Breathing and soft, almost guttural grunts of hard work: these are the sounds that stay with you a few days after viewing Sharon Lockhart's newest film, Double Tide. The immediate experience, though, is sublime visual pleasure. The film follows the work of a woman digging clams at low tide early in the morning and then again at sunset in the same cove on the Maine coast. The morning is foggy, a soft grey landscape; the afternoon features sunset and illuminated clouds. Lockhart's camera remains still throughout the film, framing the woman at a distance and creating an incredibly captivating portrait that unfolds gracefully in real time, a space opening into duration. The LA-based Lockhart has been making these evocative films with specific formal constraints for several years. Pine Flat from 2005 is made up of 12 unmoving 10-minute shots, each of which features the sound and/or images of children from the town of Pine Flat in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Here, too, the effect is dramatic as the details that would normally be lost instead resonate powerfully. More recently, Lockhart has studied workers in Maine, with Lunch Break and Exit, both of which were shot at the Bath Iron Works shipyard earlier this year. Lockhart, who is on the faculty of the Art School at USC, invites us to reconsider cinema with these projects by paring it back to an essential core, leaving room for us to think.

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 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...

On Saturday evening, beginning at 8:30 p.m., Makela will perform live, giving viewers a wonderful opportunity to see live cinema at its best. The evening performance is free and open to all. Please come!

An algorithm is "a machine for the motion of parts," says Alexander Galloway very elegantly in his book Gaming: On Algorithmic Culture. He writes extensively about video games, arguing that they offer us insight into the structures of today's information culture. I wonder, though, if the rise in video projects that call attention to their structure isn't also a reflection of that information culture... Why? Because these projects overtly invite us to think about how information is organized...

Anyway, these thoughts are sparked by the upcoming screening of LA-based artist Cindy Bernard's film Year Long Loop, which screens at USC Thursday night (September 17, 2009). The film compiles a series of video recordings collected by Bernard, whose work includes photographs and projections that explore the relationship among cinema, memory and landscape. Captured between October 2004 and September 2005 from a ridge in Mt. Washington, the video in its full length version is made up of 12 two-hour segments in a continuous 24-hour loop. Each five-minute shot captures a day; you'll be relieved to know that the shorter, two-hour version of the film will screen at USC; in this version, the five-minute shots are reduced to 24 seconds. Find out why Bernard felt compelled to make the video, and why it can be so neatly shortened...

Bernard adds that she had been watching the films of LA avant-garde filmmaker James Benning, much of whose work is highly structured, at the same time, and had also just worked on a CD compilation called soundCd no. 2 for SASSAS (The Society for the Activation of Social Space Through Art and Sound); the CD includes John Cage's 4'33" as performed by James Tenney. Says Bernard, "These works and other similar pieces are important to me and I decided to do an homage." She continues, "That's what determined the structure - but of course it's not really about the math; it's more about attentiveness and small shifts which result in aural and visual surprises."

Asked how this project connects with her other work, Bernard makes a key observation: "Some would say that absence plays a role in much of my visual work - the emptied spaces of Ask the Dust or the "Location Proposal" works, the empty and soundless bandshells, etc. And in Year Long Loop, you are presented with a seemingly blank vista which of course isn't vacant at all..."

The video, like the work of Benning and Cage, asks you to pay attention, actively, and to note and celebrate the surprises that occur when we focus. However, that kind of attentive viewing is in tension with an awareness of structure - the number of shots, their organization, and so on. The project, then, is in a sense algorithmic, but it's also just as keenly attuned to the serendipitous events - the honking horn or buzzing fly - that within this rigorous form spark all kinds of strange pleasures.

Ronald McDonald is the gun-toting badass wreaking havoc on a Los Angeles depicted as - and inhabited solely by - logos in H5's ecstatically apocalyptic short animation Logorama. The red-headed clown tyrannizes the city, the Michelin Man tries to counter, but they're well-matched, and soon, it looks like a lot of logos are going to die. The hilarious short by the directing team from France revels less in the wild antics of its characters and the superb 3-D animation spun by its makers than in the dizzying, thrilling effect of insouciant trademark violation. And it doesn't stop - the story unfolds, the city splits into pieces, and still the logos continue, well into deep space. The not-so-subtle commentary deftly punctures consumer culture, managing to dazzle at both the low and the high end; it also marks the Flux Screening Series as, again, the place to find the best in contemporary moving imagery. The next show, coming up Tuesday, September 15, at the Hammer Museum, also features work by Jonathan Glazer, Spike Jonze, Synola and more. Oh, and if you want to read a bit more about Logorama, check out this nice interview with the makers on the Creativity site.