Blog

  • SPANISH COOKING AND ITS INDIGESTIONS

    Curated by Gonzalo de Pedro and Garbiñe Ortega.

    ATA presents some of the most the revulsive, eccentric, irreverent, acid dishes of the contemporary Spanish avant-garde cinema. Andrés Duque, María Cañas, David Domingo, Virgina García del Pino and the audiovisual collective Los Hijos are the chefs for this atypical dinner.

    UN MINUTO ANTES DE LA INVASIÓN DE GROENLANDIA (A minute before the invasion of Greenland). Los Hijos. 1 min.
    From the Playground of the audiovisual collective Los Hijos (The Sons) formed by Javier Fernández Vázquez, Luis Lopez Carrasco and Natalia Marin Sancho, a one- minute fried experiment.

    NO ES LA IMAGEN ES EL OBJETO (It’s not the image, it’s the object). Andrés Duque. 2008. 12 mins.
    “How many hours could you spend watching this card?”, Pedro P. tells José Sirgado on the film ARREBATO (Rapture, Ivan Zulueta). I keep also my favorite album from my childhood. It’s called “Man, Races and Customs”. Every page reveals me new interpretations, sometimes they are imprecise and weird about who we are and what the world is. – Andrés Duque.

    LO QUE TÚ DICES QUE SOY (What you say I am). Virginia García del Pino. 2007. 28 min.
    Profession or the lack of it as a role to play. The uniform as a costume. The workplace as a set. And in the audience, the society, hoping that the actors will adjust to the script. –Hamacaonline.net

    EL PERFECTO CERDO (The Perfect Pig). María Cañas. 16 mins.
    The perfect pig: fat, substance, steroids, complete use of it. This piece, constructed as a fable, introduces us into the creation process of derivative work and recycling culture, and searches for the hidden truth of images. –Hamacaonline.net

    DESAYUNOS Y MERIENDAS (Breakfast and Afternoon Snacks). David Domingo. 2002. 7 mins.
    The starting pistol of this outlandish visual fantasy is marked by the moment when two youths, sitting on a bed, are about to watch a film and insert a tape in their VHS. This is where the first link in a chain of stories within stories, a technique often used in David’s work, who frequently draws circles of permeable meanings. –Hamacaonline.net

    TOTAL: 64 min.

    The film series, New Landscape for the New World, starts with a program at the Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday, November 10 (for futher information visit: bampfa.berkeley.edu) and at San Francisco Cinematheque on Wednesday, November 17, at the Victoria Theater (for further information visit: sfcinematheque.org).

    We are grateful for the support of Dirección General de Política e Industrias Culturales of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Consulate of Spain in San Francisco.

  • Cartoon Justice: Hallucinarium and other diversions…

    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

    – Show quoted text –
    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.

    “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.

    This collection presents a wide range of approaches. Included in the program; cult musician/artist Genesis P. Orridge’s “Eva Adolf Braun Hitler” (which proposes that Eva Braun and the famous dictator are the same person and have been living in a basement in Williamsburg NY since WW2 !), filmmaker Ashleigh Nankivell’s “Helping Johnny Remember” which deftly portrays the sexual violence lurking beneath the surface of children’s games, artist Jonah Freeman’s untitled short which feels like a Chinatown accupressure video gone haywire, master collagist Lewis Klahr’s “False Aging” evoking the bittersweet passing of time through deft use of montage, Lisa Kirk’s mock perfume commercial “Revolution” that presents a pipe bomb as luxury item, Janie Geiser’s “Ghost Algebra” which takes the viewer on an animated journey through the use of found objects and medical illustrations to find the original meaning of the word “algebra”, Larry Carlson’s “Contact The Star People” that puts the viewer in a trance via the marriage of trippy music and visuals, Justin Lowe’s “More” which traces the graceful movement of a killer whale as it (psychedelically) travels through the water, Fritz Haeg’s short video telling the story of one man’s attempts to save the European Kingfisher bird, and finally we get a peek at Florent Tillon’s “Detroit Wildlife” that shows the ghosts of that city’s past as well as a glimpse of it’s possible future. Also on tap are a few surprises that you’ll have to be there to experience (don’t worry, it’s painless).

    Total duration of program: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
    An evening of fun for all… relax and float downstream!

    More about the filmmakers here:
    Larry Carlson
    http://larrycarlson.com/medijate/
    Jonah Freeman
    http://www.museomagazine.com/11/jonah-freeman
    Janie Geiser
    http://www.janiegeiser.com/
    Fritz Haeg
    http://www.fritzhaeg.com/
    Lewis Klahr
    http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-05-16/film/culture-consumer-lewis-klahr/
    Justin Lowe
    http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35152/justin-lowe/
    Ashleigh Nankivell
    tp://www.myspace.com/ashalinamoonshine
    Genesis P. Orridge
    http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/
    Florent Tillon
    http://joelontheroad.com/?p=5071

    About the curator:
    Billy Miller is an artist and independent curator/publisher based in NYC.

    His artwork has been exhibited internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kunstverein München, Exile Berlin, P.S.1/MoMA, L.A.C.E., John Connonlly Presents, Feature Gallery, D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Architecture Foundation London, Edlin Gallery, Galerie Du Jour Paris, and other galleries and cultural institutions. His writing has appeared in VICE, Index Magazine, NowNow, BUTT, NY Arts and elsewhere. And he is the publisher of a number of independent publications including “Straight To Hell” (a/k/a The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts).

    This particular selection has been retrofitted (to use a term common to the West Coast) for A.T.A. and this particular screening, but is based on a similar series of programs that were presented this year in Germany at Exile gallery, BASSO art space, and club Wowsville (all in Berlin, Germany). More info here: http://www.thisisexile.com/project_summercampII.html