Category: Curated Programs

SURFACE TENSION
An evening on… frictions

Friday 19 March 2010, 20:00. Vooruit, Gent.
Program produced by Courtisane as part of the Courtisane Festival 2010 (Gent, 17 – 21 March 2010)

What happens when, before our eyes and ears, an event unfolds in time without simple representation, causality or possibility of identification? We are thrown back upon ourselves, upon the power of our imagination to create mental images. The real is brought back to the possible. In this series of works, most points of reference and information have been reduced to the minimum, as if the outside was folded inside. It’s up to us to break through the surface, to put our imagination to work, to search for connections, to discover what it all can mean…

PERFORMANCE
Seymour Wright, Ross Lambert, Paul Abbott
alto-saxophone, guitar/devices, electronics/light/projections.

An encounter between three participants of the weekly workshop led by musician and theorist Eddie Prévost, which during the past decade has left an undeniable mark on the London improvisation scene. The emphasis that Prévost places on the heuristic aspect of free improvisation – as a process of discovery, learning and dialogue – lies close to the heart of these musicians. Both saxophonist Seymour Wright and guitarist Ross Lambert are known for their inter-musical dynamics and exploratory drive. On this occasion, they team up with Paul Abbott, who will focus on working with light and video projections.

PERFORMANCE
Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, David Cunningham
The Space Between. Video projections, guitar

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler make film and video installations and performances that question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. The Space Between brings together a formal approach with an overtly social subject matter. The images of an anonymous housing block in India are the basis for an exploration of a number of “spaces between”, suggested by the motif and its distance from the Western viewer. The complexity of the visual structure, a two-screen projection, will be reflected in the live soundtrack by David Cunningham, who has made a name for himself as an installation artist and musician, often in collaboration with This Heat, David Toop, Martin Creed and Sam Taylor-Wood.

PERFORMANCE
Dominique Petitgand
Séance d’écoute. 1992 – 2009, pièces sonores, parlées, musicales et silencieuses

Voice is central to Dominique Petitgand’s compositions and installations. Sentences are fragmented, words and other articulations are isolated and assembled into “mental landscapes”. The listener is immersed into micro universes that bounce back and forth between an assumption of reality – the recordings in which people speak of their own lives – and a projected and timeless fiction. “For me, the search for form takes place at the level of perception, at the level of what is going on inside the head of the listener. I don’t have the impression of creating an object; rather, I set in motion mental perceptions, acts of reflection, of thinking, memory and imagination.” At the request of Courtisane, he will present a listening session in the dark, structured around silences.

INSTALLATION
Lis Rhodes
Light Music. 1975, 16mm 2 screen, b&w, optical sound, 25’

The work of Lis Rhodes is pivotal in the history of British avant-garde film, but in the past decades has also moved on to photography, performance and political analysis. Light Music is one of her earlier explorations in the field of “expanded cinema”. Two 16mm projectors project a varied configuration of straight lines, in which the spacing (frequency), thickness (amplitude), colour and density (tonality) also determine the soundtrack. “It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music, It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship.”

Altered States
20 November 2009 20:00, Les Brigittines, Brussels

In the context of Video Vortex V, hosted by Cimatics Festival. Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and María Palacios Cruz, in cooperation with Courtisane.

With the digital invading every creative enterprise and form of expression, pencils have become pixels, dreams have turned into data. While cinema’s obsession with the “holy grail” of photorealism has generated a blizzard of visual extravaganzas aimed at a suspension of the distinction between representation and simulation, a generation of DIY bricoleurs use ubiquitious “tools of vizuality” (Kevin Kelly) to explore alternative viewings and readings of the familiar. Through processes of transference, translation and combination, they encode, reveal or impose layers of information and deceive expectations about visibility and availability. Poking the surfaces of various images, sounds and symbols, their renderings create poetic, playful and often melancholic environments that are both alien and familiar, questioning our relation to images and our imagination.

(Altered States is a reworking of the Imagine programme, which was compiled for the Urban Screens Festival in Amsterdam)

Stephen Gray, Beep Prepared, 2002, 5’

“What is Road Runner without Willie E. Coyote, what is a cartoon without protagonists? What remains of the longest running and most existential series of sketches, once the actors have left the stage? Part one of a deconstructivist trilogy.”

Joseph Ernst, Hip-Hop Movie, 2008, 4’

Transforming visual imagery into words, this video is a word for word translation of a stereotypical hip hop video. ‘Bling bling’ from a different point of view.

Chirstinn Whyte & Jake Messenger, Text Field, 2002, 1′

Chirstinn Whyte’s and Jake Messenger’s work exists in the interstices of dance and the digital world. Using ASCII animation, the two artists created a whirling text-body that is part fluid and improvised and part of an algorithm’s discipline, like a dancer that obeys chaos theory.

