Events 2010-2011

EVENTS CURATED BY MICROSCOPE GALLERY OFF-SITE

MORE INFO HERE
Exhibition curated by Microscope Gallery at White Box (NYC)

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EVENT SERIES AT MICROSCOPE:

NEPOTISM
Video Screening / Sound Performance
by Elle Burchill / Andrea Monti
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 4, 7PM
Donations Accepted

Still from: AFTERMATH (the beauty of extinction), a video by Elle Burchill, color, sound, 8.5 minutes, 2010

As the final event of our 1^st year at Microscope Gallery, we decided to break our rules on nepotism and invite each other to do a show. After serious deliberations (for real) we replied, yes! Is there anything more to say?

Elle will present a program of 5 or 6 of her new and recent short videos. Among the possibilities are works involving digital accidents and distortions, multiple screens, performance, or works shot underwater or with cell phones.

Andrea will perform an improvised sound piece using magnets and portable radios as well as scratched dvds. This is his third performance with these instruments following shows in Paris and Lucca, Italy earlier this month.

Approximately 60 minutes

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Elle Burchill is a Brooklyn based video maker. She is inspired by the unexpected and accidental. Her works often explore the fragility of our bodies and circumstances. She shoots, edits and, when needed, performs in her works. Her works have screened at cinemas, festivals and galleries including: Anthology Film Archives, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, Scope Art Fair, White Box, Issue Project Room, Light Industry, Academia di Bella Arti di Brera, Milan Italy, Loris Gallery Berlin and many others.

Andrea Monti is an Italian artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His work ranges from assemblages of plastic bags and drawings, to sound, video and performance. It often explores the boundaries between visible/non-visible, audible/non-audible. Currently, he is working on a new series of transparent collages and sound performances involving scratched cd’s, portable stereos, cassette recorders and magnets.

Images are courtesy of ourselves

INGRID GREY
Reading & Performance
w/ opening reading by Brian Kalkbrenner
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 7PM
Admission $6 – tickets at door

We welcome writer and performer “Ingrid Grey” to Microscope on the occasion of the publication of her first book. This is an event we have looked forward to since opening night last year.

Absurd? Yes. Out to make sense? Not really. Butoh cowboy and writer, Ingrid Grey is a hybrid of feminine, masculine energy loosely bound into one man. S/he explores her inner nature and the trappings of her psyche through palsied motion, glossolalia, prose snippets, and poems. Hear her read from her latest work, “Rodents in the Penile Garden” just released this week. Then see her perform her latest body solo composition, “Imago,” based on the larval to imaginal stages of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. One night only!

Poet Brian Kalkbrenner also reads.

Approximately 60 mins

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INGRID GREY (former student of Butoh artists Atsushi Takenouchi, Diego Pinon, and Vangeline) lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This is her first performance.

BRIAN KALKBRENNER is a poet and author of Foul Feelings, published in 2011.

GREGORY SMULEWICZ-ZUCKER
16mm Black & White Films
Introduced by Jonas Mekas
Artist in Person!
Admission $6

Filmmaker and writer Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker screens his most recent 16mm film along with several earlier shorts. Jonas Mekas, who previously presented Smulewicz-Zucker’s in a solo screening at Anthology Film Archives, will introduce the filmmaker. Smulewicz-Zucker’s films are delicate black & white abstract works, exploring and experimenting with light.

“Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, and Jonas Mekas are the principal filmmakers who influence my work. Brakhage’s and Kubelka’s experiments with light articulate the essential vocabulary of cinema. Brakhage’s films also infuse the modern world with a new sense of the mythic, linking it more closely to human experience. I understand Mekas as a humanist reaffirming the importance of aesthetic experience in the everyday. For me, these elements – the exploration of the basic language of film, the use of film to convey new myths, and the use of film to celebrate everyday experience – have been ongoing concerns. In the structure of my films, these elements have, most often, been linked together in the form of a progression.

I have tried to chart the move from the fundamental experience of light, through its gradual articulation into identifiable images, and, finally, to the place of human experience in structuring these images. While this larger aesthetic project remains incomplete, the film that premieres in this program is my latest effort in tracing this development. The older films in this program are less focused on the human element, but also represent efforts to replicate aspects of human visual experience.”

TRT: Approx 50 minute program

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Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker is a writer and filmmaker living in New York. He is currently the Managing Editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (www.logosjournal.com). His films have been shown at Anthology Film Archives. His writings on film have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail. He is the editor of three forthcoming books: Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics (Lexington Books), The Politics of African Independence: A Reader in African Political Thought (Hackett) and Class, Culture, and the Public Intellectual: Stanley Aronowitz and his Critics. He was educated at Hunter College, CUNY and King’s College, The University of Cambridge. He is a PhD candidate in the History program at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

‘LECTRIC COLLECTIVE Presents NYC Poets:
Dan Hoy, Ariana Reines, Rachel Zucker, Rob Fitterman
THURS JULY 28, 7:30 PM
Tickets $6 – reservations recommended at info@microscopegallery.com

Microscope Gallery is pleased to welcome Oakland-based group ‘Lectric Collective for the NYC leg of their cross-country tour. They have invited four exciting New York-based poets: Dan Hoy, Ariana Reines, Rachel Zucker, and Rob Fitterman to read from their works. Each will read for about 20 minutes.

Reines, Zucker, Fitterman & Hoy represent a range of poetic methodologies and approaches that specifically enhance and challenge modes of being American. Is there a decision made when text is ripped out of thin air, when empire becomes the language of the internet, and the life experience of strangers fills pages that are then authored and given a value? In this culminating moment of the Collective’s summer tour, these four poets promise varied responses to our series of poetic investigations and inventory of spatially contingent art.

‘Lectric Collective is a group of California-based writers that formed the collective in order to incite conversation between contemporary poetry and other art forms. With their tour ‘Lectric Collective is working to document the poetic landscape of the United States and encourage cross-genera collaboration through readings, interviews, and other public happenings. For this show at Microscope, they will distribute letterpress postcards to be used to create a response (visual or other) to contemporary poetry, mailed to Oakland, and included in a wall-sized installation and (hopefully) an eventual publication. The group’s tour includes stops in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Denver, Lincoln, Iowa City, Detroit, Boston, DC, New Orleans, Austin and many others. More info and full schedule is here: http://www.lectriccollecti ve.com/

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Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn, NY and is the author of Omegachurch (Solar Luxuriance, 2010), Polaroid (Wrath of Dynasty, 2010), and Glory Hole (Mal-O-Mar, 2009). He currently contributes to the collective blog www.montevidayo.com, and previously co-edited SOFT TARGETS (2006-2007), a magazine of art, literature, and philosophy. More info: www.thepinupstakes.com.

Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, Fence: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar:2006, Fence: October 2011), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar: 2010), and Mercury (Fence: November 2011). TELEPHONE, her first play, was commissioned and produced by the Foundry Theatre in 2009, with two Obies, and was published in PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS. Volumes of translation include The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of a Revolutionary Whore (2009) by Jean-Luc Hennig and Preliminary Notes Toward a Theory of the Young Girl (2012) by TIQQUN, both for Semiotext(e), and My Heart Laid Bare (2009) by Charles Baudelaire, for Mal-O-Mar. She met members of the ‘lectric collective as Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at UC Berkeley in 2009.

Robert Fitterman is the author of 10 books of poetry including: The Sun Also Also Rises, war the musical, Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(Edge Books), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Press), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press), This Window Makes Me Feel (www.ubu.com). Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award (2000)” and Metropolis 16-29 was awarded the Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year Award (2003)”. With novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival (2004) and the Lincoln Center LatinBeat Festival (2004). He has been a full-time faculty member in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program since 1993. He also teaches poetry at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.

Rachel Zucker is the author of seven books, most recently, Home/Birth: a poemic (co-written with Arielle Greenberg) and Museum of Accidents. She lives in New York with her husband and their three sons. Currently she teaches at New York University and is studying to become a childbirth educator.

Below: Ariana Reines

Alex McQuilkin: The first 10 years
ENCORE! – MONDAY JULY 25, 7PM
Artist in person!
Admission $6

McQuilkin’s flaky bravery, her insight and in-your-faceness suggest she’s an artist to reckon with.
Let’s hope she doesn’t crack up first. — Jerry Saltz, Village Voice, 2006

After Saturday night’s intense show, we decided to add an encore. We don’t do this very often. Alex is adding 2 rare works to this program.

We are very pleased to present a comprehensive screening program of works by young video artist Alex McQuilkin. McQuilkin began working with video while still in her teens, and the program features works ranging from the controversial “Fucked” made in 1999 to the premiere of her most recent video “Unbreak My Heart”. McQuilkin’s works investigate the way narratives and other story lines are transmitted—through myths, fairytales, literature, the visual arts, and interpretations of archeological artifacts—and the manner in which cinematic forms contribute to that propagation, including the presentation of our own selves to others.

“I first encountered the works of Alex McQuilkin in 2002 when she was an undergraduate student. What struck me was the contrast between this fresh-faced girl (several pieces were made when she was a teenager) and the fearless and confident manner in which she was dealing with very ambitions material. Almost a decade later, I still have images from the handful or so videos I saw at the time in my head: a dual in the Wild West where the weapon of choice is not a gun, but a killer bikini bod; a young woman protagonist – McQuiklin herself as in all her works – covered in blood and dancing around wildly to music in her room, and McQuilkin lying on a bed, focused on putting on make-up while a guy aggressively penetrates her. Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, at some level, but more than that they were intelligent, fully realized works. I liked them very much.” EB

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McQuilkin lives and works in New York City. Her works have screened or exhibited internationally and in the US including: PS 1; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Marvelli Gallery, NYC; Galerie Adler, Franfurt; KW, Berlin; Schrin Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Tufts University; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea; Rome; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid and many others.

PROGRAM

ACT I:

Fucked
1999, Single Channel Video, 3 minutes 17 seconds
“Fucked” is McQuilkin’s debut feature where the voyeuristic aftertaste is enhanced through the video’s intentionally imperfect technical realization, intensifying the impression of private video material which has since been a staple of the artist’s work. A young woman attempts to apply a full face of makeup while being penetrated from behind. An act of supposed intimacy is transformed into a violent struggle as the increasingly aggressive thrusting obstructs the characters ability to perfect her image.

Indefinite Line
2000, Single Channel Video, 3 minutes
A young woman crawls on hands and knees down a city sidewalk determinedly following a paper trail adorned with Prozac capsules. Unaware or unconcerned with the camera directly in front of her, she methodically uses her teeth to remove and consume each pill as she crawls.

Get Your Gun Up
2002, Single Channel Video, 2 minutes 30 seconds
Music: Ennio Morricone, The Good the Bad and the Ugly Motion Picture Soundtrack
Exploring female machoism and competition through the typically male lens of the Spaghetti Western, this psychological showdown borrows scenery, staging, editing and Ennio Morricone’s epic soundtrack from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the bad and the Ugly.

Teenage Daydream: It’s only Rock’n’Roll
2002, Single Channel Video, 2 minutes 30 seconds
Music and Sound Mix by Elijah B. Torn and Satoru Luke Chayavichitisilp
The viewer is witness to a private performance in which a young girl, slathered in the blood of a victim whose legs protrude from underneath her bed, dances herself into a trance. Fake gun in hand, she performs her hyper-sexualized fantasy in her bedroom as though the star of her own music video, the blood and corpse of her victim just another cliché prop for the achievement of her vision.

Test Run
2004, Single Channel Video, 2 minutes 42 seconds
Test Run explores a romantic fantasy of suicide. The character films herself in the attempt of drowning in a bath tub, watching herself in the LED screen which is reflected above her forehead underwater. On one level it exposes the appeal of suicide as a “time out”, escape and relief. On another level it reveals the superficial appeal of suicide as a cinematic fantasy instilled in us through the illustrations of the tragic hero taking her/his own life on the screen.

Seven Minutes In Heaven
2004, Single Channel Video, 7 minutes
Two versions of the artist as protagonist coyly and unsuccessfully attempt interaction each while in a closet for seven minutes. Taking its title from a high school make-out game, the supposed heaven of intimacy is transformed into a painfully awkward psychological vacuum of pressure and paralysis.

The Ranch
2005, Single Channel Video, 3 minutes
The Ranch is the first work in which McQuilkin, replacing music with speech, approaches the complexity of romanticized imagery from a different side. Eroticized and highly edited footage of a girl lolling lazily on the white sheets of her bed are set off and against a casual and stoic voice over relaying a tragic story of a stay in a mental institution and a half-hearted attempt at suicide.

ACT II:

Romeo and Juliet (I Wanna Be Claire Danes)
2006, Single Channel Video, 7 minutes 54 seconds
Music: Richard Wagner from “Tristan und Isolde”
McQuilkin performs the roles of both Romeo and Juliet in this melodramatic recreation of the final scene from Baz Luhrmann’s movie adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Shot on a green screen with no background inserted, the characters exist in a virtual void. With a mixture of irony, seduction, and painful sincerity, the characters are forever isolated from each other through their own cinematic self-indulgent performances.

Joan of Arc
2007, Two-Channel Video Installation, 5 minutes 35 seconds
Music: Richard Einhorn “Voices of Light”, performed by Anonymous 5
Sound mix by Elijah B. Torn
Projected in 2 channels, images of Maria Falconetti performing the tile role of Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc with are paired with images of the artist attempting to mirror that performance. In the left, channel, Falconetti’s face fills the screen and close ups of her expressions guide the viewer through her condemnation, the shearing of her hair, to her slow death at the stake. Her movements are channeled into the right frame through McQuilkin’s body as she cuts off her hair, shaves it to a bristle and mimics Falconetti. The liturgical music of Richard Einhorn underscores a voice-over in which the artist’s voice wavers between historical fact and confessional revelation. This wavering mimics the visuals, legitimizing Falconetti’s performance as history while positing McQuilkin’s actions into a fictional present that is both sincere and absurd.

I Wish I Was a Beam of Light
2009, Single Channel Video Projection, 3 minutes
A young female protagonist attempts transcendence through the channeling of Catherine Deneuve as the figure of psychologically and sexually deranged Carole Ledoux in Roman Polanski’s 1965 psycho-thriller “Repulsion. McQuilkin places herself before her camera in the posture of the near comatose Ledoux, as portrayed by the notoriously stoic Deneuve, lying on her bed beneath a solitary beam of light, paralyzed and traumatized by the barely perceptible sounds of her sister’s sexual encounters in the room above her. The artist blends footage of herself with that of Deneuve, alternating the intensity of each so that one is not sure if what he sees is McQuilkin trying to emerge through the face of Deneuve or vice versa.

Unbreak My Heart
2011, Single Channel Video Projection, 7 minutes 5 seconds
Music: Toni Braxton, “Unbreak My Heart”
Sound Mix: Elijah B. Torn
Latin Voice Over:
“A Woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of a woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil” – The Malleus Maleficarum

The allegory of the hysteric is interlaced with allusions to the witch,. Lines from the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witch) are read aloud by a little girl- as a seemingly lifeless girl comes to life and performs a striptease to Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart”, her body disappearing with each item of clothing removed.

