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DANIEL + PLOTNICK + GREEN/BRUNO +

The first of two Psycho-Geo shows sports a sterling roster of amazing SF makers, both young and old(er). In-person are Danny Plotnick, Dana Smith, Russ Forster, and Bill Daniel…all sho’ nuff art-gods walking among us! The opening half is mostly about turn-of-the-(new)-century action with a massive Mission School presence, from prodigal son Daniel‘s Quake Scam, to Margaret Kilgallen and Twist taggin’ train cars, to Rigo throwing up SOMA billboards, and to Angerame‘s SFAI (RIP)–where many of us on this program met. Russ Forster‘s banjo-busking and William Wiley‘s billboard-art (Void—now at SFO) open the evening, and the first half is closed by Sam Green/Christian Bruno‘s Pie Fight ’69 reconstruction, just 11 days before its subject, the SF Int. Film Fest, initiates its next iteration! The second half is hand-picked from a parade of Frisco decades, from the ’76 Market Street memento mori Stolen Movie (Baldwin), to the ’85 49ers Super Bowl, to the 90s Meet the Realtors (Whispered Media), to the Aughts’ Lombard Luchadores (Gorrell), to the 20-teens’ Mission Miracle Mile (Smith), to the 2023 Elevator to Stardom (Plotnick). Come early for Waymo burnings, free postcards, and Gilbert’s Shapeshifters beer, AND Bill Daniel‘s West Coast launch of his new Mostly True zine! $11

Presented at The Lab

2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 9410

Tickets 

Untitled: Sound & Images

About: Artists’ Television Access is a San Francisco-based, artist-run, non-profit organization that cultivates and promotes culturally-aware, underground media and experimental art. We provide an accessible screening venue and gallery for the presentation of programmed and guest-curated screenings, exhibitions, performances, workshops and events. We believe in fostering a supportive community for the exhibition of innovative art and the exchange of non-conformist ideas. 

Website: https://www.atasite.org/

Program:

Light Year; Paul Clipson, 2013, 10 minutes, color, optical sound,16mm film, 24 fps, USA

In 2013 the Exploratorium commissioned San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson to create an abstract 16mm film study of the area surrounding its downtown waterfront site at Pier 15. “The film showcases Clipson’s extraordinary treatment of the complex natural and cultural systems in the urban landscape, from the ephemeral rhythms of light and water to the rigid order of crosswalks and skyscrapers. Clipson’s work generally involves live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians”. For the film, an original soundtrack was written and performed by composer Tashi Wada.

Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborated with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aimed to bring to light visual preoccupations that revealed themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encouraged unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound and film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Française.

Performance: Lisa Mezzacappa, Cory Wright, Robert Lopez & Anjali Sundaram

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer. Called “one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene” by The Mercury News and “a Bay Area treasure” by KQED public radio, she has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for nearly 20 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance and visual art.

Anjali Sundaram is a media artist interested in memory, identity, imagined futures and pseudo-science. Her multimedia collaborations with the collective I, Daughter of Kong Center for Research have appeared in San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Zagreb, Croatia. Her film and video work has screened at microcinemas and film festivals nationally and abroad.

performance: Amma Ateria & Linda Scobie

Amma Ateria  derived from ‘flammable material’, is a philosophy held through her work,  — to give strength to disintegration and fragility, to rebuild from aftermath of destruction, of dust. An electroacoustic composer / sound artist, her work examines psychoacoustics in binaural beats, brainwave entrainment, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension / release, she navigates between oppositions in search of transcending moments, transforming deafening noise into self hypnosis and metamorphosis. Compositions developed during her concussion recovery, utilizes brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and lost speech. ammaateria.com

Linda Izcali Scobie is a filmmaker, programmer and projectionist living in San Francisco. Her 16mm film work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Pacific Film Archive, LA Film Forum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and XCÈNTRIC – de Barcelona. She is a projectionist at the Roxie Theater and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

performance: Joshua Churchill & Konrad Steiner

Joshua Churchill and Konrad Steiner’s collaborative performances are rendered from a wide palette of influences including musique concrète, metal, kosmische, film noir, found footage and personal film as each artist improvises the construction, layering, and movement of sound and image, respectively. Konrad’s samples clips from self-shot and hand-processed 16mm film transferred to video and, along with other sampled media. These clips are manipulated live loops using digital triggering, layering and mixing. Similarly, Joshua builds ever-shifting layers of meditative drones, ghostly melodies, and walls of distorted noise live from electric guitar, tape loops, electronics, and field recordings.

Their improvised cinema weaves a rich and ever-changing tapestry of color, mood, movement, and saturation, where the various elements drift in and out of the forefront, creating a series of cinematic events ranging from evanescent to thunderous.

performance documentation links:

https://vimeo.com/857787286

https://vimeo.com/758187172

Joshua Churchill is an Oakland-based cross-disciplinary artist whose sound and light work takes the form of both performance and installation, often blurring the line between the two. In addition to expanded cinema collaborations with filmmakers such as Paul Clipson and John Davis, he has performed as a member of multiple experimental metal and drone projects, and performs solo under the moniker Plumes. Churchill has performed and exhibited his work extensively throughout the United States and abroad.  https://vimeo.com/joshuachurchill

Konrad Steiner makes single channel videos and performs both scripted live narration and live improvised montage. His work is sourced from self-shot and hand-processed 16mm film, video and media samples. His presentation of live cinema in the theater is a loose arrangement of images and sounds loose and evocative enough to bring forth associations for the audience like a shared dream. https://vimeo.com/hugoballroom

SUSAN STRYKER ON CRONENWETT’s MAGGOTS AND MEN + TRANS SHORTS

Living right here in the City, Susan Stryker is a professor and filmmaker whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality…and is in fact one of the world’s leading experts on Trans history and sensibility. We are delighted to have her in the house tonight to introduce the premiere revival of Cory Cronenwett‘s Maggots and Men, a utopian re-visioning of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, featuring film history’s first cast of over 100 transgender actors! The hour production–written by ATA staffer Ilona Berger and shot here in SF with many of our neighbors–paints a portrait of formerly pro-Soviet sailors at the Kronstadt garrison who rebelled against the perceived failures of the new Bolshevik state. Stryker contextualizes this breakthrough work within new gender theories and practices, answering questions and affording precious insider insights. The evening is opened by 3 (maybe more?) personal essays on the non-binary experience: Benja Thompson‘s (in person) new and exquisite leafmold, Shani Heckman‘s already-classic Wrong Bathroom, and the debut of Anto Astudillo‘s How to Make an Avatar and Render my Body. Free Bud Lite to support their trans stance! $10