Oliver Laric, (>’.’)>=O____l_*__O=<('.'<), 2008, 1’30”

Oliver Laric uses thousands of tiny animated gifs to create an ultra-low-res illusion of cinematic movement, generating a barely discernible compilation of clips from a series of hip-hop music videos.

Max Hattler, Collision, 2005, 02’30”

Islamic patterns and American quilts and the colours and geometry of flags as an abstract field of reflection. “It can be interpreted either way: carnage or carnival, it is open-ended. I don’t have the answers, I’m only asking questions.”

David O’Reilly, RGB XYZ, 2005-2008, 13′

“Discovered in late 2007 when a gardener accidentally dug up a hard drive buried somewhere in central Europe, RGB XYZ found its way to David O’Reilly, who compiled its five incomprehensible episodes into what became perhaps the most enigmatic piece of animation ever to leave a computer.”

Michael Robinson, All Through the Night, 2007, 6’

Described by Michael Robinson as a “charred visitation with an icy language of control; there is no room for love”. In this 4 minute digital video sequence, Robinson recontextualizes appropriated animation footage. In doing so, he successfully merges video effects into textures and glacial landscapes and creates his own kind of melancholic magic.

Dave Griffiths, Rogue State, 2003, 02’20”

Vetoed UN resolutions hand-inscribed onto DV tape using a magnetic quill. Reinterpreted by the digital apparatus, these marks reveal abstract, lawless sonic and visual explosions – a fluid display of synthetic aerial terror. The action alludes to the shared nature of entertainment and military technology in seeking perfect spectacle whilst shunning error or uncertainty. Compressed light and sound are unleashed in volatile glitches to commemorate the abandonment of conventions in both the digital medium and international law.

Jonathon Kirk, I’ve got a guy running, 2006, 7’12”

In this video, Jonathon Kirk explores the relation between cognition and recognition of war images, a relation that has been severely affected by the influence of simulation, surveillance and real-time media coverage. Images of a precision bombing, released by the U.S. Department of Defense to the glory of the American army and its weapon suppliers, are subject to algorithms, which gradually reveal the reality that lies beneath them.

Dietmar Offenhuber, paths of g, 2006, 1′

The long backwards tracking shot through a trench in Stanley Kubrick’s WWI drama Paths of Glory (1957) is reduced to pure geometry. Nothing is visible other than a matrix of rectangular figures and a line which follows the movement of the camera and counts off the spent frames. The viewer sees less but learns more.

Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, Lossless #5, 2008, 3′

Lossless is a series of works that looks at the dematerialization of film into bits, exposing the residual effects of the process that makes file sharing possible. Baron and Goodwin used several methods to alter these works, either interrupting the data streaming by removing basic information holding together the digital format or comparing 35 mm to DVD and examining the difference between each frame. The project considers the impact of the digital age on filmmaking and film watching, the materiality and demateriality of film as an artistic medium, as well as the social aspects of how the online community functions and the audience for such obscure films.

Nicolas Provost, Papillon D’Amour, 2003, 03’30”

By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950) to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.

Bernard Gigounon, Starship, 2002, 4′

Fantasy worlds are always there, anywhere, just like images, the only thing we need to do as a spectator is to allow our imagination to run free. Gigounon gives us a boost to let go of trivial reality, even if just for a while. This results in tiny phantasmagorias like Starship, a visual investigation of a passing ship, which turns into a weird and estranging object through the juxtaposition of its symmetrical reflection.

Stewart Smith, Jed’s Other Poem, 2005, 3’

Stewart Smith programmed Jed’s Other Poem, a music video for a Grandaddy song, in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. Seriously. Jeddy-3, a humanoid robot built from spare parts, is a recurring character in Grandaddy’s 2000 album The Sophtware Slump. According to Grandaddy, before Jed’s system crashed he wrote poems. Poems for no one.

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LIVE PERFORMANCE
Kurt D’Haeseleer & Tuk

In the video works of Kurt D’Haeseleer, the spectator is dropped in a world bombarded with digital fragmentation bombs. People wander through a kaleidoscopic labyrinth of trembling bodies and mutating buildings until they are swallowed by a yawning void. Lost pixels nestle like parasites under the skin and drag them through an everyday world that looks strange beyond recognition. D’Haeseleer regularly collaborates with Guillaume Graux aka Tuk, whose delicate sonic compositions reverberate with the equally uncanny image worlds, like atoms rebouncing endlessly in a hall of mirrors, a collection of stolen dreams melted into a new impressive universe.