New Additions:

Teenage Daydream: In Vain
2003, 2 minutes
Music and Sound Design by Elijah B. Torn and Satoru Luke Chayavichitsilip
Teenage Daydream: In Vain, like its predecessor, Teenage Daydream: It’s Only Rock and Roll, adopts the form of home-made music video. Fiction and reality clash violently as the protagonist struggles to hold on to an imaginary stardom.Playing with the romanticized image of a young girl cutting her wrists, the short video depicts (from the vantage point of the mirror) the immediate aftermath of a young girl’s suicide attempt as she tries to liken it to a romanticized through makeup and MTV-ish cinematic effects (think Ceclia in The Virgin Suicides). Teenage Daydream: In Vain, together with Teenage daydream: It’s only Rock and Roll can well be read as a pointed commentary on the tendency of a devoutness to Hollywood that replaces one’s own fantasies in favour of a never-ending stream of readily prepared desirable identities delivered through media into the privacy of one’s own four walls.

Desperado
2006, 4:17
Music by Don Henley/The Eagles
An exploration of suffering in which the young protagonist videotapes herself wavering between sincerity and apathy as she lip-syncs to her own karaoke adaptation of the Eagles’ “Desperado”. Torn between “losing herself” to a painful and self-indulgent identification with the music and a self-conscious awareness of her own performance for the camera, she slowly falls out of sync with her own pre-recorded heartfelt singing. In an anti-climax more desperate than the originally intended karaoke performance, the channeling of her pain is transferred from the song to the camera’s gaze.

TRT: approx 60 minutes

All images are courtesy and copyright of Alex McQuilkin
From the top: stills from TestRun, Teenage Daydream: It’s Only Rock’ n’Roll, and I Wish I Was a Beam of Light

KELLY SPIVEY
SUPER 8 AND 16MM FILMS
SUNDAY JULY 17, 7PM
Admission $6

We present a program of short Super 8 and 16mm films by New York filmmaker Kelly Spivey made from 2000 to the present. Spivey’s films explore themes of class, gender, women’s roles and more recently, anxiety, especially in relationship to our increasingly frenetic urban lifestyles, and the potential for information overload. Spivey works exclusively with film, many of which are collage/animation works. She will also screen footage from a two new works in progress. Spivey has been making experimental films since 1998.

Her work has screened nationally and internationally at venues and festivals including Anthology Film Archives, Women in the Directors Chair, FLEXFest 2011, MIXNYC, San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, Ladyfest Seattle, Ocularis, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, ReelNY PBS. She has received support from the Queens Council on the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, and she was a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellow in 2005. She works in New York City in post-production sound and picture editing and video preservation at MercerMedia.

PROGRAM INCLUDES:

Why You Were Born (2001, 6 minutes, Super-8mm)
Kodachrome Super-8 animation that utilizes found images delicately cut from magazines from the 1940s-70s. A hand-held camera creates agitation and a frenetic frame speed penetrates women’s roles shown in advertising, shattering them and offering humorous feminist solutions.

Poor White Trash Girl: Class Consciousness (2003, 6 minutes, 16mm)
A semi-autobiographical fictional animation, based on the life of a poor white girl who lives amidst Fisher Price Little People.

Keep Up With Medicine (2001, 3 minutes, super 8mm)
Animating vintage advertising images cut from magazines, this film makes a connection between gender roles societal pressures and our need medicate. Getting shots, popping pills, and curing ills are practices examined and put under the micro lens of my super 8mm camera. The results of this medical exam are alternative routes to health and well-being.

Me, Myself & I (2003, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Using paper dolls, magazine cutouts, and vintage valentines, this film plays with ideas of metamorphoses, gender variance, narcissism, and, somewhat subliminally, President George W. Bush.

Make Them Jump (2009, 11 minutes, 16mm)
Optically printed from found footage of animals with children, with subliminal messages… an experimental film that uses snippets from discarded educational films including a bullfrog-jumping contest, a story of a child in a Harlem project who finds an abandoned duck, and a girl whose best friend is a cow. Repetition, time and sound manipulation, and not least of all – humor, all reside within the film frames of this project. Inspired by the Rachel Carson quote: “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility,” the film digs frame-by-re-photographed-frame for the underlying, yet now tenuous beauty in nature and our awkward, yet increasingly poignant relationship with animals.

Stein’s Cow (2000, 3 minutes, super 8mm)
Stein’s Cow is a short experimental animated film using Xerox cut-outs. It was originally shot on super8 film, hand-processed and rit-dyed fuchsia. Stein’s Cow is a visual play on the usage of the word “cow” in Gertrude Stein’s love poetry. Theorists believe Stein used the word “cow” symbolically in place of the work “orgasm” in her writing. Was this an attempt at hiding the lesbionic nature of her writings, or a playful, inventive re-assignment for the somewhat medical sounding “orgasm?”

What if the World Loved Cellulite? (2000, 6 minutes, super 8mm)
Join a familiar icon in a world where the beauty ideal has taken a turn. Dimpled thighs and rounded bellies are what this doll is after. How will she attain her desired physique? What’s a skinny girl to do? Find out how this broad finds happiness in What if the World Loved Cellulite?, an animated short, originally shot on super 8 kodachrome film. 2000 (click on image to view YouTube excerpt)

Plus camera rolls from 2 new works in progress.

All images are courtesy and copyright of the artist

LUCA LEGGERO
Over 425,000 ways to make noise with your smartphone
FRIDAY JULY 15, 7PM
Free Admission

“Not really understood in his hometown, Luca Leggero is an inexplicable phenomenon existing in one of the Italian fortresses of conservatism, and definitely a sparkle of hope for the small town of Lucca, Italy. I myself haven’t fully understood yet what he is doing. His work benefits from the unlimited boundaries of the net and from the resistance he finds in the physical environment he lives in. Doing what he does in the place he does it, is one of the most revolutionary things I can think of. He is therefore a friend particularly welcome to Microscope…and to New York!” A M

We welcome new media artist and musician Luca Leggero from Italy for a special night of sound performance. Leggero will present for the first time in the US his new project Over 425,000 ways to make noise with your smartphone, a sound improvisational performance made entirely by using a cell phone and a loop-station. Through the non-conventional use of the smartphone’s apps, he creates ever-changing sound textures by alternating free, ambient and junk-pop deliriums. Additionally, iPod clouds, a looped visual piece inspired by Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds will be on view.

Luca Leggero is an Italian new media artist and musician. His work is known for offering a personal new reading of art history. His project net.art loves old.art, offers electronic reinterpretations of classic artworks made by other net artists as well as his own works such as Malevich HTML, an HTML-based version of Malevich’s Black Square and Fluxlines, where Leggero shows only 1-pixel-wide lines out of 37 short Fluxus films playing. He is also a member of Italian multi-media collective and avant-POP, hack-rock, proto-noise, indie rock band MAIS. More info at http://lunk.altervista.org

DALI DALI!
MONDAY JULY 11, 7PM
A night of rare works featuring Salvador Dali
Admission $6

We have assembled a program of rare films, video, and other footage we were able to get our hands on featuring the enigmatic artist and icon Salvador Dali. The works spanning 5 decades range from highly personal footage of Happenings Dali staged around New York in the early 60s by Jonas Mekas and a 1978 Anton Perich video of Dali in his Suite at the Saint Regis Hotel – during a John Stevens fashion shoot and while being serenaded by Tinkerbelle – to footage of public appearances, commercials, a self-portrait documentary piece narrated by Orson Welles and others surprises.

Highlights of the 80 minute program include:

Salvador Dali, by Anton Perich
video, 9 minutes, 1978
The video was shot at Dali’s suite in St. Regis hotel in NY. There was a photo shoot of nude silver-painted girls by John Stevens. Tinkerbelle talked with Dali, and sang for him Hello Dolly. Dali was annoyed by it and left.

Dali at Work, by Jonas Mekas
16mm transfer to digital video, 8 minutes, 2006
In 1963-64, Salvador Dali did a series of “Happenings” events in New York. In all cases Peter Beard acted for Dali as both production manager and casting director. The stars of the events in this film are the model Verushka and actor Taylor Mead. Music by Dalius Naujo.

Dali & Moires, by Jonas Mekas
Sound: Voices of Prof. Oster and Salvador Dali
16mm transferred to digital video,4.5 minutes 2006
This was filmed on January 24, 1964 during Profesor Oster’s demonstration of Moiré patterns. He is shown with Salvador Dali.

A Soft-Self Portrait, designed & performed by Dali, narrated by Orson Welles
video, 55 minutes, 1970
Filmed on location at Dali’s villa in Port Lligat Spain, the work visually explores Dali’s outrageous world, his art, and his philosophies. Narrated by Orsen Welles, designed, masterminded and acted by Dali himself.

Plus footage of appearance, commercials and other surprises!!

TRT: approximately 80 minute program

TWO PERFORMANCES in collaboration with Grace Exhibition Space
Presented by 23 Windows Arts Collective
Timo Viialainen, Finnish sound & performance artist on tour in America
Dok Gregory & Masha Gitin: Future Dream Transmissions, a collaborative sound & text performance
SATURDAY JULY 9, 7PM
Admission $6

Helinski based sound & performance artist Timo Viialainen, currently on tour in North America presenting a series of unique performances using a video camera as his primary tool joins us Saturday at Microscope. Through live date collection (video and audio from camera) of the room, audience and acoustic sound sources the piece evolves in real time into an A/V composition. Opening the night is a collaborative performance, Dream Transmissions, by Masha Gitin (text, voice) and Dok Gregory (live electronics). The piece is an exploration/contemplation/communication of dreams from the future through present time exercises in text and sound. Cut up texts are derived from a series of collage paintings and automatic writings, with music composed and performed on a custom made modular synthesizer system and theremin.

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Timo Viialainen 1981 (FIN) is a Helsinki-based sound and performance artist who explores the areas of conceptual art through various symbolic images, acts and the use of light, video and sound controlled by interactive intuitive interfaces. The series of performances presented in the “American tour 2011″ focus on using a video camera as an instrument combined with background material which have a strong ritualistic sense. His aim is “to achieve an intuitive cathartic experience by taking the performance to an area where our usual ways of sensing and perceiving the world around us stop dominating us and we open up to something new.” Timo Viialainen is a member of “Lábas”, a forum for experimental arts operating in Finland. Lábas has organized over 80 events in Finland and abroad and has contributed significantly to the Finnish field of performance art, sound art and forms of live art experiments which lack any clear definition.

Dok Gregory (Doktor23) has been composing, performing and recording experimental/electronic music since 1983. His current projects include Zero Gravity Thinkers (NYC) with Peter Principle/Zemi 17 zgt.me and Silence Corporation (NYC/SPb, Russia) with Pavel Mikheev/Alexei Pliousnine/VJ Yuri Elik, and various guests. He has been a member of NYC based audio visual group Amoeba Technology since 1997, toured and performed in festivals throughout the United States, Europe, Russia and South America and had recorded works released in most of the same. Doks’ audio-visual works have been featured in programs at the Forum Des Images in Paris, Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, The Kitchen and Lincoln Center in NYC, to name a few. In 2007 he began work on the ISRS system (a shortwave radio synthesizer) and continues to research, develop and deploy the technology. Dok has also toured and collaborated extensively with Incidence Transmission Network, Psychic TV, Akashic Currency Bureau, Trance Pop Loops and the Ransom Corps. For this performance, a VTOL* modular synthesizer system, theremin and analog synthesizer will be used. He is and has been based in Brooklyn, N.Y. for the past 20 years, and is co-director of the 23 Windows Arts Collective with Zemi 17. *Designed and built by Russian musician/DIY synth builder/circuit bender VTOL (Dmitry Morosov) vtol.tk

Masha Gitin was born by the Black Sea. She is a painter, muralist, and mixed media artist working and living in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown in various venues and galleries around NYC including the WAH center, and the Brooklyn museum. The work she will presenting is from a recent project using cut ups of found text and phrase samples explores a visual wall of pattern and information connected together through an exercise of selective association. Excerpts of these collages when read aloud, take on new aspects of meaning and form.

Grace Exhibition Space is the singular gallery in New York City devoted to Performance-Art. It is committed to exhibiting the premier artists in the world, whether emerging, mid-career or established.
Grace Exhibition Space is Directed by Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson and opened in 2006.

DALIUS NAUJO
Broken Wrists Performance
SUNDAY JULY 3, 7PM
Admission $6

We are very excited about Dalius Naujo’s one-of-a-kind performance. The musician and conductor is currently healing from a very recent accident that resulted in 2 broken wrists. He is officially unable to play music. However, this is not stopping him. He writes:

“I will play drums, percussion and trombone the way I never did before, with my broken wrists,very carefully.. not putting stress on my wrists and hands. Let see how it will sound and where it will lead. Simply my hands will be in splinters.”

Duration: approx. 45 minutes

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Born in Lithuania, Dalius Naujokaitis became an avant-garde feature of the 1980s Vilnius jazz scene performing with Juozas Milašius, Vladimir Chekasin, Petras Vyšniauskas, Skirmantas Sasnauskas and others. He moved to New York in 1995 and conducted a series of performances at Anthology Film Archives. Shortly he became involved with the Free Music on Second Street group, and began partaking in the Now We Are Here Orchestra’ projects with Jonas Mekas (vocal). At the same time Dalius collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs in “Lumiere/Naujokaitis/Jacobs: Nervous System Concerts, also with modern dance group “Limbic Six” and Tiny Mythic Theatre. Naujo’s music has been featured in several of Jonas Mekas’ films and has played and recorded with a variety of New York bands including Kenny Wolleson’s Himalayas and Wollesonics, Art Baron, Butch Morris, Joey Barron, Briggan Krauss, Jeff Ballard, Brazilian Girls, Tim Keiper, Jonathon Haffner, Otomo Yoshihide, Rocco John Group, and On Davis’ Cartoon Satellite. Naujo also leads and drums for New York based avant-garde music group Untyte, which performs ancient Lithuanian folk tunes with a downtown NY edge.

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Best of FLEXfest 2011
presented with UnionDocs
SATURDAY JULY 2, 7PM
Artistic Director of FLEXfest, Roger Beebe, in attendance to present the program.
Admission $6 – Please rsvp to: info@microscopegallery.com

Above: Still from The Voyagers by Penny Lane

Roger Beebe, Artistic Director of the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival visits NYC with highlights from this year’s festival. Beebe’s international mini-tour most recently included programs presented in May & June in Berlin. The impressive line-up of emerging and established artists includes: Steve Cossman, Sam Green, Christopher Harris, Zach Iannazzi, Georg Koszulinski, Penny Lane, Katherine McInnis, Jesse McLean, Steve Reinke, Vanessa Renwick, Richard Tuohy, and Naren Wilks. Several of the New York-based artists also be in attendance.

FLEX is interested in an expansive notion of experimental media. “Work may draw on documentary, animation, avant-garde, underground, or other traditions—-or no traditions at all.“ The programming includes a variety of mediums from 16mm direct animation to found video and from laconic place studies to experimental love poems.

PROGRAM

Hadley Grass
Zach Iannazzi (3 min,16mm, 2009, San Francisco, California)
Tumbled syllables are bolts and bullets from the blue.

Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Biggest Shopping Mall
Sam Green (13 min, DV, 2009, Brooklyn, New York)
Built in 2005, more than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou in southern China was designed as a celebration of middle-class consumption and spectacle. Often evoked as a symbol of China’s economic emergence as a superpower, the reality is much more complex. Four years after it opened, the South China Mall sits almost empty, a foreboding metaphor for the future of global capitalism.

Iron-Wood
Richard Tuohy (7 min, 16mm, 2009, Australia)
Iron-Wood is an abstract visual exploration of the deeply fissured ‘cog-like’ bark of the Australian tree Eucalyptus Sideroxylon.

The Voyagers
Penny Lane (16:30 min, DV, 2010, Claryville, New York)
In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth. According to Carl Sagan, “[t]he spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says somethingvery hopeful about life on this planet.” While working on the golden record, Sagan met and fell madly in love with his future wife Annie Druyan. The record became their love letter to humankind and to each other. In the summer of 2010, I began my own hopeful voyage into the unknown. This film is a love letter to my fellow traveler.

Horizon Line
Katherin McInnis (1 min, HD, /2009, Brooklyn, New York)
Horizon Line excavates the relationship between social and natural geography of Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the first prisons in the United States. The walls were painted to reflect the horizon line outside the walls; the prison’s decay has turned this two dimensional land and sky into intricate textures and layers: a physical incarnation of the passage of time.

Somewhere Only We Know
Jesse McLean (5:15 min, DV, 2009, Chicago, Illinois)
Standing on the brink of elimination, the suspense threatening to fracture their composure, contestants wait and see if they will be going home. The audience at home is also waiting…Part two of the Bearing Witness Trilogy. Bearing Witness is a trilogy concerned with how we, as a culture, watch ourselves, especially in moments of great emotional significance. With footage culled from mainstream media and television, the single-channel videos (The Eternal Quarter Inch, Somewhere Only We Know, The Burning Blue) distill moments of sincerity from perhaps insincere sources (televangelists, reality show contestants, screensavers, B-movies). This trilogy puts pressure on the infrastructure of disturbing images, particularly those that represent what might have normally been private experiences made public for the sake of entertainment. Located in interstitial spaces, these videos continually shift the role of the viewer between voyeur and participant.

Beaver Skull Magick
Steve Reinke (5:53 min, DV, 2010, Canada/Netherlands/Chicago)
The relation between man and nature. A bear in an infamous Internet clipping and an ‘Indian’ in an old Canadian television series. Where two worlds collide.

Tusslemuscle
Steve Cossman (5:00 min, 16mm, 2009, Brooklyn, New York)
The work presented is a reflection on humanity’s ecological relationship and the ritual of restoration. The violent pulse speaks with a sense of urgency and chaotic struggle while the hypnotic arrangement keeps us in blinding awe to its condition. TUSSLEMUSCLE is composed of 7,000 single frames, which were appropriated from view-master reel cells. Each frame was hand-spliced to create a linear film-strip. Jacob Long created the score.

Portrait #2: Trojan
Vanessa Renwick (5:00 min, 35mm to DV, 2006, Portland, Oregon)
Score by Sam Coomes of Quasi/Shot by Eric Edwards
Trojan Nuclear Facility, Oregon’s powerful iconic landmark, goes adios.

White House
Georg Koszulinski (8:00 min, DV, 2009, Gainesville, Florida)
Three compositions in a single shot investigate the people, politics, and space in front of the White House.

28.IV.81(Bedouin Sparks)
Christopher Harris (2:49 min, 16mm, Jan. 2009, Orlando, Florida)
Approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence.

COLLIDE-O-SCOPE
Naren Wilks (3:24 min, Super 8mm to video, 2010, England)
Using four Super-8 cameras, a man in a white room replicates himself. He and his clones have until the cartridges in the cameras run out before they disappear. Collide-O- Scope is an experimental video piece that exploits the aesthetic and technology of the silent film era and combines it with a latest digital manipulation technique. The work was created using one person, one take, and one shot.

TRT: approx. 72 minute

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Roger Beebe is a filmmaker, curator, and an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. His work has been shown around the globe at a wide range of venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square as well as at numerous festivals including Ann Arbor, NY Underground, Sundance, the Images Festival, the European Media Arts Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. From 1997-2000 he ran Flicker, a bi-monthly festival of small gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, and he is currently Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival.

UNION DOCS is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization based in Wiliiamsburg Brooklyn that presents a broad range of innovative and thought-provoking non-fiction projects to the general public, while also cultivating specialized opportunities for learning, critical discourse, and creative collaboration for emerging media-makers, theorists, and curators. Their local screenings, exhibitions and lectures attract people from New York City and beyond, promoting dialogue about significant social questions and expanding popular awareness of the documentary arts.
More info at www.uniondocs.org

Below: still from Collide-O-Scope by Naren Wilks

Super 8 Films by Rachelle Rahme
With Christopher Anderson on homemade electronics and violin
MONDAY JUNE 27, 7PM
Admission $6

Bushwick-based artist Rachelle Rahme joins us for a night of her super-8 films shot in NYC, California, Maryland, and Lebanon. Rahme writes of her work:

“…I attempt to create a narrative using a free style, utilizing montage, sequence, and rhythm. The films I am showing tonight represent a naturalistic period in my work, naturally lit and structured in camera. I seek a visualization of the discordance I feel in my surroundings and by imposing narrative, seek a redemption from infinite Time. The camerawork is influenced by interests in eye-tracking and surrealism. Creating the work relies on an embodied understanding of the optics and camera mechanics, and as my arm folds over my chest and heart while I film, so my films tonight represent a short circuit between the emotions and intellect.” -RR

TRT: approx. 50 minutes

Rachel Rahme is a filmmaker, musician, dj, artist and writer working and living in Brooklyn, NY. She is founding member of the Optipus Group, a collective of New York film & video artists. She received her BFA in Film & Television from Tisch School of the Arts and has been shooting 16mm
and Super 8 films since 2004. She has screened her work at Sunset Strip, West Nile in Brooklyn, and ‘On Land festiva

l’ in San Francisco. She has also exhibited, screened or performed at Anthology Film Archives, The Stone, Participant Inc, MonoNoAware, Issue Project Room, Watty & Meg, BOS Festival, and many others.

Still from Amorous Display, super-8, courtesy and copyright Rachelle Rahme

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TWO MOVIES by Anton Perich
Mr. FixIt, starring Sami Melange, Susan Blond, Danny Fields, and Tinkerbelle
Mother of God, starring Taylor Mead, Andrea Langdon, & Agathe Legrand
MON JUNE 20, 7PM
Admission $6 – Artist in person

Anton Perich returns after last week’s fantastic opening to present two comic, highly improvised soap opera-like works including the groundbreaking Mr. Fixit, made in 1973, and the world premiere of Mother of God, starring the legendary actor, poet, and Warhol Superstar Taylor Mead. Mr. Fixit aired on cable access TV in 1973 and revolutionized television by presenting underground performers and nudity for the first time, resulting in great outrage and immediate and unprecedented censorship.

Mother of God, is Perich’s latest fiction work featuring Mead, with whom Perich has collaborated since the 70s and also featured in many of his early cable access TV programs. The video deals with familial and generational relationships, centering around a manipulative granddaughter trying to extort a million dollars from her grandmother/grandfather in order to support two boyfriends.

See here a Village Voice article from 1973, in response to Perich’s Public Access TV broadcasting

PROGRAM

Mr. Fixit
Starring: Sami Melange, Susan Blond, Danny Fields, Tinkerbell
1973, video, b/w, sound, 37 minutes

“I think I heard about Public Access in the first week of January in 1973. I had my first show a week later. It was a mild sex comedy about a husband and wife trying separately to seduce a young English TV repairman. It was censored immediately, with a blank screen and muzak. There was nothing pornographic about it. But it was an absolutely new type of content on TV, a naked guy and a topless woman in the American living room, and that was pornographic. The power of challenging the dinosaur media was intoxicating. It triggered an earthquake from coast to coast. I realized this incredible power I gained by touching the taboos of the television. No one did it before me. I broke the ice. Look at TV today. I made a revolution with $10 worth of video tape. It was like Youtube of the dark ages.”- Anton Perich

“In 1973 ANTON PERICH, a Croatian-born photographer and artist who was a fixture at Max’s Kansas City, the famous artist’s hangout, created Anton Perich Presents, an anarchic public-access soap opera that featured many of the personalities who haunted Max’s back room- including Taylor Mead the Warhol superstar; Danny Fields, the legendary editor and A&R man (he had signed Iggy Pop, PR’ed for The Doors, and latter managed The Ramones); model Jerry Hall; and Susan Blond, a nutty chick who worked for me selling ads at Interview magazine. It was the first underground television show, and the wildest thing ever on the tube anywhere. Cable wasn’t big yet and so audiences were small. But cable continued to spread.” Glenn O’Brien, TEN magazine, Spring Summer 2011

“Poete Maudit of video” PEOPLE Magazine.

“Through the efforts of video artist Anton Perich and his cast of stars, underground situation comedy has come to television….It will certainly go down in the annals of television’s firsts.” Village Voice

“From the corporate strata at Time word was getting around of the Tabasco that was being sprinkled on the bland television menu by a hitherto obscure avant-garde film-maker called Anton Perich.” New York Times

“…Anton Perich has been responsible for more column inches than public access had been awarded since its inception…” Sunday Times

“Perich was an early cable pioneer…had every hang-up hanging out, along with nudity and blue language long before they became fashionable and legit.” New York Magazine

“Anton decided to become the Andy Warhol of video verite and challenge the blandness of public access of cable television…Anton exclaims that someday people will not go to films anymore at all. They will be able to stay home and watch The Last Tango in Paris on television…” Rolling Stone

MOTHER OF GOD
Starring: Taylor Mead, Andrea Langdon, Agathe Legrand
2009, digital video,col, sound, 44 minutes

Andrea is roaming NY streets pregnant. Pulling her suitcase. Looking for the rich grandfather/grandmother, not sure. She finds him/her at Lucien. He/her is Taylor Mead, who happens to be an aging Sarah Jessica Parker. Granddaughter is asking for one million dollars and support for her 2 boyfriends. Instead, she gets a lesson in belly dancing from grandpa/grandma, and his/her poem about being raped by Arnold Schwartzenegger in Brooklyn.

TRT: approx. 1 hour 20 minute

All images are courtesy of Anton Perich

Below: 2 stills from “Mr. Fixit”
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Prepared NES improvisations
Audio+visual live performance by Jeff Donaldson (noteNdo)
SUNDAY JUNE 19, 7PM
Admission $6

Prepared NES Improvisations :: A real-time audio/visual performance generated completely with the DH system. The DH system is an original 1986 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) which was prepared by creative short-circuits. The shorts create generative video using the original game cartridge Duck Hunt’s ROM data as source material. Audio is output via an additional hardware modification that splits the original mono signal into two. Raw machine noise is amplified to enable a complete audio/visual synchronization.

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Donaldson has performed and shown work at galleries worldwide including LABoral Gijon, Spain, iMAL Bruxelles, Belgium, and Museu de Arte Moderna Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Donaldson’ work also appears in the publication Glitch: Designing Imperfection (Mark Batty Publishing, 2009). Donaldson began his noteNdo project in 2001 with the intent to create animation entirely with his own hardware modifications of 8bit NES and 16bit SEGA Genesis/Master Systems. There is no new code involved, only machine logic. Donaldson was also part of the local Baltimore band Wzt Hearts with Jason Urick, Shaun Flynn and Mike Haleta. Donaldson began playing guitar at the age of 12 and at the same time began shooting video of local skateboarders. Jeff studied jazz guitar and music composition at University from 2000-2001. He currently lives & works Bushwick.

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PHILL NIBLOCK
video screening w/ live sound
artist in person
MONDAY JUNE 13, 7 – 9PM
Admission $6 – (reservation recommended: info@microscopegallery.com)

We are very pleased to welcome minimalist composer and multi-media artist Phill Niblock to Microscope. Niblock will present two exquisitely shot video projects he completed in recent years: Topolo 1 & Tupolo 2, a short series which he made during residencies in the small Italian village located near the border of Slovania; and a NEW re-edited version of REMO OSAKA 2, a feature-length video documenting the movements of rural workers in Japan. Niblock will be mixing the sound collage live.

PROGRAM:

Topolo 1 – 11 minutes ((2005)
Topolo 2 – 15 minutes (2009)

These videos were made in two residencies at the festival Stazione di Topolo, in Italy.
They were made on a table sitting on a veranda, under a plum tree, with the sun streaming through, and the wind moving the tree branches. Close up lenses were used in each, the field of view is about 1.5 inches. All of the shots were time extended. The sound of Topolo 1 is from the sync sound, but with added multitrack layers. The sound of Topolo 2 was separately recorded, and multitrack manipulated. The camera used was a Sony PC9, miniDV.

REMO OSAKA 2. 2010-11, 1 hour 43 minutes

A re-edited version of the second part of the project made in November 2009 and February 2010.
In 2009, Kenji Kai of remo [record,expression and medium – organization] in Osaka Japan, asked me to make a video of “The Movement of People Working” in the city of Osaka. Remo had just moved from the city center to an industrial area at the edge of the city. This was the first project with an artist outside of the organization, and the first public showing in the new space, in February 2010.

TRT: Approx. 2 hours

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Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films / videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60’s he has been making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world among which: The Museum of Modern Art; The Wadsworth Atheneum; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; ZKM; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; World Music Institute at Merkin Hall NYC. Since 1985, he has been the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York where he has been an artist/member since 1968.

He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1000 performances) and the curator of EI’s XI Records label. In 1993 he was part of the formation of an Experimental Intermedia organization in Gent, Belgium – EI v.z.w. Gent – which supports an artist-in-residence house and installations there. Phill Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode and Touch labels. A previous DVD of films and music is available on the Extreme label.

All images are courtesy of Phill Niblock


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Longva + Carpenter reveal their Hunger

COWHEART
MONDAY JUNE 6, 7PM
Videos from their evolving experimental documentary “nyc nyc”, with new soundtrack
Artists in person!
Admission $6

Cowheart will arrive at Microscope straight off their 3-hour sound performance at Goodbye Blue Monday during the Bushwick Open Studios  2011 weekend. They will use recordings made during their performance as the soundtrack to 4 videos that make up their current ongoing experimental documentary “nyc nyc”  – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Wonders Of Corn, Cod Wars, The 1970 Red Plymouth Valiant.  “nyc nyc” is about a trip that starts and ends in New York City. Program is about 50 minutes.

Cowheart is Charlotte Thiessen (Berlin, Germany) and Augusto Lima (Porto, Portugal / Santander, Spain). Their video-art projects have been shown in Madrid (Tabacalera de Lavapiés), Valencia (Ciclo de videoarte Screens), Barcelona (Off-Loop festival), New York (GoodBye Blue Monday with the Syncope of The Sleeping Beauty-2010).

Cow(he)art
Finding its birth in the word “Cowheart” and its semantic fertility springing from its division into differing constituents and reagglutination, the project means to illustrate and reflect on the creative process itself.  A word is soon materialized into an object – the actual Cowheart – which comes to life/is unfrozen between the two creative entities and a specific environment which provides the object with life.

