April 2009 Archives

Media artist Zoe Beloff mines the territory of the uncanny, invoking both the wonder and angst of the familiar as it suddenly becomes strange. In terms of tools, she prefers the old to the new, cranking up old cameras and revisiting forgotten technologies, and for stories, she channels the ghostly ephemera of Spiritualism from the 1800s. For her show this Monday at REDCAT, the artist will present two stereoscopic films, both of which unite the haunting magic of cinema and tales of psychic uncertainty. Charming Augustine concerns a 15-year-old patient of Charcot, who was prone to hallucinations. Named Augustine, the girl was sent to France's famous Salpetriere Hospital in the 1880s, where she was watched, analyzed and photographed. The resulting images capture physical manifestations of hysteria, and they're at once haunting and intriguing; what inner turmoil could cause such anguish? Beloff explains that she hopes "to show how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith." Augustine's unpredictable behavior and the film's silent cinema imagery make it fascinating, but Beloff enhances the sense that the film is from another era altogether by using 3-D. "Ultimately," she says, "what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if... a moment in time when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized." The show will also include Shadowland Or Light From The Other Side and Beloff will be present to talk about her work after the show.

The outlandish mating habits of the octopus and the surprisingly antic flips and spirals of starfish are just two of the subjects of the extraordinary French filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who began making science documentaries in the late 1920s. The Criterion Collection this week released a three-disc set of Painlevé's work titled Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé, which ably illustrates his ability to hover at the intersection of science and fiction. Painlevé was inspired by contemporary Surrealist artists and was passionate about filmmaking as both a means for documenting the world and for crafting visual pleasure. In his 1948 filmmaking manifesto, he insisted, "You will not use clever editing unless it illustrates your good intentions," adding in the next rule, "You will not show monotonous sequences without perfect justification." Nothing in Painlevé's body of work is overly clever or monotonous; instead, his work is audio-visual poetry, but designed to educate. The Love Life of the Octopus from 1965 features a dramatic flurry of graceful tentacles and gigantic suckers, while the colorful 1956 film Dancers of the Sea examines the seemingly static starfish, revealing the five-armed echinoderm's surprisingly fluid and mobile locomotion techniques. While many of us consider the science or nature documentary a particular form, Painlevé championed both the inherent beauty and mystery of the underwater creatures he studied, and the potential of an emerging form of artistic filmmaking. More information here.

Howard Rheingold describes attention as a literacy. The author of The Virtual Community and other books explains that the ability to focus your attention - with intention - is a contemporary skill, an idea ably demonstrated by the subtle and provocative film/performance Transparent Cities taking place at the Hammer Museum tonight. A collaborative effort of Madison Brookshire, April Guthrie, Michael Pisaro and Cassia Streb, the site-specific project unites sustained, unmoving shots of Los Angeles locations with audio captured in the city, and then adds a layer of music that is performed live, weaving in and around the captured material in a sometimes delicate, sometimes dense mix. The goal of the project must be, at least in part, to give busy Angelenos an experience of reflection as we watch the nearly imperceptible gradations of light throughout a day, and notice the beauty of everyday noises and their unexpected harmonies - a sprinkler sounds like a snare drum, for example. Pondering these nearly still images and listening to the city in new ways is indescribably pleasurable. You'll find yourself slowing down, settling in and then opening up to the remarkable audio/visual experience around us all the time. As a follow-up, the artists will discuss multidisciplinary collaboration and site-specific performance on Sunday, April 26.

With several large-scale outdoor projections, live performance / animation hybrids and networked conversations, Friday night's "Animated Spaces / Animated Bodies" show of experimental animation promises to highlight new forms of media experience. The show will include an immersive, multi-screen project titled Paradise by Candace Reckinger (pictured here), as well as Perry Hoberman's working simulation of a time machine titled Condemned to Repeat. The live performances include Christine Panushka's Mosca and the Meaning of Life, made in collaboration with Alberto "Bezo" Araizo; it unites performance and multiple screens to create a rich exploration of the search for truth. In describing the line-up, the program's organizer Lisa Mann notes that "animation has emerged as the most pervasive art form of the 21st century and is the core language of most digital media today." Indeed, while "animation" often connotes TV cartoons, the form is the foundation for contemporary media in the sense that media production now often functions through the disassembly and reassembly of moving images, the "de-animation" and "re-animation" of parts to make a new whole in a workflow that is pervasive in all forms of contemporary media production. Animated Spaces / Animated Bodies takes this idea a step farther, taking images off of the traditional TV or theater screen and placing them out into physical space. I'm looking forward to a dazzling night of moving artworks!

Live cinema short-circuits the stability of artist and machine, and builds on the dynamic potential of stories, images and sound rendered as fluid and continuous output. The form, which refers to the live mixing of moving images and sound in front of an audience, has exploded in the last five years, in part due to advances in media processing software. LA will have a great opportunity to see some of the best of live cinema this weekend when Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition hosts a three-day festival showcasing the form, along with examples of experimental electronic music and sound art. Titled "Resonant Forms," the showcase includes the premiere of Sheepwoman, created by San Francisco-based artists SUE-C and Laetitia Sonami, creative leaders in the world of live cinema. The pair has collaborated on several projects in the past, and both are incredibly inventive in how they use media to craft an electrifying experience. Sheepwoman "interweaves dreams with reality to engage the audience in witnessing the creation and dissolution of fleeting fantasies, blurring the boundaries of the cinema world and the real world." The event starts on Friday, April 3 at 7:00 with a panel discussion, and Sheepwoman will be performed for the first time at 8:30. Here's the trailer, and check the LACE site for the full schedule.