camera to interrupt the video frame rate, making visible the shutter as system detritus. The vocals give the title to the track – abstracted from the pages and spines of dusty tomes referencing the Victorian Spiritualist movement.

‘An Other Face: In autoscopic hallucination, one sees one’s self as an external object, which can lead to the delusion that one has a double. In folklore and literature, the double (or doppelganger) is a symbolic embodiment of a troubled self or a phantom, and is a means of examining one’s own existence – be it as alive or dead. However, in the everyday, autoscopic hallucination is a form of dangerous disorientation. Previously, Golding has addressed autoscopic hallucination by projecting images onto her own body while exploring a variety of optical functions, such as reflection and refraction. In An Other Face, she projects onto the spectator, making them a screen – an integral component of the work. Such reorganisation of cinematic elements into installation form redesigns the cinematic viewing experience, exposing the typically locked process of beam-audience-screen.’ — OtherFilm

 

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Lee Hangjun + Hong Chulki Cracked Share
‘It is in the spirit of an experience and experiment that Hang Jun Lee’s «The Cracked Share» must be viewed. Seized in moments of visual detachment during periods of emotional contact, these images are oxidized residues of fixed light and chemical elements of transformed from living organisms. No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of the experience and yet, the residue is the recognition of the experience, loss permeates the work and yet somehow the experience endures, recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames. The recognition of this object, so little representative and so fragile, speaks to us of this artist’s isolation. «The Cracked Share» is quite wonderfully dense and visceral in nature … it looks as though the work has been doubly manipulated organically and digitally, yet the work still retain its organic nature through its alchemical orientation…the sense of visual rhythm is well paced and the appropriated footage of the Astronauts / Pornographic actor /Horse in “The Cracked Share” is wonderfully imaginative and fluid…an ocular alkahest’ — Carl E. Brown, Visual alchemy 2008

‘Film is disintegrated by various urea by strong oxidizing chemical agents. The compound (usually, we call it that is film emulsion) resolves itself into its elements. Swingback to isolationism, unconcealment the film material itself…….Film is just a tensile strength between emulsion and base. I found new laws of particle motion investigating condition its physical chemistry attribute. I reworked image by various chemical that sodium & potassium is included and adjustment of hydrogen ion concentration is available. Work that is oxidized again silver particles that is gotten restored through film developer in darkroom….do me to reach in new state. I began to examine…about that experience talks to me at the point justly. Title of this work is inspired from Georges Bataille “Accursed share”‘ — Hangjun LEE

 

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Bruce McClure the harmonic condenser enginium
‘Bruce McClure’s immersive 16mm projector performances use the phenomena of visual flicker and its sonic equivalents to create an experience of ecstatic reverie. Polyrhythmic light and sound signals generated by flickering film loops are intricately coaxed through retrofitted projectors and thrown against a wall of high intensity strobe light tuned with multiple guitar effects pedals. Robert Smithson’s 1971 proposal for a truly underground ‘cinema cavern’ for an audience seated on boulders was the starting point for yet another intrepid cave exploration. The work was presented in two parts: ‘A Cinematic Atopia – The Process of its Construction’ was a day long installation that divided the Level 1 space at BALTIC into two viewing chambers; and ‘the harmonic condenser enginium’ was the ensuing evening performance.’ — AV Festival

Excerpt

 

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Suki O’Kane and Tim Perkis Hard to Read
‘An Oakland-based musician, composer, improviser and instigator, Suki O’Kane works with artists from a wide array of of music, movement, expanded cinema and public art genres. She is a student of monumental and durational forms, and her gestures are getting smaller and smaller while lasting longer and longer. In “Hard to Read”, a new work directed by (and featuring the electronics and coding of) Tim Perkis, Suki and Tim animate and sonify his disarming and mysterious archive of human expression.’