The city of Porto and Berlin are the stage of “creative farming”. The creative entities dream up a story of super-heroes / super-cows, who have to prevent the grey arch-enemy from taking up the city.

All images are courtesy of Cowheart

SU FRIEDRICH Presents
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One by William Greaves
& An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps by Yvonne Rainer
THURSDAY JUNE 2, 7PM
Admission $6
Reservation recommended (rsvp to info@microscopegallery.com)

In connection with her current exhibit re: working, Su Friedrich returns to present a second evening of films, this time, the groundbreaking documentary/drama Symbiopsychotaxiplasm by William Greaves and An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps, the centerpiece sequence of Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 “Film About a Woman Who…”

Friedrich offers the following introduction to the program:

If you’ve never seen “Symbio…” before, then come prepared to have the top of your head lifted off and your brain rearranged in a few pleasurable and gratifying ways. In 1968 William Greaves, a former actor and a prolific maker of conventional documentaries, set about making something totally out of anyone’s ordinary, and he succeeded big time. The film was almost forgotten but then, after a retrospective of Greaves’ work at the Brooklyn Museum in 1991 and a screening that summer at the Flaherty Film Seminar, it became an overnight success and was recognized as one of the landmark films of the twentieth century. It’s certainly up there in the top five for me.

And of Yvonne Rainer’s excerpt Friedrich writes: “A perfect little gem.”

PROGRAM

An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps, excerpt from Yvonne Rainer’s “Film About a Woman Who…”
8 minutes, 1974, 16mm transfer to video
The central “tour de force” scene of Rainer’s 2nd revolutionary “Film About a Woman Who…”.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, by William Greaves
70 mins, 1968, 35mm blow up of 16mm transferred to DVD
Shot in 1967 in Central Park, Symbio… features actors from the Actors Guild where Greaves was previously an instructor. The actors believed they were doing screen tests for fictional film, but the actual film being made was entirely something else. Using three camera crews, one shooting the screen tests, the other aimed on the first crew, and the third recording the larger scene, Symbio…consists of layers upon layers and film upon film – sometimes displayed simultaneously in split screen. Greaves film arose out of his interest in trying to find a way to capture true reality with the camera and is a comment on the creative process.

…Even then, almost ten years ago, I felt maybe it’s still, even now, too far ahead of its time.
It’s the ultimate “reality” piece. …
– – Steven Soderbergh

Bios

WILLIAM GREAVES
Director, producer and writer William Greaves began his career as a featured actor on Broadway and in motion pictures. His work behind the camera has earned him over 70 international film festival awards including an Emmy and four Emmy nominations. Retrospectives of William Greaves work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

YVONNE RAINER
Yvonne Rainer is a leading figure of avant garde film & dance. She began as a dancer/choreographer and was a founder of the renowned Judson Dance Theater. She  transitioned almost completely from dance to making short and feature-length films in the mid-70s. Her work screens extensively at major museums, theaters, and festivals world-wide.

Thanks to William & Louise Greaves abd Yvonne Rainer for permission to screen the works.

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CARL DIEHL
A Speculative Genealogy of Metaphortean Research
FRIDAY MAY 27, 7PM
Performative lecture & video program
Artist in person!
Admission $6

Portland-based artist Carl Diehl presents a night of new & recent works in connection with his “Metaphortean Research”, a project he has developed for nearly half a decade. It is perhaps best to let Diehl describe his work:

The neologized term “Metaphortean” combines “metaphor” and “Fortean,” the latter term denoting strange, mysterious events popularized in the publications of the independent early 20th century researcher Charles Fort. An eccentric champion of anomalous phenomena, Fort collected facts that had allegedly been excluded, rejected, or ignored by established science because they were unexplainable. While Fort focused on the arbitrary borderlines between accepted and denied explanations, Metaphortean Research puzzles the shifting values associated with new and obsolescent media.

Persistent, if marginal, accounts of Bigfoot, UFOs and other Fortean events will sometimes be implicitly compared with acts of technological re-use. Alternately, ghosts and monsters may be explicitly scrutinized in terms of their own hypothetical media consumption habits.

Putting audacity before caution, this speculative genealogy of Metaphortean Research features short videos and performative para-lectures on topics including atemporal network culture, the perceived obsolescence of blurry sasquatches and wayward zombie satellites.

PROGRAM

A Speculative Genealogy of Metaphortean Research
Presentation by Carl Diehl

Blobsquatch: In The Expanded Field (2007, 12min)
Many Bigfoot aficionados have dismissed “blobsquatches” (photos too blurry to be discernible as sasquatches) as an impediment to serious cryptozoological research. In this paranormal polemic, the Blobsquatch is engaged critically to explore spaces between information and noise, obsolescence and adaptive re-use.

Patrolling the Ether (2009, 7 min)
The end of analog broadcasts will be a boon for electronic anomalists. In the diaristic video essay Patrolling the Ether, eclectic electronic pursuits including EVP, EIP and Martian radio are bandied about by a disembodied voice emanating from beyond. Paranormal penchants aside, interviews and examples from Portlland’s Pulse Emitter reveal the always already strange goings-on amongst electrons.

Future Affluence (2011, 5 min)
Having dropped its geo-synchronous orbit, a wayward “zombie sat” offers cryptic anecdotes on orbital debris and tech support for failed utopias.

Polterzeitgeist (2010/11, 15 min)
The haunted housing market is in ruins. In this audio-visually faugmented lecture, ghosts, poltergeists and other liminal beings are explicitly scrutinized in terms of their own hypothetically imperiled security in a networked economy.

TRT: approximately 60 minutes

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Carl Diehl resides in Portland Oregon where he teaches Experimental Video Production, Time Art and Digital Tools at the Northwest Film Center and Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work has screened in the US and internationally at cinemas, festival and galleries including: PDX Festival, Transmediale Festival Berlin, ADA Gallery, Millenium Film Workshop, ATA Film & Video Festival, Other Cinema, ICE Film Festival, La Enana Marron, Madrid, The Tank, and many others.

More information:
www.metaphorteanspace.com

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MARY BILLYOU
The Rivalries of Names
MONDAY MAY 23, 7PM
Filmmaker in person!
Admission $6 – tickets available at door
Brooklyn Filmmaker Mary Billyou joins us to present a program of seven short 16mm films & videos, including several recent works. Billyou is inspired by the spirit of punk and feminism, and by the surrealist objet trouvé and cut-up. She often works with appropriated footage, documentary and experimental hybrid forms.

PROGRAM

CBS Eye
16mm, col, sound, 2010, 2 mins
A color negative rayogram employing the tails of Central Broadcasting System programs, announcing their end. With soundtrack.

Case Study #6
minidv, sound, 2010, 3.30 mins
An analysis of a young female subject, K., who describes her love for a friend. In so doing, she reveals her struggling independence in the midst of a frenetic environment.

Case Study #8
minidv, sound, 2008, 7.30 mins
A documentation of the story of A., a young female subject. The video describes a dialogue that took place one afternoon, during which A. discusses a painting she made. In so doing, A. reveals her frustration in her inability to communicate, and the lack of interest she finds within her relationships with her parents and her friends.

1-9
minidv, silent, 2007, 8 mins
Early 20th century footage of convulsing figures. Their bodies erased, covered up, whited out. A medium shot against a makeshift background, repeating with little variation. There are others in the frame, uniformed others: doctors, orderlies, police, soldiers? Trouble in the trouble. – Pablo de Ocampo, Images Festival

Good Translator
minidv, sound, 2007, 22 mins
A short documentary about Mohamed Yousry, a naturalized American citizen who’s life changed radically after September 11, 2001. Mohamed immigrated to the United States in 1980. For the next twenty years, he developed a full and happy life, as a husband, father, professional translator, and academic. On September 13, 2001 Mohamed was approached by the FBI on his doorstep in Queens, NY.

Ours Be the Tossing
Super8 transferred to minidv, sound, 2005, 7 mins
“Why sing when nobody hears?” No response is made to the letters read in this film of lonely island landscapes. Meetings are imagined, but are never realized. Intimate yearnings and unknown bliss intermix over flickering home movies.

The Invalids
16mm, sound, 2003, 9.15 mins
“…What is to become of the temperamental individual, who for all intents and purposes is participating in the ‘best’ treatment available, and continues to exhibit undesirable behaviors?” – Anonda Bell, “Hysteria: Past Yet Present”

TRT: 59 mins

Bio
Billyou’s work has shown at Art in General, Rotunda Gallery, Images Festival, The New Museum, Sundance, & The Chicago Underground Film Festival. In 2010, she received a filmmaking grant from the Jerome Foundation for her upcoming film, GUN, HAT, GIRL… She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, & attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.

All images are copyright and courtesy of Mary Billyou.

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SU FRIEDRICH
3 short works
SATURDAY MAY 21, 7PM
Artist in person!
Admission $6 – tickets available at door
(Reservation recommended to info[at]microscopegallery[dot]com)

“…Friedrich keeps a gracious distance, building a critique that doesn’t patronize the very real, very naked emotion she captures. A virtuoso of clarity, Friedrich recasts the personal as political, makes the public curiously intimate.” — Manohla Dargis

Our current artist on exhibition, Su Friedrich joins us to present a 79 minute program of 3 short highly personal works: Rules of the Road, The Head of a Pin, & Seeing Red. The works — 1 on 16mm film & 2 on video – previously screened together as one of four programs presented at Friedrich’s 2006 “Mid Career Retrospective” at MoMA.

PROGRAM

Rules of the Road
Script, cinematography, voiceover, and editing by Su Friedrich
16mm, b/w, sound, 31 mins, 1993

Rules of the Road tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling.

A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides the women at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together—and thousands of its imitators—continues to prowl the streets of the city, haunting the woman who no longer holds the keys either to the car or the other woman’s heart.

Through spoken text, popular music and images from the streets of New York, Rules of the Road takes a somewhat whimsical, somewhat caustic look at how our dreams of freedom, pleasure, security, and family are so often symbolized by the automobile.

The Head of a Pin
Cinematography, editing and sound editing by Su Friedrich
video, col, sound, 21 mins, 2004

Those of us who grow up in cities and continue living in them tend to have a romantic view of life in the countryside. Moreover, we know every subway route, shopping district and urban legend of our city, and feel that our “street smarts” enable us to function anywhere–but put us out in the country and we’re just plain stupid about almost everything that nature has to offer. What’s the name of that tree with the peeling bark? What fish just jumped? And are those beaver, heron, goose or duck tracks?

And then there’s our experience of violence–urban violence, of course. We know how to avoid it or, even better, how to escape it—by going to the country, where it’s so different: so quiet, so peaceful, so safe, so gentle. And it is when you’re lying on a hot rock by the river, or having a drink in the yard at sunset. And it is until you spend twenty minutes watching a spider work over and finally kill an insect twice its size.

Seeing Red
Cinematography and editing by Su Friedrich
video, col, sound, 27 mins, 2005

In Seeing Red, three elements run parallel, overlap, diverge, lock horns and in various other ways give voice to the notion that a color, a melody, or a person has multiple characteristics that cannot be grasped by, or understood within, a simple framework.

One element is purely visual.

One is very verbal and minimally visual.

One is purely musical.

So is red the color of a fire truck or a ruby, of rust or a rose, of blood or a brick?
How fixed is a melody if it can be twisted, stretched and shaken to the point where we no longer recognize its original form?
And when we “see red,” what color is that exactly? What aspect of passion are we feeling? Are we looking outward and seeing injustice and cupidity, or looking inward at our own limitations and failings?

All images are copyright and courtesy of Su Friedrich

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PROJEXORCISM
Spaceglue Continuum
A live 16mm multi-projector & sound performance by:
Ed Cooper, Jacob Lunow & Rick Gallagher
SUNDAY MAY 15, 7PM
Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Microscope welcomes to NYC the performance group Projexorcism for the live multi-projector performance of “Spaceglue Continuum”, a work inspired by “duct tape and its history of utility in space and on the stage.”

Here is how Projexorcism describes the show:

Found educational space films and four 16mm projectors are suspended from a t-bar and connected to a sound sensitive lighting controller. Pivoting from bicycle chains, further motion is imparted to the motion pictures autonomously by the spasmodic on-off cycling of the 16mm projectors, and sent into sweeping stroboscopic arcs by projectionist Ed Cooper. The projections pass through strategically placed silver CD-Rs, which act as beam splitters to further fill space with moving light. Optical audio is fired directly from the internal speakers, and weaved into an absurd new storyline, using the lighting controller as a 16mm mixer. A camcorder captures a portion of the action, which is scrambled digitally and re-projected through two butterflied video projectors, adding peripheral overload to the performance. Jacob Lunow and Rick Gallagher are the duct tape of Projexorcism, extracting dizzying sounds from a heavily effected & treated guitar, circuit bent Speak & Spell, found internet sounds & other lo-fi noise makers, which provide sonic bedrock for the 16mm dialogue.

16mm source films:

Why Explore Space? – 1962

Halley – A Comet Returns – 1985

Infinite Horizons: Space Beyond Apollo – 1979

Mars Minus Myth – 1977

PROJEXORCISM IS:
Ed Cooper has performed using 16mm film in diverse venues including a corn silo, former nunnery, living rooms, the Black Rock Desert, rock clubs, hippie jam fests, museums, Christmas tree burnings, DJ dance parties and outdoor generator shows. A native of Philadelphia, he funds his film addiction as a self-employed web designer headquartered in Hickory, NC.

Jacob Lunow is a full-time member of Projexorcism and a photographer, a skill he developed after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2004 at the age of 31. He also lives in Hickory, NC.

Rick Gallagher lives in Waterford, NJ. In past few years he has slowed down playing out live, only doing a couple of choice shows a year, to focus on photography, digital manipulation and running a print shop in his home.

All images are copyright and courtesy of the artists

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ALICE IN WONDERLAND
and other video premieres by James Fotopoulos
MAY 7 & 9, 7PM
Admission $6 – Reservation recommended at info [at] microscopegallery [dot] com
Artist will be present and Q&A will follow the film.

MICROSCOPE Gallery is very pleased to present the premiere of James Fotopoulos’ new feature length film, an adaptation of the 1886 musical “Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children” by Henry Saville Clark and Walter Slaughter. Fotopoulos’ Alice in Wonderland, inspired by a 2003 Lewis Carroll daguerreotype exhibit, propels the Clark/Slaughter musical score into the 21st century digital age. Sculptures, drawings, text, and original music are used to explore the late 19th century’s evolution of painting, literature, and theatre into early photography and moving pictures.

The piece probes the interplay of art and science and in exploring these ideas certain lives and themes are touched upon – the relationship between John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, Ruskin’s theories on drawing, Thomas Eakins’ painting and his use of photography, the burgeoning of early cinema with Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the notions of the amateurism and professionalism in art and the archetype of the condemned artist. The work is presented in two acts remaining faithful to the musical’s original construction based upon Carroll’s narratives.

Alice in Wonderland
2010, high-definition video, 99min, color, sound stereo, from 245 drawings

Read review by Amy Taubin on Artforum

ALSO IN PROGRAM:

Tape 1
video, 2007, col, sound, 11min 49sec
A woman is haunted by: the ghost of her vanishing twin, the inner life of actor “X” and the suicide of Robert FitzRoy. Many stylistic elements of this 2007 short would later reappear in the 2010 feature Alice in Wonderland.

