Artists' Television Access

Author: Fara

  • audiovisual electroacoustic improvisation with Birgit Ulher, Jacob Felix Heule , and Bill Hsu

    Co-sponsored by  Goethe Institute.
    Bay area improvisers Jacob Heule (percussion) and Bill Hsu (electronics, interactive animations), joined by Birgit Ulher (trumpet, electronics) from Hamburg, Germany, present an evening of improvisations on acoustic and electronic instruments, and interactive video.
    Video clips:
    Birgit Ulher studied the visual arts, which still have an important influence on her music. She works mainly on extending the sounding possibilities of the trumpet and has developed her own extended techniques and preparations for producing these sounds. She performs solo, with her working ensembles, dancers, visual artists and one-time collaborations with musicians from around the world, including Ute Wassermann, Gino Robair, Bill Hsu, Leonel Kaplan, Christoph Schiller, Heddy Boubaker, Gregory Büttner, Michael Maierhof and Forbes Graham, amongst others. Concerts and festivals in Europe, USA, South America, Russia and the Middle East. Website: www.birgit-ulher.de
    Jacob Felix Heule is a percussionist and electronic musician focused on sound-oriented improvisation following the traditions of electro-acoustic improv, noise, and 20th-century composition. His playing embraces both rough-edged intensity and disciplined instrumental technique.
    Heule’s Norwegian/American acoustic noise ensemble Sult has been actively touring the US and Europe, and released its second album, Harm, in 2013. His local group Addleds (with Kyle Bruckmann, Kanoko Nishi, and Tony Dryer) was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music to hold a concert series in the fall of 2013. Heule has also been actively touring with Voicehandler, his electro-acoustic duo with Danishta Rivero, and they are currently working on a recording of the their open-form song cycle. Website: http://www.heule.us
    Bill Hsu has built systems, tools, installations and compositions in collaboration with Peter van Bergen, Chris Burns, John Butcher, James Fei, Matt Heckert, Lynn Hershman, Jeremy Mende, Gino Robair, and Birgit Ulher. He has performed and exhibited work in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He teaches and does research in the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University. Website: http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/art.html

     

  • Small Press Traffic

    Small Press TrafficSince 1974 Small Press Traffic (SPT) has been at the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area innovative writing scene, bringing together independent readers, writers, and presses through publications, conferences, talks, and our influential reading series. Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center promotes and supports writers from all over the globe—particularly those who push the limits of how we speak and think about the world. Kindly and graciously housed at the California College of the Arts, we remain autonomous and thus depend upon outside funding for our operating expenses.

    Program:

    An evening with RACHEL ZOLF featuring a film, reading and polyvocal performance from Janey’s Arcadia. With special guests SIRAMA BAJO, DAVID BUUCK and ERIKA STAITI.

  • Craig Baldwin: Sonic Outlaws

    SONIC_moped_legsCo-presented by SF Cinematheque.

    Craig Baldwin, ATA co-founder and organizer of the Other Cinema series of experimental and underground film/video and performances , is celebrated through two programs of his amazing and influential work exploiting found and archival footage embedded in countercultural sensibilities.

    1st program: 7PM (¡O No Coronado! & Wild Gunman & RocketKitKongoKit)

    2nd program:

    Sonic Outlaws, 87 minutes\16mm

    By their own reckoning, members of the Bay Area recording and performance group Negativland got themselves into trouble by having too much fun. Their prank began with a pirated audiotape of Casey Kasem, the normally boosterish-sounding disk jockey and radio personality, as he cursed a blue streak while trying to record a spot about the band U2. Sensing opportunity at hand, Negativland enthusiastically mixed these mutterings with samples from a U2 song, then put out a 1991 single on the SST label with a picture of the U-2 spy plane on its cover.

    “We didn’t know how prophetic it was that the plane was shot down,” one member of Negativland says now.”

    Sonic Outlaws, a fragmented, gleefully anarchic documentary by Craig Baldwin, approaches this incident from several directions. Some of the film is about the legal nightmare that ensued from Negativland’s little joke. In a highly publicized case, U2’s label, Island Records, charged Negativland with copyright and trademark infringement for appropriating the letter U and the number 2, even though U2 had in turn borrowed its name from the Central Intelligence Agency. SST then dropped Negativland, suppressed the record and demanded that the group pay legal fees. Trying to remain solvent, Negativland sent out a barrage of letters and legal documents that are now collected in “Fair Use”, an exhaustive, weirdly fascinating scrapbook about the case.

    Sonic Outlaws covers some of the same territory while also expanding upon the ideas behind Negativland’s guerilla recording tactics. Guerilla is indeed the word, since these and other appropriation artists see themselves as engaged in real warfare, inundated by the commercial airwaves, infuriated by the propaganda content of much of what they hear and see, these artists strike back by rearranging contexts as irreverently as possible. Their technological capabilities are awesome enough to mean no sound or image is tamper-proof today.