 

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Greg Pope Moon Walk & Shadow Trap
‘After dabbling in punk rock bands and absurdist performance, Greg Pope founded Brighton-based Super 8 film collective Situation Cinema in 1986 and afterwards Loophole Cinema (London, 1989). Using 16mm, Super 8 and video, Loophole Cinema were self-styled shadow engineers performing numerous events around Europe. They produced The International Symposium of Shadows in London in 1996.

‘Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art pieces and single screen film works since 1996. Recent works include live cinema performance pieces Light Trap and Cipher Screen as well as 35mm film productions Shadow Trap and Shot Film. He currently lives in Norway and is active teaching, projecting, programming and making film.’ — BRUTALSFX

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos, Hi, and happy week. Yes, John was the guy pictured in the memorial photos in ‘PGL’. I hope you’re picked up now. When I dig into Aaliyah, I’ll let you know what I think. But don’t expect too much because I’m suspecting her thing is not so much thing. But we’ll see! Hi back from almost always cogent Paris. ** Steve, Good news! About your better state of mind. Oh, cool, I look forward to ‘I Saw the TV Glow’. I haven’t talked Gisele in more than a year. I know she’s busy touring her latest piece. Our meet-up got delayed until this Friday, so I can let you know more after that. No, I’ve had no contact with David. He seems to be very offline. A mutual friend says he’s doing ok, but I don’t know more than that. I hope to see him when I get to LA soonish to screen ‘RT’ for the cast and crew. ** Bill, Hey, hey, Bill. Yes, I am still very, very interested in the Alex van Warmerdam post. That would be great! Thank you! ** Uday, Hi. I’m not surprised that mini-golf and calculus have little in common. I’m not good at math. In high school, when we got to Geometry, I got too confused and kind of mentally bailed on the genre. I mean, silk has its place? I’m sure you looked resplendent. Yes, I would email a little doodle in, but what do you mean by doodle? But, yes, I would/will. Thank you for wanting. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘PA’ is big fun, and I’m not even from around there. My ears, my ears! Awesome! Everyone, It’s Play Therapy v2.0 time again and not a moment too soon, courtesy of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ + ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson. Here he is. Hit the link if you know what’s what. ‘The new episode of my show is available here via Tak Tent Radio. This installment of Play Therapy v2.0 runs the gamut from Electro Punk freakout to blissful Ambient tranquility. All ideology here is open to debate and we cannot guarantee your safety!’ ** Dominik, Hi!!! It is. I think George’s friend has bailed on me. But that’s been the story of this quest to find George people. A bit of a cursed outreach, I fear. You’re not a bath person either, cool. Whenever I’ve had to lie in a bath I get bored within five seconds. Same with hot tubs. Teleportation would, of course, come in so extremely handy, so love proves the value of his intuitive powers yet again. Love proving or disproving the claim by one of my ex-boyfriends that he had sex with Billy Joe from Green Day true or not even though I don’t suppose I actually care either way, just curious, G. ** Harper, Hi, H. Oh, right, the film’s not out yet. Duh. I too liked the ‘Inherent Vice’ film. Imagine a world where a TV series adaptation of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ would get green lit by Netflix or wherever. I can’t imagine that world. Although Season 3 of ‘Twin Peaks’ got green lit, so … hm. But it didn’t have scat in it as far as I could tell. Hm. Well, not being there in your flat, I still think they probably don’t hate you because hate is pretty big, and I can’t imagine you doing something hateful, so maybe they’re just wary of you or something, which is actually a powerful position to be in. I don’t know, you just don’t seem like a hateful guy. I vent all time. Just not here. Here I just occasionally leak a little of my stress, but I try not to. Venting is pretty key. I encourage you, and I’m down with being venting’s proximate person, in your case at least. ** Okay. Today your attention is directed towards the experimental film sub-genre of Performance Cinema. The problem is that it’s an ‘in-person’ only experience, and here we are, stuck on this blog. But I guess I’m suggesting that you check out the evidence at hand and use your fine imaginations. Anyway, that’s today’s deal. See you tomorrow.