Go Back and Watch it
video, 2007, col, sound, 6min 30sec
Tom Thrill tries to relive the greatest moment of his life. This short was initiated by Thrill’s discovery that he possessed 20-year-old video footage of the greatest day of his life, which was taped by his Catholic Pastor/father figure.

BIOGRAPHY
James Fotopoulos is a boldly unique filmmaker who makes dark, cerebral and often impenetrable works. Ed Halter, film critic and former director of the New York Underground Film Festival in an 2002 article “Horror, Violence, Sociopathic Loners: The Films of James Fotopoulos Play Downtown” in the New York Press described Fotopoulos as “the most important new director I’ve seen in many years.” Since then, the prolific Fotopoulos has made hundreds of films and videos, expanding from dialogue and narrative forms to more abstract works, such as Alice, featuring his drawings and other artworks.

His film and video work has been shown internationally at many festivals and sites including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Underground Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Andy Warhol Museum, the 2005 Whitney Biennial among others. With Grove Press founder Barney Rosset, he created an experimental video biography on Rosset and an adaptation of an unpublished screenplay by Eugène Ionesco, of which the latter premiered at the New York Museum of Modern Art. He has also had a retrospective of his work at Anthology Film Archives and published many books of drawings. He currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

All images are copyright and courtesy of James Fotopoulos

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PRESAGES
organized by Allison Somers in conjunction with the current exhibition Black & Blue
Including films & videos by: Adam Putnam, Alex McQuilkin, Allison Somers, Jason Martin, Katherine Bauer, Peter Clough, Ronnie Bass & Tommy Hartung
SUNDAY MAY 1, 7PM
Admission $6 – Reservation recommended to info@microscopegallery.com

While previewing the works for this screening, I encountered what I believe to be premonitions, conveyed via the materiality of the film or video. For me, these artists use their material as a medium — through which surfaces a secret knowledge of what is to come. But in these works, the volume at which the message is shared is turned way down — to that of a whisper. As contributing artist Katherine Bauer wrote about her work: The material has written inside of it the urge to crystallize. I think this can be said for all the works in this screening. — A S

PROGRAM

reclaimed empire
Adam Putnam, video, approx. 4 minutes, 2008-2010
“In Adam Putnam’s work, reflections, distortions and image manipulations take us far from the concrete world . . . seductive, forbidding and erotically charged.” —The New Yorker

I Wish I Was a Beam of Light
Alex McQuilkin, single channel video, 3 minutes, 2009
In I Wish I Was a Beam of Light, my character performs Catherine Deneuve’s iconic performance of Carole Ledoux in Roman Polanski’s 1965 Repulsion. Deneuve’s placid performance of the near comatose Deneuve lying in bed listening to her sister’s sexual encounter in the room above her is merged with my own re-enactment this pivotal moment in the film. The footage is constantly blended so the viewer is unsure whether it is my face trying to emerge through the face of Deneuve or vice versa.

Rick’s House
Allison Somers, b/w 16mm film, silent, 3.5 minutes, 2010
In making Rick’s House, a single roll of film was shot in a cabin in Northern California. The camera pans through narrow spaces irregularly lit by beams of light filtering through windows, a bottle, mirror, or crystal prism. The aperture and focus were set at an approximate setting before beginning to film. As the camera moved along, brighter areas tended to be overexposed, while darker ones were swallowed in shadow. It is these zones of indeterminate light that give the film its fantastical quality. Despite odd personal moments, like items on the dresser or a note pinned above the desk, these non-specific areas of obscurity are where everything is up for grabs.

Swimming Pool
Allison Somers, b/w 16mm film, silent, 3.5 minutes, 2010
In Swimming Pool, a brother and sister pass the camera back and froth as they share the experience of stepping into freezing cold water.

UFO EVIDENCE Reel 2
Jason Martin, color 16mm film, silent, 3 minutes, 2010
Light phenomena on motion picture film deemed a mystery. Evidence suggests extraterrestrial origin.

Crystallus: Phase one, Discontinuity
Katherine Bauer, 16mm film, silent, 6 min, 2009-ongoing
As one crystallographer put it, “lack of time and lack of freedom—these are the only lacks that have stood in the way of separating each of the solid materials of the world in the form of a single enormous crystal of its substance.” The material has written inside of it the urge to crystallize.

Moon
Peter Clough, miniDV, variable length, 2007

River
Peter Clough, AVCHD video, 27 minutes (excerpt), sound, 2009
Try this: Hold your right pointer finger up to your face, about six inches in front of your nose. First focus on your finger by crossing your eyes; then focus on the background. Move slowly from one image to the other. Notice how this focusing involves two different things: one is the merging or splitting of the double image, and the other is the blurring or sharpening of the edges.
Now try this: focus on the background, so that you see two blurry fingers, and then slowly bring the fingers into sharp focus but do not bring them together. See, if you can, a single blurry background, and a double sharp focused finger.

Terry Debris
Ronnie Bass and Tommy Hartung, video, 5 minutes, 2005
Terry Debris is a video that is part of a series of videos collectively called the Catastrophe.
The fragmented narrative follows the situation of a man named Terry Avery who is in constant preparation for a disaster. Terry Debris depicts this preparation/training paired with Terry’s occupation as a binary light counter. Similar to themes in their other works, Terry Debris involves a moment of transformation, recounts of history and escape; actual or imagined.

Please RSVP to info [at] microscopegallery [dot] com

All images are copyright and courtesy of the artists

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Day Job
Organized by Ben Coonley
SATURDAY APRIL 30, 7PM
Admission $6 – Reservation recommended to info@microscopegallery.com

(Still from Lunch Break on the Xerox Machine by Marie Losier)

The concept of a “day job” implies a kind of second-order activity. Though day jobs are financially expedient, they are generally assumed to be unrelated to the artist’s raison d’être, making art. It may be embarrassing for an artist to admit to having a day job; some believe that successful artists do not work outside of the studio. But the waking hours and creative activities of most artists are deeply impacted by the non-studio-based things they do to make money. Day jobs may “wear us down” by sucking away precious time and energy on mundane or common tasks. But they also introduce us to problems, structures, routines, materials, skills, people and ideas (in short, subject matter) that we simply wouldn’t have access to if we didn’t have to work for a living.

This is a program of films created during, about, and for artists’ day jobs. They include: remarkable films made as part of a non-art paid activity; films that were directly inspired by paid work activities; and films that were shot and/or edited on the sly while the artist was getting paid to do something else.

Program

DAVID KAY
SENIOR ENCODER AT A LATE NINETIES INTERNET STARTUP
Underdog (take 3), 2000, 4.5 min.

JACK CURTIS DUBOWSKY
CHIEF TECHNICIAN, CHUNG KING RECORDING STUDIOS
NYC Dilemma, 2005, 5 min.

BEN COONLEY
INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES VIDEOGRAPHER
Baseball for Beginners, 2000, 4.5 min.

XXX XXXXXX
COLLECTABLE FIGURINE PROTOTYPE PAINTER
Day Job, 2006, 4.5 min.

XXXXXX XXXXXXX
ARTIST ASSISTANT
The Parrot, 2001, 4.5 min.

MARIE LOSIER
FILM CURATOR, FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANCAISE
Lunch Break on the Xerox Machine, 2003, 3 min.

BENJ GERDES
WEDDING VIDEOGRAPHER
Wedding Season, 2003, 4 min.

NICK HALLETT
RESEARCH ASSISTANT, OTTO B. SCHOEPFLE VOCAL ARTS CENTER
Nasometer, 1995, 2 min.

KENT LAMBERT
P/T ENTRY LEVEL TECHNICIAN/EDITOR
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA HOSPITALS AND CLINICS
Security Anthem, 2003, 3.5 min.

XXXXXXX XXXXXX
RESEARCH SPECIALIST
A RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN SEATTLE, WA
How to Collect the Saliva Samples, 2007, 2 min.

JESSE CAIN
DOCUMENTARY CINEMATOGRAPHER
Untitled Wave Project, 2011, 5 min.

DIANNE BELLINO
ORAL STORYTELLER/PERFORMER FOR CHILDREN IN ALABAMA
Pow Pow Pow, 2011, 18 min.

* In some cases, artists have elected to remain anonymous in order to avoid the notice of a current or past employer.

Curator’s Bio
Ben Coonley is a video artist, teacher, educational videographer, and freelance digital media generalist who lives and works in Brooklyn.

Please RSVP to info [at] microscopegallery [dot ] com

All images are courtesy and copyright of the artists

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ALVIN CASE
MONDAY APRIL 25, 7PM
Admission $6 – artist in person!

Microscope is pleased to present a program of short video works by Boston-based artist Alvin Case including the premier of “The Geneva Effect”, an untraditional short fiction work dealing with a catastrophe related to the Hadron Collider in Switzerland and featuring Lord Byron’s famous text “Manfred”, translated by theater/film director and actor Carmelo Benoi into Italian. Case’s works often use scientific or philosophical tests as a starting point and in some cases can be loosely considered ‘sci-fi”, yet these are works that are difficult to categorize, intimate and personal in tone. Case will be attending the screening and available for Q&A afterwards. A series of his paper & tape collages with also be on view for the evening.

PROGRAM

Force Majeure
video, color, sound, 24 mins, 2009
An experimental narrative work shot on various video formats over a three year period. Based on the early 20th century science-fiction story ‘The Purple Cloud’ by M.P. Shiel.
The story imagines a young woman whose dreams of the future are revealed with the help of a machine. – A C

The Last American in Paris
video, color, sound, 4 1/2 mins, 1998/2008
Two screens. A nude in bed lit by television light; a trio of firemen cleaning up after a fire. Alternating between scenes of voyeuristic observation, and the memory of flight and its anticipation, the anticipation of meeting ‘someone’. Images of crowds in promenade next to a procession of clouds and a woman in silhouette looking out at a airplane; a man, on the ledge of a burning building, decides to leap forward. The video is a conduit between memory and recorded history, fate and chance. – A C

The Geneva Effect
video, color, sound, 24 mins, 2011
An artist/theorist has isolated himself from what he believes to be a great catastrophe caused by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The world as we know it is gradually being overcome by an unseen force. Hidden at his remote camper van he tears and burns copies of his paper titled The Geneva Effect and curses the scientists who ridiculed his presentation and its warnings. When he calms down enough to consider his fate and the erasure of all reality as he has known it, he begins to see objects and people appear out of nowhere. He knows well that what he sees and hears are not hallucinations, but rather the most disturbing aspects and consequences of The Geneva Effect.He is left to consider his fate in conversation with these objects and beings as a perpetual night falls over the forest.
[…] Text by Lord Byron, transcribed into Italian by Carmelo Bene and read by Paolo Balestri.
Originally the voice-over was to be read in English by a Danish actor. The key element was the tone of the voice. When the Danish actor became unavailable, Mr. Balestri, an experienced vocal performer, stepped in to read. Mr Balestri’s vocal tone and emotional range could not be ignored, so the voice-over became Italian.
The music is a short excerpt from Schumann’s incidental music to Byron’s Manfred. The excerpt was slowed down to one eighth speed. – A C

Stars My Destination
video, color, silent, 2005, 1min

Niagara
video, color, silent, 1999/2009, 2 mins

artist statement
The use of time based work in moving image and sound, as a continuum of plastic investigations are central to my film and video work. I see little separation between investigations by use of drawing, painting, collage, etc and the use of audio-visual media.
The term “experimental film” or “experimental video” are not acceptable terms for my work. These terms reflect an acceptance of the aesthetic authority given to commercial motion picture producers by critics and scholars alike. As well as embracing the dominance of the dramatic over the narrative in popular motion pictures.

Rather it seems sensible to accept definitions employed within the art studio for, what might be called ‘single-author’ motion pictures (like Kenneth Anger) or small scale collaborations. Since all art studio work is by definition experimental and often unprecedented within personal practice the rarity of this terminology within art should apply to motion picture work as well. I am certain many practitioners and observers alike are struggling with this itchy subject of ‘definitions’.

Motion picture work evolves from the same strata as collage and drawing. It is from the seed of notions and impressions that a narrative structure begins to evolve. These are reflections of our own cerebral processes wherein the brain is constantly adjusting and re-recording narrative; effectively rewriting our personal history from our earliest memories, as it happens in real time.
It is this central element that drives our acceptance of narrative structures in some motion pictures and other time-based forms. As apposed to dramatic elements (plot-driven, neurotic formations of characters, material crisis and goals, etc) narrative elements reflect the mind in truer form, in the way images and sounds are collected and arranged by the brain into sound and image “sentences” and “paragraphs” of meaning.

Collectively these arrangements by the mind are more effective in altering a person’s state of mind and their aesthetic point of view than the spoon-fed dramatic structures of most film, video, and television work. The looser and freer arrangements of motion picture elements force the mind to work in a state it is already accustomed to and relishes.

BIO
Originally from Dominican Republic, Alvin Case is an artist who ives and works in Boston.
He received an MA at Emerson College in 2008, and he has been shooting videos since 1998.
In 2010 he completed a series of small works on paper titled The Disasters of Love consisting of collages and tape that were exhibited in January at Bromfield Gallery, Boston.
He has previously exhibited at Gallery 5620 (LA), Galerie W Landau (Paris), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin), Axiom Gallery (Boston), Scope Art Fair (Basel), and others.

The Disasters of Love, 14×16″, magazine paper and artist tape on paper, 2010, 1 of 18

All images are courtesy of the artist © 2011

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TAPELESS MELODIES
a night of videos & performance hosted by Marianna Ellenberg & Melanie Neergaard
featuring: Oriana Fox, Laida Lertxundi, Josh Mannis, Jayne Parker, Jessie Stead, Marianna Ellenberg and Melanie Neergaard
SATURDAY APRIL 23, 7PM
Admission $6 – Reservation recommended to info [at] microscopegallery [dot] com

If identity-politics are dead, who’s making dinner?
— Louise Lasser as quoted in Susan Sontag’s “Death and Matriarchy”

A night of psychedelic inversions, structural cuteness and the contestant of your dreams! These artists use self-help performance, filmic intervention and improvised play to re-invent the mediated image in the digital age. In these works, amateur renderings of Hollywood tropes form operatic failures of Wagneresque dimentions. Cinematic dreamers and dancers fill Mannis’s and Lertuxndi’s work. Re-inventions of the mythic gaze draw us through Parker and Stead’s celluloid journies. Fox works with female identity and self-help culture to provide hysterical results, while Ellenberg investigates the female voice in her haunting video performances.

Including works by: Marianna Ellenberg, Oriana Fox, Laida Lertxundi, Josh Mannis, Jayne Parker and Jessie Stead and voice over actress Melanie Neergaard.

*Special Live Performance Make Anyone Fall In Love With You
An interactive inspirational workshop with Oriana Fox.
Live audio interventions by Marianna Ellenberg and Melanie Neergaard.
Excerpts from cut-up scripts of self help and advertisements, will dot the screening.
Inviting the audience closer while bringing up psychological concerns, such as mental well being and internet-dating.