On the same night there will also be artist presentations by Constant Dullaart and Albert Figurt. See www.cimatics.com

Morgan Fisher Films
4 November 2009, Independent Film Show 2009, Napoli (IT)
Introduced by Morgan Fisher. Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz.

The 16mm films of Morgan Fisher (US, 1942) – straightforward, elegant, playful – are particularly idiosyncratic; they are situated both outside the film industry and the central developments of avant-garde cinema. Too minimal and conceptual for Hollywood’s taste; too concerned with the specifics of industry procedures for the underground.

Although born in Washington DC, the work of artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher is essentially Californian. The kind of crossover between avant-garde cinema, film industry and contemporary art in which his films operate could only occur in a city like Los Angeles. After earning an art history degree at Harvard in 1964, Fisher moved West to teach and study at USC and UCLA, where an interest in film was then taking hold. While teaching, he began his career as an editor in the commercial film industry, an experience that would mark his subsequent work as a filmmaker, leading him to examine and deconstruct with wry humour the machinery of cinema in his films. In a sense, Morgan Fisher’s film work is one of the most accomplished forms of filmic meta-cinema. Films that are themselves a discourse on cinema, and which could be understood as “moving” history and theory of film; critical texts in the very form of their object of study. If avant-garde film has always hold this critical function of discourse on film’s history and its possibilities, nowhere it is more apparent than in Morgan Fisher’s oeuvre. And yet, Morgan Fisher’s work has often been marginalised for not fitting neatly into any of the usual avant-garde categories. Instead of avoiding commercial approaches, Fisher uses avant-garde procedures as a way of engaging mainstream film.

Fisher’s films are an exploration of the film apparatus and its physical material, as well as of moviemaking production methods : from film’s standard gauge (35mm) to the use of production stills, the narrative role of inserts and the invisible importance of the projectionist. Fisher plays with the concepts of film, cinema and filmmaking, creating a unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical representation. ” One thing my films tend to do is examine a property or quality of a film in a radical way,” he says. “Being radical is a modest form of being extreme. They each examine an axiom of cinema and say, ‘What if ?'”

This programme brings together a selection of Morgan Fisher’s films, rarely seen in Europe and most of which will be screened in Italy for the first time. Beginning with Fisher’s first work as a filmmaker in 1968, The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2), the selection spans two decades of work, between 1968 and 1984. In 2003, after a 20 years hiatus away from filmmaking (occupied with painting and drawing) Morgan Fisher completed ( ), a film comprised entirely of insert shots. It will be screened on the (DE)CODING programme on November 5th, together with — ——- by Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick, the title of which ( ) references and pays homage to (Andersen and Fisher are long time friends and collaborators).

The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2)
1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 15 min

“The length and straightforward self-reflexivity of the title locate the film outside the commercial cinema, but the specification of the traditional industry situation of the director working with “His Actor” reveals a direct connection with industry procedures unusual for avant-garde filmmakers in the late 1960s”. (Scott McDonald)

A film in 5 sections; each of them is a single roll of 16mm film long. We see a bare room with a young man sitting behind a tape recorder. Another man, played by Fisher himself, busily enters; he tests the recording machine and eventually goes into a back room, which, when illuminated, turns out to be a projection booth. Each section of the film elaborates the situation of the director and his actor working on an unfinished film which gradually becomes the film we are watching, but which is not the film they were working on. Throughout we hear the comments of the two men as they watch the rushes of their film. Watching rushes is part of the necessary procedures of the fimmaking process, which must remain invisible in the finished film. In this work, however, procedure itself is the subject.

Documentary Footage
1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min

“Naturalness wilfully corrupted by inevitable self-consciousness, unwittingly corrupted by unavoidable naturalness, a role played with incredible nuance and complexity by Maurine Connor”. (Mark Toscano)

Just as The Director and His Actor… (made also in 1968) Documentary Footage deals film process, but as the title indicates, it refers to documentary film and not narrative fiction. A single continuous shot of 11 minutes (a 400 foot roll of 16mm, the measure of many of Fisher’s films) in which a naked woman turns on a tape recorder and reads a series of written questions, then rewinds the tape and proceeds to answer to the questions she previously read, all of which concern her body. Documentary Footage reveals the impact of the film process on the woman who is the subject of the film, showing the changes in her manner when she first reads the questions and when she answers them.

Production Stills
1970, 16mm, colour, sound 11 min

As its title indicates, the subject in Production Stills is a series of production stills of a film that was never made, and that at the same time is the film we are watching. Scott McDonald calls Production Stills “the quintessential Fisher film”. A perfectly enclosed narrative of its own production: the image is one long take (again 11 minutes) of a wall on which a hand sequentially pins a number of Polaroids, one after the other. The Polaroids depict the crew making the film; the synchronous sound allows us to hear in ‘real time’, their chatter and the hum of the still camera, so that we can anticipate the photos and assign faces to the voices we hear.

