Author: Fara

Some strange future, some strange present: video magician Jesse Malmed brings an exciting new performance and peripatetic participatory installation rooted in ecstatic improvisation, the history of experimental film and conceptual poetics. Improvised sing-alongs, Conversational Karaoke!!, deep listening, deep watching.

Zaum/Beyonsense is a program of experimental shorts surrounding the Russian sound symbolist poetry movement / utopian metaphysical experiment in a universal, poetic language. Zaum, termed first by Aleksei Kruchenykh in 1913, can be translated as beyonsense or transreason and can be conceived of in a number of ways. It marks one of the western canon’s first forays into the sonic and visual capacities of poetry.

The publication-based works of Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others are beautifully rendered lithographs of hand-written, drawn and stamped books containing shapely poems, rousing even to non-Russian speakers (many of these are now available online through the generous efforts of the Getty Research Institute from their Tango With Cows exhibition). Then, there is the performative element of the works. Many of these poems were designed to be read aloud. Their written sense is debatable, but heard, they function almost musically—beyond sense. It was the intent of its proponents for Zaum to function as an organically-crafted poetic universal language.

Indeed, it is these quixotic nods toward utopian metaphysics that make the work so alluring. This and their deft evasion of prescribed meaning.

The video and film works presented here each contain unique pathways to Zaum. Here are attempts at universal poetic languages, wading-pasts the realms of sense, attacks on and rejoicings of human voice, its processes and apparatus. Moments of participation are encouraged.

Artists include Mary Helena Clark, Joe Sandler, Zachary Epcar, Meghan O’Hara, Jesse Malmed, Max Juren, Ted Passon, Ian Jones and more.

Sound artists perform live electronic scores for experimental films.

As with experimental film, electronic musicians approach their medium with unconventional structures, pushing against conventional boundaries or definitions. This departure incorporates and celebrates unexpected ingredients and impressions, breaking open new forms not-yet-categorizable. Come check out this evening of fresh, unprecedented cross-pollinations between Bay Area sound and visual artists, never to be seen in this incarnation again!

myrmyr will perform a score for a work by Sue-C.

Kadet Kuhne will perform music scores for a new film directed by Paul Clipson and two films by Maia Cybelle Carpenter

myrmyr is Agnes Szelag & Marielle Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch) who live in Oakland, California. With the violin and cello as their basis, the duo creates an intimate chamber music atmosphere with an arsenal of electronics and instruments. They merge improvisation and experimental song forms to create works often inspired by their common Baltic heritage. Since 2004, they have performed across the West and East Coasts, and in 2009 released their debut album “The Amber Sea” on Digitalis Recordings. They are currently in production with their sophomore release, Fire Star, recorded at Shasta Mountain in April 2010.

http://www.myrmyr.net/

SUE-C. (Sue Slagle) is a visual and performing artist based in Oakland. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” Slagle synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, hand-made papers, fabrics and miniature interactive lighting effects. Slagle has collaborated with musicians such as Morton Subotnick, Luc Ferrari, Antye Greie (AGF) and Joshua Kit Clayton at a variety of international venues including the San Francisco International Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), Ars Electronica (Linz), MUTEK (Montreal), SONAR (Barcelona), MonkeyTown (NYC), and Activating the Medium (San Francisco). Her solo performances combine live imagery with a live soundtrack using her own voice, small sound effects devices and assorted electronic instruments. She currently teaches “Math & Media” at the California College of Arts (CCA) in Oakland.

Kadet Kuhne is a media artist whose work spans the audiovisual spectrum. With the goal of forming somatic experiences which can prompt visceral responses to sound and movement, Kadet openly exposes the use of technology in her practice by employing fragmented, jump-cut edits and amplifying evidence of sonic detritus. This glitch aesthetic, contrasted with layered ambient reflection, is intended to heighten tensions between motion and stasis: a balanced yet heightened “nervous system” to reflect our own. Trained in jazz guitar in her youth, Kadet became attached to the instinctive nature of improvisation which led her to the California Institute of the Arts where she studied Composition and Integrated Media. As an award-winning filmmaker she has numerous shorts that have screened worldwide including Infinite Delay, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her installations involve a combination of motion sensors, customized software and online virtual exploring themes of communication and control. Kadet’s compositions twist signal processing, FM synthesis and neurological impulses into experimental electronic ambiences that make your cilia vibrate in curious patterns. Select exhibitions and performances include the Museum of Art Lucerne, LACMA, Musees de Strasbourg, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, REDCAT, Museum of Contemporary Art-LA, Not Still Art Festival, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, The LAB, Highways Performance Gallery and the New York Underground Film Festival.

Festival.http://www.tektonicshift.com

Paul Clipson has shown his films internationally in various galleries, festivals and performance venues in Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Japan and Russia, as well as throughout the U.S. He works primarily in film, video and paper, often collaborating on live performances and installations with sound artists and musicians. Since 2003, Clipson has collaborated with sound/music artists such as Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Joshua Churchill, Brendan Murray, Robert Rich, Jim Haynes, Rosy Parlane, Marielle Jakobsons and Metal Rouge. His work has been featured in the Tanned Tin Festival, San Francisco Exploratorium, DWARS Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco Art Institute, Bay Area Now 5, the Edinburgh Film Festival, New York Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Clipson attended the University of Michigan, studying film, painting and drawing.

http://www.withinmirrors.org/

Maia Cybelle Carpenter is an artist and curator, who has built a body of research and art work around theoretical problems. In addition, she has mobilized a community of artists to wrestle with similar considerations in their creative process. Through explorations of the material specificity of film and video, which produces new dialogues with philosophical and current cultural approaches to visual form. Taking identity politics beyond overt polemics, her work engages its audience in multi-layered examinations of identity through spatial experiences. Maia positions her work against the narrative expectations of moving-image media. She received her MFA in 2001 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film/Video/NewMedia and her BA in 1997 from Barnard College, Columbia University in Women’s Studies and Film Studies.

http://www.mccarpenter.net/

For more information: www.volumeprojects.org or www.atasite.org

Co-presented by SF Cinematheque

Curated by VOLUME and Kadet Kuhne

Support for this project is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program.

A limited-edition DVD of the five commissions will be produced.

Transit and the Ballot is part of an event series aimed at encouraging citizen participation in lowering our carbon footprint, and is helping raise funds for the documentary project, MIND THE GAP, a film about sustainable transportation.  The event includes a Transit Pub Quiz, speaker Rebecca Long from the MTC talking about transit issues on the November ballot, and a spoken word performance piece by choreographer/artist Sara Shelton Mann.