Author: suki

Fine-tuning through the ultra-rich ether, we have discovered some, uh, “special” frequencies that ‘charm’, and re-animate concepts of contemporary A/V installation/performance, with jolts of juice both natural and ‘super’. Mission whiz Josh Ellingson marvels all with demos of his current works – thee eye-popping Pepper’s Ghost, as well as his re-wiring of cult director Sid Davis‘ Age 13. Anchoring the second half is a co-hit that threatens to crack through the ‘Quantum Consensus’: the US premiere of Riar Rizaldi‘s Tellurian Drama, a 20-min anomaly that asks way more that it answers, on the uses and possible abuses of an obscure Malabar Radio Antenna, on the island of Java in the Indonesian archipelago during the Dutch colonial period. Berlin skeptic Thorsten Fleisch contributes Astrogolem, his digital hypothesis on a time-traveling Nikolai Tesla, while Craig Baldwin shares his own revelations from his speculative history Spectres of the Spectrum (exc). PLUS Piercing the Unknown, Hippies High on Alpha, Clara Rockmore’s Theremin, and other inquiries into novel pop-music forms flowing from those magickal waves of electricity! $13

Other Cinema’s early April ‘split-ticket’ of “Wavelength Works” initially focuses on the Visible Range, while next Saturday’s attends to the larger electromagnetic spectrum. Among tonight’s repertoire we’ll be treated to an arguably ‘West Coast’ predilection for Light, both electric.. and from paraffin! Here’s a trifecta of optical superstars, each of whom steps up to the challenge of a live expanded cinema performance: Divya Farias and Alex Mejía bring Sleep When The Baby Sleeps, an audiovisual act for film, video, saxophone, and voice. Working in high-contrast rhythms of sound and image, the piece explores sleep not as rest, but as a paradoxical threshold—where exhaustion breeds agitation, memories loop, and the body resists its own release. Fragmented moving images, optical pulses, breath, and saxophone lines spiral between tension and surrender. PLUS: The J Lee Mobile Unit is a daring arrangement of projectors, keyboard, candelabras, and free-hanging mobiles, all synchronized by the ‘Third Hand Collective‘ to enact a marvelously playful sound/shadow-play improv. Jake Scott returns from CalArts with the premiere of his triple-projector How Everything Is Connected as the finale to this program, that also proffers pieces by Francois Miron and Craig Baldwin, so as to provide refreshing visuals between live acts. A Tommy Becker Loopy Overture welcomes all into our Dream Machine pre-show milieu. $14