“Production Stills presents the usual Fisher-esque in-version of industry procedures. Normally, production stills are taken while a film is being shot as an aid in marketing the finished film: they are a means to an end. In Fisher’s film, the making and presentation of the production stills is the end, and moments of motion picture illusion–the hands entering the image, the apparent use of sync sound, the making of the film itself-are means for getting the stills mounted so that we can examine them. The film also challenges conventional cinematic categories and terminology. (…) It is an unedited film which, however, provides us with eight different views of the action taking place.” (Scott MacDonald)

Picture and Sound Rushes
1973, 16mm, b&w, sound, 11 min

“Picture and Sound Rushes takes the form of a lecture in which his deadpan discourse describes the various permutations of sound/silence and picture/no picture. These states are demonstrated in the editing, which cuts between them at regular intervals (determined by dividing a roll of film equally by the total number of combinations), with no regard for the audience struggling to follow the dialogue”. (Mark Webber)

Picture and Sound Rushes deploys the various combinations of sound and image in cinema. Again, Fisher unveils and explains film strategies and structures, breaking, and the same time re-imagining, the illusion of cinema. Fisher reads a text that describes the industry procedure of double-system sync sound recording which allows sound and image to be recorded separately but in synced sound. Once again, Fisher approaches a subject unusual for the avant-garde, double system being very rarely used by experimental filmmakers.

Cue Rolls
1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 5min30

“Over the years Morgan Fisher has analysed nearly every aspect of the production and projection process. Cue Rolls appears to be a continuous five-and-a-half-minute shot, the visual subject of which is a synchronizer through which four strands of black and white leader are running continuously. As the soundtrack makes clear, Fisher has applied what once was a standard industry practice (for making colour corrections and other modifications before final prints were struck) to a situation in which it would seem to be entirely irrelevant. Specifically, a single continuous forty-foot shot of four strips of leader moving through the synchronizer was “analysed” into ten-foot segments that were subsequently A and B rolled so that the ten-foot segments could be resynthesized into a convincing illusion of the original, uncut shot. The leader moving through the synchronizer was a plan for the negative cutter who would edit (or who, by the time we see the film, has edited) Cue Rolls“. (Scott MacDonald).

Cue Rolls suggests that the particularity of cinema is its interface of rigorous mechanical equipment and fallible human process, which is dramatised by the juxtaposition of the precision mechanics of the visuals and Fisher’s somewhat halting narration.

Projection Instructions
1976, 16mm, b&w, sound, 4 min

Morgan Fisher makes films that “return you to the here and now, and in so doing give you back the body that all other films take away from you” (Morgan Fisher). With Projection Instructions Morgan Fisher turns his interest to the screening space and the act of projection. Every film must be performed by the projectionist, but generally the projectionist’s job is done correctly when it goes unnoticed. Projection Instructions puts the projectionist at the centre of the work, requiring his full attention, as all the textual instructions on the screen (“Turn sound off”, “Throw out of focus”…) need to be read and respected.

“The projectionist is no longer the means for delivering the performances of actors to the audience; the projectionist is a performer who, at Fisher’s instruction (or, in a sense, at the film’s instruction) succinctly demonstrates (or fails to demonstrate) the various dimensions of the viewing experience controlled from the projection booth”. (Scott MacDonald)

Standard Gauge
1984, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min

“While on one level, Standard Gauge is Fisher’s homage to 35mm and to the diverse cinematic world it made possible, the irony of its having been filmed in 16mm reveals a conceptual paradox central to the film, and which unites it with the webs of irony and paradox evident in his earlier work. (…) As Fisher explains in his program notes, the thirty-two minute shot “is virtually the maximum length of a scene in 16mm, and is longer by far than 35mm is capable of.” For all its potentials and accomplishments, standard gauge is limited, and in ways that a non standard gauge-a gauge quite marginal to mainstream film history-is not”. (Scott MacDonald)

An autobiographical account of Fisher’s experiences as an editor in the commercial film industry during the early seventies. Filming a succession of divergent film scraps rejected at the editing stage, Fisher comments on the origin and meaning of each image, thus exploring the mechanisms and conditions of film production, in both its materialistic and institutional aspects.

(DE)CODING
5 November 2009, Independent Film Show 2009, Napoli (IT).
Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz.

“It’s about the unities of similarities. It’s about sameness in confusion. It’s about logic in chance. It’s about structure and logic”.
(Jonas Mekas on Zorns Lemma)

(DE)CODING plays with cinema’s ability and potential to generate associations, may they be intentional or not. This programme brings together a series of films that explore the capacity of images and words to create meaning, even when attempts are made to release them from the constraint of narrative, or in other words from the constraint of “making sense”. Images and words can’t help making meaning “before our eyes”, for we will always try to look for their sense and purpose.

