+ WE ARE THE DIVIDED UNITED / 16MM & LIVE SOUND / HUONG NGO & EMCEE C.M.

A performance to accompany the film “Texas and Iran: Two Grasslands”

With this project we present to you a world where issues of individual identity and interpersonal relations are magnified on a transnational scale. The audience is divided by a human wall: a single body inhabited by two people: a being that transcends individual ego. The only way for the audience to be together again is to break down the wall and thereby destroy this transcendent being. Music plays a part in this struggle.

Organizers:
Huong Ngo was born in Hong Kong and raised in Raleigh, NC. She has exhibited her sculpture, videos, installations, and relational performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Gallery in Prague, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, as well as numerous non-profit and artist-run spaces. She is currently researching the Fluxus Movement and the Gutai Group at Columbia University.

Emcee C.M. was born in Coventry, Connecticut, in 1979. He is an everyman nobody, a loving caricature of the world’s preoccupation with the questions of work and leisure. He got an MFA at the University of Connecticut in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. He recently organized a major collaborative and interactive public project “A Lot in Our Lives” commissioned by Artspace in New Haven for The Lot. He has presented numerous unofficial and collaborative projects in public spaces, including MOBILIZE, the moving movie theater. He has shows coming up at the Bronx Museum (AIM 28) and Artists Space in New York.

+ LIGHT SLEEP WALKS / SUPER 8MM & LIVE SOUND / PAUL CLIPSON & JOSHUA CHURCHILL

Paul and Joshua met at their workspace (SF MOMA). They will be working together to create unexpected stream of conscious colleges of sound and images. The music is experimental and improvised in form with the use of guitar, voice, percussive objects, tones, and feedback.

Organizers:
Paul Clipson, San Francisco, has shown his films internationally in various galleries, festivals, and performance venues, as well as throughout the US and in the Bay Area; including the Pacific Film Archive, the YBCA, the Ftilm Arts Foundation, Artist Television Access, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He works primarily in Super 8mm film, video, works on paper and has been called “one of the city’s most ambitious filmmakers”.

Joshua Churchill is a San Francisco based cross-disciplinary artist that works primarily with sound and light in the context of site-specific installations and experimental music performances and recordings. His performance/recording work involves live processing and layering of found and generated sounds, including field recordings, guitar, voice, percussive objects, tones, and feedback. He also performs and records solo noise work under the moniker T/R. Joshua Churchill has exhibited and/or performed at Triple Base Gallery (San Francisco), National Showa Kinen Park (Tokyo), Yerba Buena Center For the Arts (San Francisco), Aqua Art Fair (Miami), Contemporary Artists Center (North Adams, MA), New Media Scotland, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal).

+ FIREWORKS FILM / 16MM & POP ROCKS / AUSTIN WILLIS

This films imagery is of 4,000 firecrackers being lit/exploded one at a time, one for each prolonged frame exposure of the film. The film itself is silent. Pop rocks (candy) will be distributed amongst the audience members to create an individualized tactile sound accompaniment for each viewer, and perhaps place the image in the mouths instead of the eyes.

Organizer:
Austin Willis lives and works in New York and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College. He was recently awarded a fellowship from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, a regional center at the University of North Carolina, for research in time-based projects.

+ #472 A / 35MM & LIVE SOUND / NASTYA OSIPOVA, LEA BERTUCCI & ED BEAR

Expanded projections using 35mm slides focus on the constitutive components of the cinematic experience. Multiple projectors are employed to create motion without obscuring the real process and technology used. Bas clarinet, baritone saxophone, are played with electronics to create performances in which the structure of the music intertwines with that of the projections. In correlation, they are in immediate awareness of the space in which they occupy.

Organizers
Nastya Osipova- ‘Cannibals starve in the white nights, such is the disaster: the night lacking darkness. Needle shines above revolving shadows. Hunger, desire: to employ whips and flashes.’ Nastya O. hopes that the future is not too bright. She is an experimental projectionist and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn who works with photography, video and sound. She is a 2007 Tierney fellow and has received a degree in photography from Bard College. Lea has played woodwinds since childhood and in recent years has taken a more experimental approach adapting amplification and electronics to her sound.

Ed Bear works with experimental electronics and video. As a musician he has toured extensively in the US and Europe playing at venues such as Issue Project Room, Free103Point9, Tonic, and The Montreal Pop Festival. “I am obsessed with the questionable calibration of human perceptual systems and how the intimate relationships between aesthetics/expectations and perceptions/experiences define the unique internal and external world of every individual. With no unbiased or succinct conclusions to the “empirical” paradox, I humbly strive for a broader and more progressive understanding of truth to share.”

+ HAPPY HOLIDAYS / 16MM & LIVE SOUND / STEVE COSSMAN & MATT MORANDI

Using the predominant color in the frame and/or figure-background relationship, the frames of this piece have been divided into categories then flipped, doubled-up, and spliced together into repeated sequence. Painstakingly collaged together on a guillotine splicer, the patterns are aimed to create visual rhythms. All of the still images were appropriated from holiday/winter themed view-master reels. Musical accompaniment will follow its pulsating beat in the style of a 50-yard dash.

Organizers:
Matt Morandi hails from Staten Island, currently works and lives in Brooklyn, NY as a composer. He is Co-Currator for a multimedia arts space in DUMBO and runs a sound studio out of an adjacent space. In addition to composition, is currently working on a solo music project under the name Pantagruel.

Steve Cossman is an experimental filmmaker working in Brooklyn NY. His hand-painted film work graces our homepage and is in the permanent collections of the Len Lye Foundation, New Zealand, the special collections libraries of the University of Seattle Washington, University of Iowa, and University of Hartford Art School. Currently he is working on a 10-minute film composed of single view-master frames entitled “Wolverine.”