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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.

ATA and Alternative Tentacles present:
The Widower (7pm)

Terminal City Ricochet (9pm)

DVD + CD soundtrack release

One of the most asked-about Biafra-related projects finally seeing the light of day! Never available on VHS and rarely shown outside of Canada, this dystopian vision is as timely as ever. Jello Biafra will appear in person for Q&A.

Come at 7pm to see cult classic “The Widower,” and stay for the 9pm screening of “Terminal City Ricochet,” followed by a Q&A.

Welcome to Terminal City—one of only five livable places left on Earth.

Telegenic Mayor Ross Glimore (Peter Breck, The Big Valley, Shock Corridor), is king of all media, and rules as a virtual dictator. To maintain his grip on power he must stage an election, and for that he needs fresh fear. Enter Alex Stevens (Mark Bennett), a fed-up, cynical newspaper delivery boy who happens to witness Glimore run over one of his own supporters in his car, and leave the scene of the accident.

Glimore and his Rove-wellian henchman Bruce Coddle (Jello Biafra) hatch a plot to brand Alex “the #1 terrorist threat” (based on his connection to rock‘n’roll music which, along with meat, is banned) to cow Terminal City into submission and steal another tabloid election.

Alex flees underground, where he stumbles into a resistance movement led in part by his newfound friend Beatrice (Lisa Brown), and a fugitive brain-damaged goalie from the Glimore-owned hockey team, unforgettably portrayed by two-time Genie Award® winner Germaine Houde (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, Les bons Débarras 1980, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, Un Zoo la Nuit 1987).

Alex finds himself caught up in a plot to bring Glimore down, with the not-so-secret police (D.O.A.’s Joe Keithley and pro-wrestling legend Gene Kiniski) hot on the trail.

The DVD package comes with the soundtrack CD featuring Jello Biafra, DOA, Nomeansno, Beatnigs, Evan Johns and the H-Bombs, Nomeansno, Gerry Hannah (from the Canadian band called the Subhumans), the Groovaholics, I Braineater, Jello Biafra and D.O.A., Jello Biafra and Nomeansno, Jello Biafra and Keith LeBlanc. The Jello Biafra/D.O.A. tracks ended up being expanded into the full-length called “Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors” (virus078) also available from Alternative Tentacles.

“People should watch this before every American election.” —Jello Biafra

Featuring:

PETER BRECK as Mayor Ross Glimore

MARK BENNETT as Alex Stevens

GERMAIN HOUDE as Ace “The Savior”

GENE KINISKI and JOEY “SHITHEAD” KEITHLEY as Cops harassing Alex

The Widower
Canada, 1999
Directed by Marcus Rogers
Approx Run Time 79 Minutes, Unrated

Starring Shawn Milsted, K. Ramona Orr, Irene Miscisco, Tim Trylinski, Darren Andrichuk
with appearances by Jello Biafra, Nardwuar The Human Serviette, Joey “Shithead” Keithley

The Widower is a surreal black romantic comedy from director Marcus Rogers. Rogers has created an instant cult classic inspired by the sinister visions of David Lynch and the colorful, comic book camp of John Waters. The film is a cartoonish world of decay in a timeless, nameless city, where the very fringes of reality are starting to unravel. This is especially true for Milton, the nebbish romantic widower who is unable to face the reality of his wife’s demise… But why should he? She still talks to him.  The Widower is a creepy, kitschy comedy about love and death, blood, cops, and donuts, that has some surprisingly sweet touches among the corpses, punk rock and out-sized characters!