In cinema, this is very much connected to the idea of montage, the ordering principle that creates continuities and discontinuities between images, sounds and text. But some associations escape the control of the editor. As Morgan Fisher points out “any succession of shots, no matter how disparate, brings into play the principles of montage. That cannot be helped. Where there is juxtaposition we assume specific intention and so look for meaning. Even if there is no specific intention, and here there is none, we still look for meaning, some way of understanding the juxtapositions.”

How does meaning result from a linear organization of images? Is there such a thing as a logic of chance? Does every random succession of film bits imply a unity, an order within chaos, a secret route to the imagination? Is narrative, as Hollis Frampton suggested in his so-called “Brakhage’s theorem”, a fixed axiom in cinema? : “For any finite series of shots (’film’) whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term in the series, together with its position, duration, partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirely accounted for”.

The works in this programme propose a playful approach to concerns generally associated with “structural film”. On one hand, these are highly structured, quasi hermetic works. On the other, they are full of humour and wit. They ask the viewer to take up, within the practice of spectatorship, an expansive attitude towards the creation of meaning. We are invited to participate and solve perceptual puzzles, interpret them, and above all construct unity out of their diversity.

(DE)CODING is composed of two parts. The first presents four short films by Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, Morgan Fisher, Robert Nelson (all four Californian) and British filmmaker John Smith. Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick’s — ——- and Morgan Fisher’s ( ) are works that explore the power of a rule as a structuring principle of montage, suggesting the possible new meanings that result of the reordering of images and sounds. Smith’s Associations and Nelson’s Bleu Shut are also works that deal with issues of order, but they are principally concerned with language, and with the confrontation of text (may it be spoken or written) with imagery. These two films serve as a lively introduction to a work both concerned with language and structure, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma which will be screened in the second part of the programme.

1st part

Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick
— ——- (aka short line long line)
US, 1966-67, colour, sound, 11’

“A documentary about rock ‘n’ roll. Documentary material organized by a predetermined structure. A sequence of picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms. Vertically, — ——- is completely structured; horizontally it is completely random. A pastiche of cinematography, a parody of montage. 1:2. 3:7. Right, left. Right to left-left to right. Up-down. Stasis, motion. Orange, magenta. Yellow, blue. Red, green. Magenta, orange. Blue, yellow. Green, red. 1:2, 1,5:3, 2:4, 3:6, 5:10, 8:16 . . .” (Thom Andersen)

Morgan Fisher
( )
US, 2003, 16mm, colour/b&w, silent, 21’

“The origin of ( ) was my fascination with inserts. Inserts are a crucial kind of shot in the syntax of narrative films. (…) I wanted to free the inserts from their stories, I wanted them to have as much autonomy as they could. I thought that discontinuity, cutting from one film to another, was the best way to do this. It is narrative that creates the need for an insert, assigns an insert to its place and keeps it there. The less the sense of narrative, the greater the freedom each insert would have. But of course any succession of shots, no matter how disparate, brings into play the principles of montage. That cannot be helped. Where there is juxtaposition we assume specific intention and so look for meaning. Even if there is no specific intention, and here there is none, we still look for meaning, some way of understanding the juxtapositions. “ (Morgan Fisher)

John Smith
Associations
UK, 1975, 16mm, colour, sound, 7’

“Associations plays with meaning, not in its construction but rather in the absurdity of meaning as a given, of packaged knowledge. Using the text from ‘Word association and linguistic Theory’ by Herbert H. Clarke and images from colour supplements, the film creates, through associations, a rebus where words are replaced by pictures in a seamless continuum of puns.(…) The ubiquitous connections, often humorous, displace meaning in very much the same way as nineteenth-century English nonsense poetry, forsaking understanding for the benefit of a more ephemeral psychological gymnastics where ambiguity becomes the determining factor.” (Michael Mazière)

Robert Nelson
Bleu Shut
US, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 33’

“In Bleu Shut Nelson invented a form which would be capable of holding together many different kinds of film while maintaining their integrity as home movies, advertisements, quotations, etc. In Nelson’s inflection of the participatory form, the very question of synthesizing the materials of the film is handed directly to the viewer. In the ironic structure he provides, all images share a relationship to one minute subsections of the film. Screen time is affirmed in two ways. A small transparent clock appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, measuring the minutes and seconds throughout the film. That measurement is reinforced by a number which flashes briefly on the screen at the beginning of each new minute”. (P.A. Sitney)

2nd part

Hollis Frampton
Zorns Lemma
1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 60’

Zorns Lemma is arguably the veritable master piece of American filmmaker Hollis Frampton. It combines a number of intellectual and aesthetic issues that Frampton had already explored in his earlier films and photographic work, especially his fascination with epistemology and set theory – the title is a reference to mathematician Max Zorn’s equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. The film is structured according to an axiomatic system, expressed both in ontological and structural codes. The central part consists of images of words, assembled in alphabetical order – a reference to the Encyclopedic movement and the arbitrary tendency to categorize the World on the basis of the first letter of the object name. The ideograms gradually make place for arbitrary images, as a result of which an ingenious game between language and image is installed, inciting the audience to dismantle the control structures and discover the logic of chance.