PROGRAM

My Tears Are Dry
Laida Lertxundi, 16mm, 4 min, 2009, (on mini-dv)
“Laida Lertxundi’s My Tears Are Dry is something of a coda to her wonderful 2008 film Footnotes to a House of Love. It is a haiku-like sunshiny Southern California riff on Bruce Baillie’s classic All My Life, with a towering palm tree instead of the brambling roses. But the simple, yet elegant, skyward tilt at the end is still there.” — Patrick Friel

The Pool
Jayne Parker, b/w, 16mm, 10 min, 1990 (on mini-dv)
A woman stands in the deep end of an empty and disused swimming pool. She wipes her face and stomach with her hands to clean away blood. Inside, she places her hands on the outstretched arm of a man who lifts her into the air and catches her when she falls. An eel breathes through its gills as it swims. The woman settles the eel in her arms and holds it against her body. When the woman swims she breathes out underwater.

High Noon
Josh Mannis, video, 2 min, 2009
Faceless Mannequins dance awkwardly to the clock in a theatrical backdrop, set reminiscent of the classic western “High Noon.”

Today! (chase scenes)
Jessie Stead, mixed media on DV, 2007-present, 12 minutes
Jessie Stead’s sublimely intermittent epic Today! plays as episodes in an open-ended and wide-eyed adventure series, accumulating meaning even as it becomes increasingly mysterious.” — Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque

Blossom
Marianna Ellenberg, split-screen HD video, 8 minutes, 2011
Blossom is a double-channel, live action video projection work. In this piece, scenes from Wes Craven’s 1972 film Last House on the Left are re-performed in a stripped down seaside landscape. The work re-edits a live rehearsal to reveal a close up view of female subjectivity as it emerges from the sadistic slasher genre to a bare bones video production. Direct address is combined with Meisner technique and improvisational play, to transform the tragic heroine from infantlized victim to mutable player in a process video work.
Starring Libbie Jacobson.

CUNT
Oriana Fox, 5 min, video, 2006
“Ventriloquism, lip-synching, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist retro-spoof, Consciousness, Understanding ‘N Trust. In it I play a quirky cast of characters including Betty Crocker brunettes, soap-opera blondes, and air-head redheads as they become aware of their collective subjugation as women.” – Oriana Fox

ARTIST BIOS
Marianna Ellenberg is a Brooklyn based artist, working across the mediums of film and photography. She has curated shows both locally and internationally on a diversity of themes from gender politics to global subjectivities. Her programs have appeared at Issue Project Room, Orchard Gallery (NYC), Gallerie SC (Zagreb) and Horse Hospital in London. Ellenberg’s videos have been shown widely, in such venues as The N.Y. Underground Film Festival(2007), The Collectif Jeune Cinéma (2003), LA Freewaves (2006) and EMAF (Germany). Recent exhibitions include “Blossom” (video installation), Momenta Art, “Light” curated by Keith Sonnier at Pratt Institute (Fall 2008, NYC) . Her work has appeared in Art Fag City, Time Out New York and Drunken Boat online journal.

Oriana Fox is a London based artist, originally born in New York City. With a mixture of sarcasm and sincerity, Oriana’s videos replay scenes from her own life through kitsch characters and cultural clichés, addressing wider issues of feminility, identity and autobiography. She has performed at Tate London and recently completed a performance residency at Nottingham Contemporary, England.

Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, 1981) works on film making non-stories with non-actors that explore the terrain of diegetic space, creating a particular sound and image syntax in response to the way desire and expectations are manufactured and embedded in the language of cinema. She is interested in the histories of experimental film, the possibility of a feminine language and the play between found environments and constructed situations. Her work has been shown internationally in museums, festivals and venues such as MoMa, Lacma, Viennale and the New York Film Festival views of the Avant Garde, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Anthology Film Archives. She recently received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was included in Best of the Decade reviews in CinemaScope Magazine and 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century in The Film Comment Avant-Garde Poll. She has been a programmer for Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona since 2002 and has also programmed for ZineBi at the Guggenheim Bilbao, CalArts and UCSD. Her writing on film includes Xcentric: 45 Películas Contra Dirección 2006 (CCCB, 2006) and La risa oblicua. Tangentes, paralelismos e intersecciones entre documental y humor (Madrid, Ocho y Medio Libros de Cine, 2009). Reviews of her work appear in Senses of Cinema, ArtForum and Cahiers Du Cinema among others. She teaches film at the University of California San Diego and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Josh Mannis is a Los Angeles based video artist who is represented by Thomas Solomon Gallery. His work has shown at a range of festival, and was included on the 2008 Cartun Xprez dvd. All works appear courtesy of Josh Mannis and Thomas Solomon gallery.

Jessie Stead is a Brooklyn based artist, who works primarily in film, video and sound. Jessie Stead has shown her work at local and international film festivals, including Ann Arbor and Rotterdam Film Festival.

Jayne Parker is an internationally recognized experimental filmmaker. She is the new head of graduate fine art media at the Slade School of Art in London.

Images are courtesy of the artists © 2011

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BYOK: Bring Your Own Kodachrome!
Open Screening of last Kodachrome movies
Organized by Pip Chodorov & Stephanie Gray
SUNDAY APRIL 17, 7PM
Admission $6, free to all who bring a Kodachrome roll

As you probably know, the last rolls of Kodachrome were developed by Dwayne’s in Kansas in January 2011. Kodak is no longer providing Dwayne’s the color dyes needed for the K14 process. Any remaining rolls of this fabulous color stock will have to be developed in black and white. But during the last weeks of 2010, thousands of rolls were sent to Kansas for processing. We want to see them!

Stephanie Gray and Pip Chodorov are organizing an open screen in hommage to Kodachrome at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick on April 17 at 7pm. Any New York area filmmakers are welcome to attend and bring along your last roll. Out of state filmmakers are welcome to send us your rolls at your own risk!

We will project regular 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm originals.
Come one, come all, and bring your ‘chromes!

Please write us and let us know you are attending and how many rolls you are bringing or sending!
You can send all info and inquiries to info@microscopegallery.com

PROGRAM

Moira Tierney
Untitled (super 8, 6 min)
A quick slice of my daily routine, from Brooklyn to the LES (and a trip to the ‘library’ thrown in for good measure).

Jeanne Liotta
GIORDANO BRUNO (super 8, 3.5 min)
A statue of Giordano Bruno stands in the middle of the Campo di Fiori, the oldest continuous public outdoor market in Rome, on the very site where he was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy: suggesting that not only was the Earth not the center of the solar system, but that perhaps there is no center to the Universe at all.

Lynne Sachs
Morivivi (regular 8mm, 5 min, shot Dec. 29, 2010)
Morivivi is a beloved, anthropomorphized weed found in Puerto Rico. The leaves fold inward and droop when touched or shaken, re-opening minutes later. I was thinking about this shy, little plant when I plopped my last roll of Kodachrome into my camera in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That night, my roll boldly winged its way to Kansas, just in time for Kodachrome’s final curtain.

Rachael Abernathy
WASTE (super 8, 2 min) + excerpt from OBSERVATIONS – aka CHROME (super 8, 3 min)
Candy wrappers in Kodachrome followed by footage of San Francisco streets-mostly old cars and buildings that fed the filmmaker’s nostalgia for the past…

Andrew Lampert
HEKMAT! + CONSTIPATION (super 8, 5.30 min, HEKMAT! is silent @ 18fps, CONSTIPATION is sound at 24fps)
A fast two-reeler of late faves featuring, first, fancy Leila Hekmat in resplendent frolic, followed by a sound reel two of footage that dares to ask, _____?

Joshua Lewis
There’s No Honor in Death or How my last roll of Kodachrome inadvertently became a document of the despicable event known as “SantaCon.” (super 8, 3.5 min)

Stephanie Gray
Will Edmiston reading my favorite poem of his and shopping for X-mas gifts for his nieces & nephews at a Greenpoint toy store; and my camera catching the first bit of one of Brenda Coultas’ Bowery Project poems before my camera kinda dies (super 8 sound, 24fps, 6.5 min, Dec 2010)

Jason Martin
Early Morning December 18 2010 (super 8, 3.5 min)
The air gets light in sub zero morning. Floating identified objects point to mysteries.

Virginia Eubanks
South Troy (super 8, 3.5 min)
Things I see in my neighborhood on a day too cold for anyone to be out.

Bradley Eros
tyger (or, Two Young Girls Encircling Round): dress up & fall down, in feather masks & fabric swirl. (super 8, variable speeds, 5 min, with sound accompaniment) Along with: a live reading of Bradley’s poem, Koda Crows a homage to the Death of Kodachrome and the new era of “Kodachromanticism”. Plus, a surprise!

Georg Koszulinski
Last Stop, Flamingo (super 8, 10 min)
The last Kodachrome sunset over Cape Sable, Florida ever shot in the history of the world! The edge of Cape Sable is about eight miles walk from the nearest parking lot (on the very tip of Florida), and one of the last beaches on Florida’s coastline that hasn’t been developed upon. It looks like it might have looked 500 years ago.

Stefan Grabowski & Mariya Nikiforova
Swan Song (super 8, 3.5 min)
Our first and final roll of Kodachrome.

Pip Chodorov
Last Kodachrome Song (super 8 sound, 24fps, 7.5min, Dec 2010)
Three rolls of super-8 sound film, held onto for years, waiting for that perfect moment, late December, Paris in the snow, down by the river, under the willow tree, the sun comes out, we sing.

ORGANIZERS:
Pip Chodorov. Born April 13, 1965 in New York. Filmmaking and music composition since 1972. Studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, NY and film semiotics at the University of Paris, France. Work in film distribution – previously Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; Light Cone, Paris; and, currently, Re:Voir Video, Paris, which he founded in 1994 (www.re-voir.com) and The Film Gallery, the first art gallery devoted excusively to experimental film. He is also co-founder of L’Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris, and the moderator of the internet-based forum on experimental film, FrameWorks.

Stephanie Gray is a filmmaker-poet whose films, often with live poetry narration, have shown in featured screenings at Microscope Gallery, the Poetry Project, Millennium Film Workshop, Thaw, Visual Studies Workshop, and MIX NYC’s monthly series. Her films have screened internationally at fests such as Ann Arbor, TIE, Oberhausen, Viennale, VIDEOEX, Cinematexas, Antimatter, Frameline, Chicago Underground, Inside Out, Madcat, Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Media Art Festival Friesland. Her current film You know they want to disappear Hell’s Kitchen is one of 10 Jury’s Choice films of the Black Maria Fest/Tour and has or will screen at Experiments in Cinema, the 8 Fest, Director’s Lounge/Urban Research, and MONO NO AWARE.

(c) Images are courtesy of Pip Chodorov

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TAKAHIKO IIMURA
Films / Videos / Performance (1972-2009)
MONDAY APRIL 11, 7PM
Admission $6 – Filmmaker in person!

Courtesy of the artist and Damien Sanville

Performance / Myself (Or Video Identity)
videos with Takahiko iimura and Akiko iimura

Self Identity (1972, 1 min. extract)
Double Identity (1979, 1.5 min. extract)
Double Portrait ( 1973-1987, 5 min.)
I Love You (1973-1987, 4.5 min.)
This Is A Camera Which Shoots This (1982-1995, 5 min.)
As I See You You See Me (1990-1995, 7 min.)
I Am A Viewer, You Are A Viewer (1981, 4 min.)

The aptly titled “Performance/Myself,” seven part series of epistemologically complex excerpts and stand alone experiments,is fashioned from deceptively simple concepts: Iimura simultaneously “live” on screen and inside a television monitor pronouncing… The videos “This Is a Camera which Shoots This” and “As I See You You See Me” complicate, rather than mitigate, questions about knowing through seeing as they document and also comprise an original live performance. — Michael Joshua Rowin, City Arts, New York’s Review of Culture, April6, 2010

The video is not just a document of the performance but a work of video-art made specifically for video utilizing the video system including camera and monitor as a part of the performance. It also questions the identity of oneself in video having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is “I” and what “I” means.

In the first, Self Identity, I said in front of the camera, “I am Takahiko iimura,” and “I am not Takahiko iimura,” alternately. Does it sound like a ZEN-MONDO, a question and answer session of Zen monks? Yes, and no. The key of the piece is the former announced with the voice synchronized with the picture and the latter without synchronization, the voice only. Next, Double Identity is set in a similar context with two monitors, in which the same person in frontal view appears, facing himself. They both claim “I am T.I.,” then yield to each other, at the end both denying the identity themselves. It is subtitled “On turning the Double Negative to the Positive.” It suggests that only the viewer receives the positive, not the person in the monitor who is not able to hear what the other said.

Double Portrait and I Love You are a paired piece with Akiko iimura. Both iimuras play individually and as a unit. In “Double Portrait” they are never together, but one by one in three points of view, front, side, and back, assigned to the words “I”, “You” and “He”/”She” respectively. They identify their own names positively and negatively one after the other. The pronouns rotate with every repetition, for instance, in front view with “You,” then “He/She” and back to “I.” Often the words are destroyed acoustically, making them unintelligible. Are you confused? “I Love You” is not an expression of confession, but a series of words — a linguistic practice using a sentence “I love you” in which pronouns alternate reference to subject and object (called a ‘shifter’ by linguist Roman Jakobson) based on the positions of speaker and listener. The reverberating effect in the sound multiplies the actors’ overlapping words and the male and female voices are dubbed over the image of the other gender.

Two other companion pieces are This Is A Camera Which Shoots This and As I See You You See Me Both are set up facing two cameras and monitors and the performer walks between them while voicing the sentence of the title. Here the words “This” and “You” have the same form in the nominative and the objective cases, switching the roles of not only the signifier (word) but also the signified (object). In the last, I Am A Viewer, You Are A Viewer, made in film, the performer plays the double role of the performer and the audience simultaneously, talking to his own shadow. At the end, the performer suggests the audience members move into the light to see themselves in shadow. (T.I.)

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Talking Picture (The Structure of Film Viewing)

Talking Picture (The Structure of Film Viewing) (16mm, 1981, 15min.)
Shadowman (The Structure of Seeing and Hearing) (video, 1984/2009, 8min.)

Takahiko Iimura presents a series of mind-twisting videos, meditating on the experience of watching film/video, and of seeing and being seen. Prodded by a succession of riddles, the videos are lined with humor…Iimura touches on a range of significant philosophical questions about linguistics and the nature of representation itself. While watching these videos one is likely to entertain comparisons to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Ren Magritte’s “This is not a pipe,” and the analytic tradition of semiotics. – – Aaron Michael Kerner, San Francisco State University

Once again, in a series of short works (from 1981 to 2009), Iimura narrates and/or places himself in front of a camera, this time filming a square of light projected by an off-screen projector. Sometimes the camera perfectly frames the projected light, sometimes there is space between projection and camera frame; sometimes Iimura can be seen by the camera, sometimes he remains outside the frame; sometimes Iimura’s perceptions match those of the viewer he imagines watching his film in the future, sometimes not. Iimura examines and explains every permutation (“You are looking at me, the one who is facing you”) and, aware of the difference between the Western understanding of cinema (moving pictures) and that of Japanese and Chinese cultures (reflected pictures), he unpretentiously breaks down the cinematic (and, in the last piece, video) experience into its most basic components in order to discover what makes viewing and being viewed unique yet interconnected modes. – – Michael Joshua Rowin, CityArts

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MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji
16mm, color, sound, 1989, 16mins
Text by Arata Isozaki, music by Takehisa Kosugi
Commissioned by the Program for Art on Film (PAF), a New York organization co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Foundation.

