An afternoon of short films/kinetic visual sculptures with live experimental soundtracks by members of Cartoon Justice and guests, performing improvised electroacoustic shamanic noise jazz.
A variety of visual content inventing and remixing pasts and futures, distant traditions and local chaos, individual visions and a fractured consensus reality will be accompanied by genre-bending sounds that, like the visuals, blend repurposed style and content with the newly-created and unclassifiable. Godzilla and space aliens wreak havoc in Amsterdam while Butoh performers explore the Californian desert, Albrecht Durer gets deconstructed and reconstructed, and the audience is invited to create its own visual universe and then forced to inhabit it.
Program:
Godzilla vs the Netherlands — short film by Sietske Tjalingii from her Super Shorts Series
Two Butoh performance films by Jorge Davies:
Above & Below (performers Celene de Miranda, Don McLeod) — Jorge Davies
OutSide (performer Jacqueline McCormick) — JorgeDavies
Primoria Revisited: (kinetic video presentation) — Meg Schoerke, Mika Pontecorvo
Visit From Outerspace — Sietske Tjalingii
Roico en la nieve (performer Rocio Perez) — Jorge Davies
Dance of the Lost Souls (performers John Fairbairn, Elena Iguina, Matt Lasky, Don McLeod, Rocio Perez, Dominik Krzanowski) — Jorge Davies
Social Media Hallucinarium, a shared generative hallucination — Neal
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Elzenga, Mika Pontecorvo, and members of the audience.
Live improvised electroacoustic scores provided by members of Cartoon Justice and guests on guitar, computers, electronics, bass, drums, cello, saxophone, flutes, clarinets, vocals, assorted percussion and other sonic devices.
Filmmakers/Performers
Sietske Tjallingii graduated in 1997 from the audiovisual department of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Since then she has been producing her own shorts with her company Take T Productions. Her movies are distinguished by their ironic humor and subversive commentary on contemporary culture and society. Tjallingii has received several grants and her movies have been included in numerous international festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Slamdance, Dahlonega International Film Festival, ZoieFest USA, Interfilm Festival Berlin, Film Festival Sarajevo, Film Festival Zealand.
Jorge Davies is a musician and filmmaker currently living in Joshua Tree, California. An Argentine native, he moved with his family to the U.S. at age eight. He’s been making avant garde music and art films his whole life. His artistic obsession with pure expression is what leads him to feature Butoh and expressive dance in many of his films, both short and feature length.
Meg Schoerke is a San Francisco-based writer, artist, and professor of English literature. Her recent pen and ink series forms a post-modern reimagining of classical pen and ink technique, embodying a vital countrapuntal interplay between collage and pen and ink expression.
Mika Pontecorvo is a San Francisco-born musician, artist, and scientist. His generative process architecture research is the basis of the works of Cartoon Justice. His work has involved creative, scientific, and technical collaborations in Finland, the Netherlands, Japan, and the US.
Neal Elzenga is a San Diego born scientist, artist, and conceptualist. Neal has made a career of designing and creating systems of subtle elegance and profound conceptual depth, recasting our current expectations of media technology and intelligent systems.
Cartoon Justice started in 2006 as an alternate version of the ambient noise duo Theory Garden. Since then it has expanded into a fluid set of players finding a unique voice in their genre-defying ‘Shamanic Noise Jazz’ style, formed from the blending/bending of free improv, ambient post-industrial noisescapes, dark psychedelic folk-rock and post-rock songs with the diverse flavors of arctic/nordic/siberian song, north and sub-saharan african popular
music, and the electronic and electroacoustic traditions of Xenakis, Ligeti, Ussachevsky, … Cartoon Justice features:
Mika Pontecorvo – guitars/flutes/voice/laptop
Kersti Abrams – altoSax/clarinet/flutes
Hakan Guven – drums/persussion
Mariko Miyakawa – cello/electronics/voice
Laurie Buenafe – voice/guitar/percussion
Loren Steele – bass/bassClarinet/shortwaveRadio/electronics
Greg Baker – laptop/didgeridoo/clarinet/jawHarp
Adriane Pontecorvo – cello
With guests including
Neal Elzenga – laptop/percussion
“S.O.L.U.T.I.O.N.” is a program of short films combining environmental topics with D.I.Y. surrealism, selected by artist/curator Billy Miller. The title “Solution” refers to both the idea of reconciliation and a chemical state of suspension.