“For one or more things to be “ordered,” they must share a perceptual (provable) element. So there are many ordered subsets within the set of all elements that make up the film. There is the subset of all “abstractive” elements (the words, if they are seen as merely “list-able”) and the subset of all “fictive” elements (the images, if they are seen merely as deliberately “made”). But what you see (consciously) most of all is the one-second cut, or pulse. So that what I imply is that the maximal fully ordered subset of all film (which this film proposes to mime) is not the “shot” but the cut – the deliberate act of articulation. (…) Zorns Lemma is hierarchic, in that it proposes a possible meaningful “tour” of all elements within a set with regard to only one operation – discernment of their “ordering,” or the relative preponderance of their shared qualities.” (Holllis Frampton)

In the context of the programme “Accelerated Living”, part of IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2009, 14-18 October 2009, Utrecht, NL. Preview here.

Wednesday 14 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

“We will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with the violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke.”
– F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurist Manifest’

Thomas Köner : The Futurist Manifest
The work of media artist Thomas Köner cannot be easily categorised. For years he was active as a sound engineer, before his project Porter Ricks caused a stir in the European techno landscape. In filmmaker Jurgen Reble he found the perfect collaborator to pursue his interest in the symbiosis of visual and auditive experiences. All these different influences come together in Köner’s recent work, in which his fascination for sound colour has expanded to the moving image, resulting in a series of acclaimed performances and installations. At the occasion of the festival theme of “Accelerated Living” and the hundredth anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, he has composed an “opera digitale” for Impakt, which will be performed with a prepared piano, a digital ”noise orchestra” and a singer. The sonic sediments of one hundred years of industrialisation and acceleration will be condensed in a multidimensional audiovisual space, where image and sound interact as if “time and space died yesterday”.

Carl Faia: prepared piano & live electronics
Iris Garrelfs: voice & live electronics
Thomas Köner: laptop noise orchestra, visuals

An Impakt production

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Thursday 15 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

DOPES TO INFINITY

“I have something more cosmic in mind
It’s a warpage of time and it’s bliss for everyone”
– Monster Magnet

Time has this strange quality: it must be paced by events for us to be able to orient ourselves with it. This seems so natural that we don’t even regard our temporal relation to events as something that dictates how we structure meaning and position ourselves in this world, thinking instead of the space-time continuum as an ideal outside reality, unless – of course – the temporal orientation process is dismantled or overthrown in some way. The performances in this programme disrupt the structure, the pattern of time. Using analogue instruments, including 16mm projectors, these artists generate a variety of sensory manipulations, drawing and reflecting on psychological and phenomenological effects of speed, motion and repetition. On one level or another some disruption or displacement of conscious processes occurs, lapsing into unconscious and visceral sensations; a recirculation of orientation and perception. Time is collapsed – leaving us dazzled, between shimmer and bliss.

Guy Sherwin
A key figure in British avant-garde cinema, Guy Sherwin (GB) pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties: light and time. Concerned with seriality and live intervention, his work investigates questions such as the physical relationships between sound and image, the digital re-working of film, the mechanisms of projection, the methods of printing and the live interaction between performer and film. Since the 1970s he has been working on a series of studies on the illusion of movement and stasis experienced during train travel. For Impakt, he will present a selection of his “train films” in the form of an expanded film performance.

Dirk de Bruyn + Joel Stern
In his work, filmmaker and media artist Dirk de Bruyn (NL/AU) deals with the disorientating and traumatic experience of media saturated environments. A founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta), he has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation film and videos and interactive work over the last 30 years. He currently teaches Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne. His performance ‘LanterNfanten’ for three projectors creates an absorbing space where time is disturbed and compressed as a kind of personal research on bodily trauma and cultural displacement, employing hand drawn, afterimage, single frame and flicker work. It will be accompanied by a live soundtrack from Brisbane based composer Joel Stern (AU), merging music concrète, art brut and noise.