Originally, the word MA was used to define a distance between two points or two sounds. As a result, more importance became attached to the emptiness or silence-the space between-than to a thing or sound itself. This concept of `time equals space` is fundamental to the arts of Japan. Takahiko Iimura and Arata Isozaki

I had an early interest in the concept of “MA” and produced another film called “MA(Intervals)” during my long stay in New York, 1975-77. It is an abstract film, very different than the Ryoan-Ji garden film. Made only of black and clear leader, and a scratched straight line (See photo no.1) . All the materials are measured in every second, the length of one, two and three seconds as the basic units, which are scratched as points or a line on the sound track, the film is organized at random by the permutations of all the possible combination of picture and sound. […]

In making of the film of Ryoan-ji, I thought about “MA” as an indivisible state of time and space, and tried to describe the state in filmic terms. The object of immovable stones in a space, has been shot before in many photographs and movies. I thought of not merely realizing the concept of “MA”, but also of experiencing a real “MA” through viewing the film. In other words, not to illustrate the film as an explanation of the text as, a usual art instructional film, but viewing the film becomes as an actual experience of “MA”.

While the film was articulated according to the garden, I thought that one should get a total experience through the film as a work of art. I used a tracking shot to create a coherent visual experience. Moreover, through very slow tracking shots. I tried to realize the state of “MA” where time and space is indivisible. The slow tracking shots move against immovable objects, and is a continuous space and at the same time one can show the time-process of the viewer. Though one can not easily judge just by looking at the picture whether the shot is moving or still, such a tracking shot is required for a change of the scenery from the beginning to the end. Quicker tracking shots would cut the continuity of the space.

(Takahiko Iimura, from A Note for MA: Space/Time in the garden of Ryoan-Ji)

All images are copyright and courtesy of the artist

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ALEX CARPENTER
live sound & visual performance
SUNDAY APRIL 3, 7PM
Admission $6

Australian artist Alex Carpenter presents kinetic forms coaxed from his live video delay system – a new invention which employs chains of cameras and projectors to assist in the creation of living light-cell organisms! – while contributing live audio activity in a symbiotic interchange.

LISTEN TO A MUSICAL EXCERPT:
A Shift In Perception (excerpt 3)
Recorded and mixed at home and EMU Studio, Adelaide, June-August 2006. Premiere screening at Higher Ground Inc, Adelaide, August 4, 2006

For more info and samples, visit artist’s website: http://transparentmeans.net

ALEX CARPENTER is an Australian artist and researcher living in New York City. He has performed extensively as a soloist playing guitar, keyboard and electric zither through a multi-amp and delay network he calls the Live Audio Delay System, and has also independently produced and coordinated a number of large-scale ensemble performance and multi-media events under the moniker Music of Transparent Means.

Music of Transparent Means was Alex’s chief project in Australia from 2002 to 2007, initially providing a platform for his meticulously-tuned wineglass inventions, then later incorporating instruments such as prepared guitars, woodwind, strings, percussion and brass, and featuring as many as 21 performers at a single time.

Alex’s most recent performance activity has centered on his own Live Video Delay System, an extension of the audio system which employs multiple cameras and extreme color isolation to facilitate a unique looping and layering of live laser drawings. The system was first tested at MELA Foundation in 2009, and continues to be shown on screen and in performance internationally.

Alex has performed alongside artists such as Francisco Lopez (Madrid), Will Guthrie (Melbourne), Kyle Bobby Dunn and Richard Lainhart (NYC), and has produced several CD and DVD releases on his own label, Vanished Records.

Admission is $6 – tickets available at door
All images are courtesy of Alex Carpenter (c) 2011

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JAPAN!
SATURDAY APRIL 2, 7PM
Featuring works by: Peter Buntaine, Takahiko Iimura, Yasue Maetake, Jonas Mekas, Jeremy Slater, Stom Sogo, & Leslie Thornton.
Admission $8 – Half will be donated to the American Red Cross and earmarked for relief efforts in Japan.*


With Japan on everyone’s mind, we present an evening of short videos dealing with the beauty and horror of what is modern Japan. The diverse program features experimental works by Japanese artists Stom Sogo, Yasue Maetake, & Takahiko Iimura; works of love shot in Japan by New York artists Jonas Mekas, Jeremy Slater, and Peter Buntaine who have spent time there, and Leslie Thorton’s exploration of the aftermath of man-made destructions and terror, including Hiroshima.

*Additionally, a portion of the proceeds works on sale for the current exhibition Takahiko Iimura: Between the Frames, will also be donated.

PROGRAM

Cine Dance: The Butoh of Tatsumi Hijikata
Anma (The Masseurs)
Takahiko Iimura, 16mm to video, b/w, silent, 1963-2001, 20 minutes
Dancers: Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno, Akira Kasai, and others.
Anma (The Masseurs) is a representative and historical work by the creator of Butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata in his early period in the 1960s. The film is realized not only as a dance document but also as a Cine-Dance, a term made by Iimura, that is meant to be a choreography of film. The filmmaker “performed” with a camera on the stage in front of the audience. With the main performers: Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the film has the highlights such as Butohs of a soldier by Hijikata & a mad woman by Ohno. There is a story of the mad woman, first outcast and ignored, at the end joins to the community through her dance. Inserted descriptions of Anma (The Masseurs) are made for the film by the filmmaker, but were not in the original Butoh. The film, the only document taken of the performance, must be seen for the understanding of Hijikata Butoh and the foundation of Butoh.

Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working with film since l960 and with video since 1970 while residing in New York and Tokyo. He is a widely established international artist, having numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum, New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris,

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Ueno Rain (Enjuku)
Jeremy D. Slater, video, col, sound, 2007, 2m 13s
My last night in Tokyo. The sound of percussion from the rain water on crushed up Kirin cans and this beautiful green light in Ueno. I had to enjoy the moment. I felt happy in the rain shooting and recording this. This piece presented itself to me walking at night in the rain in Tokyo.

“I am a sound artist who also works with video in performance and installation settings. I perform live and much of my work happens in an improvisational manner with sound and video environments that have a live audience with video projections and live music/sound. As a sound artist/musician, I work with performers and dancers as well. In the studio, I create installations with sound and video and occasionally interactive/reactive work that runs on a computer which is either visible or hidden.”– Jeremy Slater
Jeremy Slater has exhibited and performed in the US and abroad including: White Box Gallery, Here Art Center. Cabinet Gallery, The Kitchen, “Situ’arte” Pátio da Inquisição” (Coimbra, Portugal), “Electrochoc Festival” (Rhône-Alpes, France), NPR sound performance at The Whitney Biennial.

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Testosterone
Yasue Maetake, video, col, sound, 2011, 2m 50s
“When I went to Japan in August 2010, the fire work festival was held in the small village near by my home town (Yorii-village in Saitama prefecture). There the festival is famous based on the fire work contest (local competition among the engineering companies, crafts studio or others). However, I was amused by the out-of-the-proportional fire work scale and quality in such a tiny environment, so I felt I was physically in the central bomb explosion. The boy (my friend’s kid) was excited, saying “wow! Like a warfare!! Cool! Yey! Like a air force fighting!!”
The video shows a reenactment of my imaginary memory of that festival. It’s a sign of absolute peace. We exploit our testosterone management during peaceful time by using sensual spectacles experience. It’s not a criticism. It’s a depiction of us being an intelligent animal.” – – Y M

Yasue Maetake works in a variety of media including sculpture, video and other 2-dimensional works. She seamlessly employs materials often from the natural world and synthetics in bizarre form sculpture. In her video, quasi-narratives style is built on a few simply shot passages of subtly inexplicable activity.
Her recent exhibits in galleries and public institutions include solo shows at Fons Welter, Amsterdam, Harris Lieberman, New York and Fredric Snizter Gallery, Miami as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Arnhem in the Netherlands. Her work has been included in the Queens Museum Biennial, New York as well as Sonsbeek 2008, Arnhem in the Netherlands. Her work has been often in experimental curatorial projects, including White Box in New York, Project Birch Forest – Part 2, in collaboration with LUX London and Lucca Film Festival 2010 in Italy. She lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens.

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Try (version 3)
Stom Sogo, mini-DV, col, sound, 2009, 9 mins
Footage of lovers kissing, slowed down and looped. “Try was originally shot on Super-8mm film and then re-shot on video. The idea was to have the image of young kids kissing forever. Ecstasy here is so wasted.” (SS)
“The films of Stom Sogo are incantatory and self-combustible. An erratic master of low tech do-it-yourself sortilege, he puts his works through seemingly perpetual remakes.” (Mark McElhatten)

Stom Sogo is Japanese filmmaker who live for several years in New York where he started Open Screenings at Anthology Film Archives in 1995 inspiring a whole crew of filmmakers …and has gone on to make some of the most gorgeous super-8mm films around. His films have shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival & the Whitney Biennale and have toured Russia as part of Avant-Garde Alternatives: an evolution of American experimental film (Cinema Museum, Moscow, Freud Museum & Academy of Fine Art St. Petersburg & Dom Kino Yekaterinburg). He currently lives and works in Osaka, Japan.

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Let Me Count The Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, Minus 7, Minus 6
Leslie Thornton, video, col, sound, 2004-2010, 21mins
Let Me Count the Ways is at present composed of five short segments compressed into a 22-minute exploration of the lead-up to, the confusion about, and the aftereffects of the Hiroshima bombing. The title simultaneously references the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and suggests anticipation. Minus 10 juxtaposes footage of the artist’s father in Los Alamos and on the way to Tinian Island with an interview with a woman in Japanese about the bombing. Minus 9 aligns an American nurse’s eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath with aerial landscape shots blocked by a blinking blue circle which could represent a mutant sun, an eye, planet Earth, an afterimage, or the inverted “rising sun” of Japanese national symbolism. Minus 8 and Minus 7 show excerpts from a documentary, The Growth of Plants (c. 1950), overlaid by running text describing radiation-induced botanical mutations. Minus 6 explores current American war policies and ethics contrasted against the histrionics of Adolf Hitler; as the dictator gesticulates on-screen, women’s voices recite a diatribe by Joseph Goebbels.
In recalling past histories of warfare, Thornton’s current work urges the reexamination of contemporary politics, and artistic practice, by building delicately balanced emotional and narrative arguments. (Trinie Dalton)

Leslie Thornton has been at the very forefront of experimental film and media since the 1980s, having completed more than twenty film and video works and installations. An acknowledged pioneer in media, Thornton is a legendary and influential artist whose early works first addressed the interplay between cinema, video, installation and improvisation, in a manner that prefigured many contemporary media strategies. Her works have been exhibited worldwide, at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, PS.1, and many others. Leslie Thornton has also received numerous prizes and accolades, including the Maya Deren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first the Alpert Award in the Arts for Media.

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Tokyo Fish
Peter Eliot Buntaine, s8mm to digital video, color/b&w, silent, 2008, 8m 30s
“When traveling in a foreign land surrounded by an unfamiliar tongue, visual information becomes more important as well as decontextualized. One begins to notice colors, gestures and symbols, aestheticized and divorced from their context in the everyday. Finding myself in this mode of observation – which is by the same token instinctual/insightful as well as superficial/limited (limited to surface-level observations) – I crafted a s8mm film about the surfaces and textures at play in the intersection of fish and man in Tokyo, Japan.” – – P B

Originally from Boston, Peter Buntaine graduated from NYU with a degree in Documentary Film and Photography and has remained in Brooklyn ever since. After several years of work for Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter), Peter now works as a freelance cinematographer and filmmaker while devoting his spare time and resources to the creation of personal, experimental cinema. Last year, he participated in the Migrating Forms ‘E.P.I.C.’ artist dialogue series and presented his work at NYU’s Experimental Film Workshop as a visiting artist. Since 2009 he has co-curated a regular series, ‘The Experiment,’ at Maysles Cinema in Harlem where he screens experimental work which explores the borderland between the ‘avant-garde’ and ‘documentary’ genres of cinema.

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Rain, morning, Japan
Jonas Mekas, miniDV, col, sound, 2007, 3m 37s
Rain, morning, Japan. August 3, 2007.

Untitled
Jonas Mekas, miniDV, col, sound, 2007, 3m 10s
On the plane reading Inazo Nitobe’s “Bushido, the Soul of Japan”. August 10, 2007.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. Two weeks after his arrival in New York he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avante-garde cinema, and a screening venue. During all this time he continued writing poetry and making films. Mekas’ film The Brig was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. Other films include Walden (1969), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Lost Lost Lost (1975), Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990), Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992), and As I was Moving Ahead I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000). More recently, in 2007, he completed a series of 365 short films released on the internet, one film every day.
Since 2000, Mekas has expanded his work into the area of film installations, exhibiting at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), PS1 Contemporary Art Center MoMA, Documenta of Kassel, the Museum Ludwig in Coulogne, and the Venice Biennale. He currently lives and works in New York City.

© All images are copyright and courtesy of the artists

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TAKAHIKO IIMURA
60s Experiments & Early Conceptual Videos
MONDAY MARCH 28, 7PM
Admission $6 – Takahiko Iimura in person!
Reservation recommended

For many years, Japanese experimental film was Takahiko Iimura.
– – Malcolm Le Grice, Time Out, London.

In connection with his current exhibition BETWEEN THE FRAMES, Takahiko Iimura brings a selection of his earliest film and video works to the gallery. The evening will be divided into two parts: “60 Experiments” with four 16 mm films made between 1962 & 1964 including his famous AI (LOVE); and “Early Conceptual Videos”, six short video works that contributed to the birth of conceptual video art. A Q&A will follow the screening.

