October 2009 Archives

The city is growing ever more sentient, snapping photos of our misbehavior at intersections and tracking our movement past banks and federal buildings. Our phones let us connect with that sensing data, pointing us to the nearest Thai restaurant and illuminating the freeways in rivers of red, yellow, or, on occasion, green. As we grow accustomed to the data-driven, real-time city, though, what do we lose? That question forms the foundation for LA-based designer and research Julian Bleecker and researcher Nicolas Nova's intriguing essay, "A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing," a Situated Technologies Pamphlet recently published by the Architectural League of New York. The essay asserts a provocation, namely to rethink the fetishization of the real-time data-enabled city in order to "stretch out the space of possibility and the space of possible imaginings." What does this mean? In short, the pair is less interested in how data delivered immediately and orchestrated bureaucratically in a top-down approach may "help" city-dwellers, and instead ponder the potential for more speculative and poetic layers of information, and for a notion of the city that's not static and fixed but rather in process. In the later part of the conversation, Bleecker describes a series of objects that were designed to provoke different ways of interacting with the city, moving beyond the expected and the screen-based. "We're in the realm of epistemological monkey-wrenching broadly conceived," he explains. "Creating objects that shift meanings and provide new, unexpected points of view. Or, they may just show you the obvious, but do so in a more legible way..." Check out the essay to read about these objects, and to get a glimpse of alternative ways of considering the sentient, asynchronous city.

"It's about ritual," says Finnish live cinema artist Mia Makela (aka Solu) talking about why she chooses to perform live with moving images and sound rather than simply create a linear film or video project to screen in theaters. "It's about sharing an experience with an audience." The artist performed Kaamos Trilogy last Saturday night in LA, and as a surprise, invited the group DuoDenum, comprised of Carmina Escobar and Scott Collins, to perform along with her. The effect of their collaboration was nothing less than riveting, mainly because it was indeed live and very much improvised. Makela, Collins and Escobar met only hours before the performance, and had to hope that their sensibilities would mesh onstage. They did. The musicians brought an array of objects with which to make sound, the most powerful being a large dish of water that sloshed and dripped as the story's heroine waded through waves. Escobar's clear, haunting voice also captivated, and while you'd think that watching the musicians in tandem with the mix of video imagery would catapult you right out of the story, it instead created a sense of greater acuity. But why?

That question will get asked again tonight when the group known as Cloud Eye Control performs its own mix of live performance and multimedia. The LA-based group is made up of Chi-wang Yang, Miwa Matreyek and Anna Oxygen, and tonight (and through Sunday) they will present Under Polaris, described as "an epic journey into an Arctic wonderland," mixing projected animation, electronic music and theater. While I haven't yet seen the performance, I think the same tension will exist between a story unfolding in front of you alongside an awareness of the artists creating that experience. There's something so powerful about sliding back and forth between the story and the awareness of its telling. Read more about the group and the performance here, and buy tickets here. Image: from Under Polaris.

"It's very hallucinatory," says avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs, frankly describing the effects of viewing one of his Nervous Magic Lantern performances. He continues, "It sounds very slow, but there is endless, uncanny and unusual amounts of motion and depth taking place. People inevitably Rorschach. They're absolutely convinced that they've seen things, but it's really a combination of what I'm projecting and what they're projecting." Jacobs, who came of age as a filmmaker in the 1960s in New York (where he and his wife, Flo, founded the Millennium Film Workshops) and participated in the wild East coast film scene alongside radical filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Hollis Frampton, returns to LA next week for one of his incomparable performances and several screening events. On Monday, October 12, Jacobs will present the Nervous Magic Lantern performance Towards the Depths of the Even Greater Depression at REDCAT in which he manipulates projectors to create intense optical events. He has described the experience for his audience as one of group hallucination, and having seen one of his performances many years ago, I can verify that it is indeed unlike any other visual or cinematic happening I've witnessed. At once ritualistic with regard to the sense of shared experience, riveting in being totally unpredictable, and wonderfully psychedelic, Jacobs' live events reimagine cinema in honor of its key elements, namely image, time, space, motion and light. Jacobs will also screen several digital shorts at the UCLA Film & Television Archive on Thursday, October 15; on Saturday, October 17, Jacobs will co-present two shorts, one of which was made by his son, Azazel Jacobs, at LA Filmforum, and his new 3-D digital feature Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) will screen at LA Filmforum on October 18.

"The unifying theme is artistic vision, especially from an experimental end of the cinematic spectrum," explains REDCAT Film and Video co-curator Steve Anker describing the fall season's wonderful line-up of Monday-night screenings at the REDCAT theater. REDCAT, now in its sixth year and described as a "vibrant laboratory where innovating artists from throughout Los Angeles and around the world gather to push the boundaries of creative expression," has become a key aspect of LA's art scene, and the film and video screenings extend the emphasis on avant-garde film and video at CalArts, bringing many of the school's visiting artists into downtown LA. The line-up for the fall includes several live cinema events, including an upcoming performance October 12 by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who uses two projectors to create unique 3-D effects. "We also have a fine artist/animator form China - Sun Xun - whose work critiques Chinese culture and politics, a program curated by Cindy Keefer of recent animations from around the world that explore abstraction and continue in the footsteps of such pioneers as Oskar Fischinger, a screening and exploration of the historical importance of Jack Smith's seminal underground classic Flaming Creatures with noted critic J. Hoberman, and a screening of documentary portraits by Mexican artists that explore contemporary rural life and artistic responses." Anker notes that this theme has been central to the curatorial vision he shares with co-curator Berenice Reynaud, noting, "In every case the artist is expressing his/her own vision and personal absorption into both the medium and the subjects at hand." LA's film culture is lucky to have REDCAT! Download a PDF of the Fall 2009 schedule here.

A dark delirium of images, a disintegrated vision of a complex world - a digital version of William Blake's poetry...

This is how the work of media artist Solu (aka Mia Makela) has been described. Makela is an internationally acclaimed leader and innovator in the field of live cinema, by which I mean the live, real-time mixing of images and sound for an audience, where the sounds and images no longer exist in a fixed and finished form but evolve as they occur, and the artist's role becomes performative and the audience's role becomes participatory. The Finnish artist is fascinated by editing and argues boldly in her essay, "The Practice of Live Cinema," that "live cinema is not cinema" at all. Her assertion rests on the idea that cinema privileges storytelling, but for Makela, live cinema thrives in the exploration of the transitions between bits of storytelling sequences. Referencing the haunting shots of the dark asphalt that stretches through parts of David Lynch's Lost Highway, she writes that these kinds of shots "are the basic material for live cinema performances: the transitions, the movements, the pure visual beauty and intrigue, the atmosphere." Makela's work is rich with lush, stuttering imagery flecked with information and graphics rendered live, in real time, and in response to the audience.

I'm delighted to say that Makela will present Real Time Live, which is both a two-part, hands-on workshop at USC starting Friday, October 9, as well as a live performance on Saturday night! Get the full details after the jump...

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