Core of the Coalman
Core of the Coalman is one of the alter egos of composer and visual artist Jorge Boehringer (US), a project in the musical no man’s land between power electronics, noise and contemporary classical music. With violin, his voice and electronics he builds sonic architectures hovering on the edge between chaos and order. Slow in form but powered and etched by sunshine continually, in the spirit of biting the hand that feeds one, Core of the Coalman is “dyspeptic subtended prescient lacuna”. He has collaborated with a spastic mash-up of the experimental music community and the international avant-garde, including Yellow Swans, Grouper and Pauline Oliveros.

Bruce McClure
A film projector is not only a source of light but also of sound. Nobody understands this better than Bruce McClure (US) who with his immersive performances for multiple projectors creates a pure sensory game of pulsating rhythms and shadows, well beyond the borders of cinematographic time and space. McClure, an architect by training, “crossed over into the realm of the proto-cinematic as a consequence of trying to represent the beat of a metronome in time with the ultimate goal of laying down a line equal to the circumference of the earth at the equator. By recording the tempo and duration of his markings on paper he could calculate the distance travelled and what remained to complete a circumnavigation of the planet.” For Impakt he has prepared a unique two-hour performance, which is sure to provide a hypnotic and overwhelming experience.

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Friday 16 October 2009
Tivoli de Helling / 23:30

SPEED TRIBES

“It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.”
– Gilles Deleuze

The arrival of low-budget music technologies in the mid 1980s drastically altered the relational bonds between humans and machines in electronic music cultures. According to Kodwo Eshun “Atlantic Futurism is always building Futurythmachines, sensory technologies, instruments which renovate perception, which synthesize new states of mind”. The possibility of altering the speed of a record functioned as a key audio-technical transformation with wide-ranging subcultural impact. The bpm (beats per minute) metric, the operating grid of electronic dance music culture, acts as a filter whose fine-grained mesh distributes these audio populations. The sound system driven music cultures of the last two decades, especially in the UK, are populated with thousands of micro-scenes that have been deploying polyrhythmic attacks on this audio metric. Steve Goodman aka Kode9 calls these vertical rhythmic collectives “Speed Tribes”, collective bodies swarming around certain speeds of sound. This night is all about these ecologies of speed, “those molecular seepages and rhythmic infections which deviate from social segmentations.”

Mount Kimbie + James Blake
British breakbeat culture is alive and kicking. The explosion of dubstep has provoked a plethora of sound experiments and cross-overs from which a fresh sound emerges from time to time. One of those surprises is London duo Mount Kimbie (GB) who inject melancholic pop sensibility and hybrid rhythmic patterns into dubstep. They are joined live by vocalist James Blake (GB) whose exciting debut reconciles jazz, soul and a taste for melodrama with the sound of the imploding metropolis.

Cooly G
This protégé of the cutting edge Hyperdub label drew the attention of the so-called « UK funky » scene last year. It’s not surprising : her spicy but contagious mixture of deep house and dubstep, seasoned with bitter sweet vocals and subtle touches of acid and hardcore is, without a doubt, a fresh wind in the the British club culture. Tribal rhythms and woozy synth chords, deep basses and aching sighs, light vibes and dark undertones : it’s precisely these contrasts that make her music so irresistible!

The Bug + Flowdan
The man behind The Bug is Kevin Martin (GB), who has been reinterpreting industrial, dub and breakbeat since the 1990s. His fascination for intense and dark mutations of electronic rhythms and sub-harmonic frequencies was already present in earlier projects such as God, Techno Animal and Ice. The Bug is the culmination of all these influences : a highly personal exploration of bass culture, with a sound that he self-described as “warped ragga meets heavy electronic dub”. His most recent release London Zoo was praised by several media as one of the most important albums of 2008. MC Flowdan (GB), a key figure of East London’s grime scene, will accompany The Bug as guest artist.

Kode9
In recent years Steve Goodman aka Kode 9 (GB) has established himself as one of the most influential names in contemporary electronic music culture. A music producer, theorist and the owner of the celebrated Hyperdub label, he obstinately continues to explore the big city’s sonic fabric, its energy fields and rhythms. Movement, vibration, exaltation, emotion: Kode 9’s music acts like a hyper urban virus that mercilessly gets into our central nervous system.

+ DJ Sonido del Principe (Generation Bass)

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Saturday 17 October 2009
Theater Kikker / 21:00

ECSTATIC MUTATIONS

“Below the level of sounds and rhythms, music acts upon a primitive terrain, which is the physiological time of the listener. (…) Because of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening to it immobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind.”
– Claude Lévi-Strauss

As Lévi-Strauss suggested, music is registered throughout the body, it is not simply a matter of mental cognition. Compared to forms of visual communication, music possesses a visceral quality, relying for its effects not only on the neural registration of light waves but on the resonance of sound waves throughout the organs and the body tissues. It’s safe to say that music has a degree of materiality which other forms of communication – apart from physical touch – do not have. For Lévi-Strauss, music has something in common with myth in that they’re both “languages which, in their different ways transcend articulate expression, while at the same time requiring a temporal dimension in which to unfold. But this relation to time is of a rather special nature: it is as music and mythology needed time in order to deny it. Both, indeed, are instruments for the obliteration of time”. The acts in this programme explore rhythmic structures built of vibration and pitch, material expressions of raw movement of sound that tear us away from conventional time. Music as a pulsing line of flight, a surface affect expressed through rhythm.

Thomas Brinkmann
Thomas Brinkmann (DE) is one of the foremost figures of the minimal techno movement, which has influenced contemporary music production since the 1990s. His fascination for programmatic and rhythmic structures finds its roots in his background as a drummer and his training as a visual artist, and most particularly in the influence of Minimalism’s principle of reduction. The result is a vast oeuvre of mathematically refined scores made of complex grooves, overtones and doppler effects. In Utrecht he will present for the first time a completely improvised « klick » performance with 8 turntables, a series of vinyl records and a knife.

Arnold Dreyblatt Ensemble
The musical exploration of Dreyblatt (US), a student of the first generation of New York minimalist composers, is driven by an inclination for rhythmic complexity built on resonance and vibration. During the past decades he has developed a number of new instruments, tuning systems and performance techniques, with which he digs even deeper under the rhythmic surfaces in order to find a rich dynamics of textures and timbres. His work remained obscure for years, until it was brought to attention by musicians such as Jim O’Rourke who described one of his albums as “the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years”. He has recently brought together an ensemble with Jörg Hiller, Joachim Schutz and Robin Hayward, which will offer a rare not-to-be-missed concert during Impakt.

Arnold Dreyblatt: Composer, Excited Bass, Laptop
Jörg Hiller: Drums, Automated Electric Guitar
Joachim Schutz: Electric Guitar
Robin Hayward: Amplified Tuba

Oren Ambarchi + Robbie Avenaim
Oren Ambachi (AU) uses the electro-acoustic transformation of his guitar as a laboratory for tonal research. The result is an abstract and fragile sound world that continuously searches the borders of time and space. He regularly collaborates with different musicians such as Fennesz, Keith Rowe en sunn0))). This time he will be reunited with his long-time friend percussionist Robbie Avenaim (AU), who explores the limits of the sound spectrum using modified and motorised drums. Together they create a visceral and kinetic audiovisual experience.

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SPECIAL EVENTS

“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
– J.L. Borges

Sunday 18 October 2009
Theater Kikker/ 15:00 – 18:00

Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez : Naldjorlak I, II, III by Eliane Radigue

The work of French composer Eliane Radigue (FR) is first and foremost an exploration of the phenomenological reality of sound : the combination of matter, vibration and resonance which ultimately determines our experience of sound. She began to experiment with electronic feedback in the 1950s, before discovering her medium of choice, the analogue ARP synthesizer. Since 2004 she has composed exclusively for acoustic instruments. ‘Naldjorlak I’, in which the hidden, complex sonority of the cello is fathomed, was developed as a collaboration with renowned cellist Charles Curtis (US). For the following parts, she required the participation of basset-horn players Carole Robinson (FR) and Bruno Martinez (FR). The result is a versatile and volatile sound world, which continuously balances on the verge of perception.

Charles Curtis: cello
Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez: basset horns

Friday 16 October – Saturday 17 October 2009
Werfkelder / 21:00

Leif Inge : 9 Beet Stretch

There are few musical works that speak to the imagination as does Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But although almost everyone in the Western world can easily hum its melody, this classic composition has not yet given away all its secrets. That’s what Norwegian artist Leif Inge does by digitally stretching out the piece to a length of 24 hours, unveiling its unknown and unheard dimensions. A marathon performance which is sure to provide a peculiar perception of time. In the words of a participant : “I thought I was a fly trapped in honey.”

Leif Inge’s (NO) monumental work in sound, 9 Beet Stretch has become emblematic of his work as an artist, even if it spreads across a great variety of forms, fields and crafts. Context and idea are given equal importance in an open play which emphasises the quality of bisociation rather than linear association; a play on the context and the definitions used to define it which functions as a cultural statement in such way that the resulting work is often hard to brand in one field rather than the other. Leif Inge’s work has been shown globally in venues like BizArt Art Center, Shanghai; Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico; Wien Modern, Vienna and Diapason Gallery, New York.

Special Thanks to: Dave Driesmans & Steve Marreyt (Kraak), Pim Verlaek (Impakt), Maurice Spijker (Mojo Music), Rebecca Prochnik (Elastic Artists).