60s EXPERIMENTS
Original 16mm films

Kuzu (Junks)
1962, 10min., b/w, music by Takehisa Kosugi
It’s a mixture of [dead]animals, pieces of [broken] furniture, industrial waste, kids playing. I didn’t have in mind any of the kind of historical perspective, nor was I trying to make an ecological statement. I was showing the new landscape of our civilization. My point of view was animistic. I tried to revive those dead animals metaphorically and to give the junk new life. – – Takahiko Iimura (from “An Interview with Taka Iimura”, Scott MacDonald, Journal of the University Film Association XXXIII, 4, Fall 1981)

Ai (Love)
1962, 10min., blown up from 8mm, b/w, music by Yoko Ono
“I have seen a number of Japanese avantgarde films at the Brussels international Experimental Film Festival, at Cannes, and at other places. Of all those films, Iimura’s LOVE stands out in its beauty and originality, a film poem, with no usual pseudo-surrealist imagery. Closest comparison would be Brakhage’s LOVING or Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES. LOVE is a poetic and sensuous exploration of the body…fluid, direct, beautiful.” – – Jonas Mekas, Film Culture,1966, New York

On Eye Rape
1962, 10min., b/w, silent, Co-Pro. Natsuyuki Nakanishi
The second film (On Eye Rape) was made with footage I picked out of some trash. It was originally an educational film which recorded a plant growing out of the ground. The content isn’t important. I punched almost all the frames with a puncher. I made big holes so that when it was projected, people could barely see what was originally in the frames. I didn’t punch every frame; there was a lot of flicker from the holes. People got very annoyed and complained. They were afraid they would get hurt by the light. That film was called, in English, On Eye Rape (1962). In fact, I had also inserted (a few frames of) *some porno shots. Pornography was forbidden in Japan; It’s still forbidden…. […] *ps. This is in fact subliminal shots against censorship.” – – Takahiko Iimura (from “An Interview with Taka Iimura”, Scott MacDonald, Journal of The University Film Association XXXIII, 4, Fall 1981)

A dance party in the kingdom of Lilliput
1964, 12min., b/w, sound
A surper-real comedy with Sho Kazakura. The film is divided into a number of very short scenes or chapters, each with a title <A,B,C> at random. We see him lame in a crowd, see him running up stairs, see him absolutely naked, watch him urinate, etc. An anthology of discontinuous happenings and events.” – – T I

“The movie may well be one of the first ‘Conceptual’ film ever made anywhere in the world. It was a rather slow, but clerly defined daily motions of Kazakura, a mysterious underground figure of Japan, who is still unknow in Tokyo, yet has a strange presence in his remote area of Japan, KYUSYU Island.”
– – Nam June Paik, 1987

(Total 42 minutes)

EARLY CONCEPTUAL VIDEOS

After coming back from New York in 1969, I began video production in Tokyo. Working in experimental film since the early 1960s, I first combined the art of film with video, thus making a kind of flicker effect in video in two pieces: “A Chair ” (1970) and “Blinking” (1970). These videos are experiments in perception, and are very minimal formally, consisting mostly of a single object. “Time Tunnel” (1971) is an attempt at time travel in a very conceptual sense. The video combines a repetition of the countdown leader of film, which runs the numbers 10 to 1 , with the feedback effect of video. The result is a tunneling of the numbers in time. “Man and Woman” (1971) shows the full body of a man and a woman shot from above, in the posture of the drawing of a man by Leonardo Da Vinci, without movement. They are shown alone as well as together one over (or under) the other, narrating in words their positions at the same time. “Visual Logic (and Illogic)” (1977) shows the visual logic (and illogic) of various signs in letters and simple forms on paper combined with limited camera movement and voice-over narration. These early videos constitute the very early experiments of a particular “conceptual video” that almost no other video artists had ever tried at that time. – – Takahiko Iimura

A Chair
1970, 6min., b/w, sound

Blinking
1970, 2min., b/w, sound

Time Tunnel
1971, 5min., b/w, sound

Man and Woman
1971, 2min., b/w

Visual Logic (and Illogic)
1977, 8min., b/w, sound

(Total 23 minutes)

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Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working with film since l960 and with video since 1970 while residing in New York and Tokyo. He is a widely established international artist, having numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum, New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo in addition to an artist residency at the German Academy of Arts, Berlin, and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy.

All images are courtesy of Takahiko Iimura © 2011

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THE ART OF TIME
Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh
SATURDAY MARCH 26, 7PM
Admission $6 – Filmmakers in person!

In contemporary culture we are often told that ‘time’ as we have experienced it historically is being obliterated by the speed and acceleration of our technology-driven society. Many artists, writers and creative practitioners in various fields feel that the work they make contests this process. The Art of Time asks: how are leading artists and thinkers responding to today’s new and rapidly changing world? It explores how leading international practitioners in architecture, video art, film, theatre and philosophy are challenging traditional temporal ideas, questioning the nature of memory and perception today, and inventing new and radical notions of Time.
– – Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh

The Art of Time
Fergus Daly & Katherine Waugh
Video, col, sound, 2009, 95 mins

Contributors: Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Chantal Akerman, Brothers Quay, David Claerbout, Stan Douglas, Peter Eisenman, Sylvere Lotringer, Ivone Margulies, Paul Morley, Alexander Sokurov, John Rajchman, Axel Vervoordt, Robert Wilson.

‘The Art of Time’ is primarily situated in the city, except in the opening passages where Venice is presented as a geographic and temporal counterpoint – a nostalgic turn of the ‘hypermodernic’ page, a time when the passage was not so fast. The film’s subjects are Time and Space, and how both are being lost, imagined, spread, leveled, or reimagined by the multidisciplinary arts. I say ‘multidisciplinary’ with some trepidation, as the term ‘temporality’, which is the ‘lynchpin’ of philosophical discourse and contemporary art and cinema, is primarily being dealt with by the moving image rather than the traditional art object per se. ‘The Art of Time’, inadvertently asks questions about the cause and effect, or lack thereof, of contemporary art on history and time, and the philosophical discourse that continues to have a growing influence on arts formal exercises in space and time, and vice versa. — James Merrigan

Read the full article here: http://unbuildingproject.wordpress.com/

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Fergus Daly is a critic and filmmaker based in Ireland, and co-author of Leos Carax (Manchester University Press, 2003).He’s also a contributor to Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Pompidou Centre 2006). His films include Abbas Kiarostami: the Art of Living (2003), Experimental Conversations (2006) and The Art of Time (2009). Katherine Waugh is a Galway-based filmmaker, writer and philosopher.

Left: Chantal Akerman Right: Vito Acconci
All images are courtesy of the artists © 2011

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ROBBIE LAND’S 16MM FILMS
MONDAY MARCH 21, 7PM
Admission $6 – Filmmaker in person!

We welcome filmmaker/artist Robbie Land to NYC on Monday night to present a program of his 16mm films, including a preview of his work-in-progress “Bioluminescence” made with fireflies and film stock in a jar.

“The 16mm work is a collection of various experiments with image, sound and assorted environments. The stories are formed by reconstructing film processes utilizing print film, hand processing and re-photography in order to achieve a particular texture, rhythm, and emotion of specific places, moments and people.” — R L

PROGRAM

Betty Creek
16mm, 2006, 7 minutes
Various items such as plant life, audio and nightlife have been gathered and applied to the celluloid using numerous methods in order to provide a projected sense of the Appalachian Betty Creek environment.

Elaine Drive
16mm, 2004, 6 minutes
Elaine Drive deals with the anxiety I have with the concept of infinity. A collection of personal images from my past to current is constructed to flit in a stream-of-conscious that attempts to place a visual to the infinity concept.

Precipice
16mm, 2011, 8 minutes
Precipice is an unconventional dance film where the dancers were re-photographed with microscope objective in order to achieve a pointillist texture and re-choreographed in the editing. The sound track was created by attaching contact microphones to each dancer.

The Biddie Camps
16mm, 2004, 6 minutes
The Biddie Camps illustrate the occurrences of a chicken farm.

Airport Inn
16mm, 2006, 6 minutes
A collection of “nightlife” images provides a personal glimpse of friendly encounters. Shot entirely on super-8 color negative high-speed film (800asa) with optical blow-up to 16mm color print stock (3383). The film explores this environment by experimenting with the technical characteristics of film in order to achieve the desired results of peering into life after dark.

Oil Derric
16mm, 2003, 5 minutes
Repetitive audio set to pointillist super8 images creates a tension between the two mediums.

Fall Creek Road Study #6
16mm, 2003, 7 minutes
A cameraless film constructed without the use of a camera by gluing and taping objects relevant to Fall Creek Road.

Bioluminescence
16mm, 5minutes, (work-in-progress)
The film begins with a time-lapse of fireflies and various raw film stocks contained in a glass jar. The second portion of the film is the abstract result the bioluminescent insect creates with the light sensitive film. The audio is an optical track generated by the bugs undulating illumination along the film edge.

Greencameraless
16mm, 2007, 6 minutes
Greencameraless illustrates an inner landscape – a portrait in green, visual layers created by working directly on the filmstrip without a camera.

Read here Robbie Land in interview

ROBBIE LAND
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Robbie began working in film specifically super-8mm producing animations and live action experiments. He has worked numerous jobs and continues to produce motion picture films, photography and performance. This includes a variety of projects from cinematographer at the Florida Lightning Research Facility to teaching college level photography and film production. Currently he resides in Atlanta, Georgia and continues to experiment with various film and sound methods.
Robbie’s work has been exhibited at Kunst Film Biennale in Colongne, Germany, Museu Do Chiado in Lisbon, Portugal, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition in Denver, Colorado, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia in Atlanta and various other solo and group screenings and venues.

All images are courtesy of Robbie Land © 2011

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PUCCINI X 4
4 films by Stephen Dwoskin, Michael Snow, Tsai Ming-Liang, Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin
MONDAY MARCH 14, 7PM
Admission $6
Presented in collaboration with House On Fire, Paris

We are showing 4 of the works from Twenty Puccini, a project in which nineteen filmmakers from around the world, united by their free and fiercely individualistic approaches to cinema, contributed to a series of short films honoring the 150 year anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Puccini in 2008. Each film provides a unique and personal take on the music of a master composer, equally loathed and revered for his grandiloquence and lyricism. These re-interpretations of Turandot, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl from the West), La Bohème, & Madame Butterfly were created with no inhibitions, no budget and no limits, giving free reign to the poetic and independently minded sensibilities of the participating artists.
Twenty Puccini is a project coordinated by Paris-based film production company House On Fire, originally started in collaboration with the Lucca Film Festival.

Ascolta!
Steven Dwoskin
USA/UK, 2008, 6’ 30”, color, sound
Face: Valérie Maês

Liu, crying sings ‘Signore, ascolta !’ Liu can bear it no more. She sinks to the
ground, exhausted, and sobbing. Puccini makes tears of joy and sadness.

Stephen Dwoskin
Born in New York in 1939. Since the early ‘60s, Dwoskin has created a unique body of work, in which the (female) body constitutes the primary subject. In all his films, Dwoskin creates a performative relation between the filmmaker, the camera and the filmed subject. His films have frequently been screened in major festivals like Rotterdam, Torino and Locarno. One of his most recent films, Phone Portrait, was shown in Berlin in February 2008. In Ascolta he tackles Turandot.

Viso d’Angelo – Face of an Angel
Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin
UK, 2008, 05:30, colour, sound
With: Jo Ann Kaplan (voice)

Based on themes of La Fanciulla del West (The Girl from the West): Minni, who runs the bar in a gold miner’s camp shows great humanity, not only to the poor immigrant miners but also to Dick Johnson, the bandit with whom she falls in love. Her belief that every man is worthy of redemption is disclosed when she convinces the miners that her lover should not be hanged for his crimes and that he has will to reform…The film pays an unusual tribute to the West of the Gold Rush and the Western genre by using a post-industrial zone in the south of Wales, a coal-mining area which fuelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain…

Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin
Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin live and work in London. Although they often work together on experimental video projects, they also have “individual” careers, notably Ian’s as a photographer. Furthermore, both have worked with Stephen Dwoskin – Anthea is the protagonist in his film Face Anthea, for example, and was also editor on Pain Is for which Wiblin worked on the camera. The films they have co-directed have been screened in numerous international festivals. Stella Polare, their first film after Elegy, premiered in Rotterdam in 2006. Now they have created a breathtaking interpretation of La Fanciulla del West for Twenty Puccini.

Puccini Conservato
Michael Snow
Canada, 2008, 09:50, color, sound

The source of the sound (the loudspeakers) in a continuous hand-held panning (guided by the music), inter-cut with short shots of flowers or wood-fire, exemplifying the passion, the lyricism in Puccini’s music.

Michael Snow
Canadian multimedia artist whose work embraces experimental film, sculpture, painting, photography, holography… A triumph at the Knokke Festival, his film Wavelength was immediately hailed as a landmark in the history of experimental film. Many of his works are in private or public collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the MOMA in New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Michael has chosen to work on pieces from La Bohème.

Madam Butterfly
Tsai Ming Liang
Taiwan, 2008, 35:00, colour, sound
With: Perly Chua

A woman roams in a big shopping centre, trying to find a way to leave it. When she finally finds a bus, she realises she doesn’t have enough money to buy a ticket. She asks her boyfriend to come and pick her up. While waiting for him, she just grins and bears it and wanders around the shopping centre. Meanwhile, people bustle about around her. Tsai Ming-liang made Madam Butterfly within the framework of a collection of short films, “Twenty Puccini”, initiated by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. It follows the commission in a very personal way, as it shows a distant cousin of Mrs Butterfly whose loneliness and distress become more palpable as the film goes along. Through this fifteen minute sequence shot, silent anxiety and a feeling of general discomfort settle in. A real daring film in which realism gives way to shots of luminous ecstasy. Madam Butterfly was shown recently at MoMA, New York, among others.

Tsai Ming-Liang
Tsai Ming-Liang was born in Malaysia in 1957. His films have received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion in Venice for Vive l’Amour (1994), the Silver Bear for The River, and 5 Fipresci-Prizes in Berlin. Since his first feature film Rebels of the Neon God (1992) up to the breathtaking I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming Liang’s films always feature a cool, sensitive vision of life, human relations and solitude. He is considered to be one of the masters of contemporary cinema. Here he offers a very free and personal interpretation of Puccini´s Madame Butterfly.

HOUSE ON FIRE is a a young production company that was created in February 2009 by Antoine Barraud, writer/director, Philippe Dijon de Monteton, co-director of the Lucca Film Festival, and Vincent Wang, producer of all Tsai Ming Liang’s feature films since “Goodbye Dragon Inn”, including his latest « Face » (Visage). The aim of the production company is to work hand in hand with well-known directors with their new projects and to help great, innovative and adventurous film projects by younger talents. House on Fire’s credits include The Forest in Between (Antoine Barraud, 2010), Madam Butterfly (Tsai Ming Liang), Pierre Clémenti : The Unreleased Reels and River of Anger (Antoine Barraud).

« If my house was on fire, what would I take with me? I would like to take the fire »
(J. Cocteau)

Thanks to Michael Snow, Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin, Steve Dwoskin and Tsai Ming-Liang. Special thanks to Antoine Barraud, Philippe Dijon De Monteton, and Vincent Wang for their invaluable work.
All images are courtesy of the artists © 2011

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TENZIN PHUNTSOG
FOUR RIVERS
Saturday March 12, 7pm
Admission $6

“Who can put into words the immensity of space? Who can put into words
a landscape that breathe this immensely?”

– Lama Govinda, Way of the White Clouds

We are very pleased to welcome Brooklyn artist Tenzin Phuntsog for a special screening of his most recent feature “Four Rivers”, shot in Tibet in 2010. Phuntsog – a Tibetan born and raised in India – spent over 2 years researching and preparing to make the film, which was inspired by a 1940s book by an Indian Swami involving journeys to the source of Tibet’s four rivers. When he was ready to begin work on the video, however, Phuntsog found himself denied an entry visa. Refusing to abandon his project, he sent a cameraman into Tibet with detailed instructions on where and how to shoot a landscape he had never before seen. “Four Rivers” is a remarkable work of inspiration and perseverance and of beauty. The film has two versions: with voiceover & with natural sound. We are showing the one featuring natural sound.

Tenzin Phuntsog (b. New Delhi, India 1982) is a Tibetan filmmaker and artist who graduated with an MFA from Columbia University. His films explore fundamental and provocative aspects of time and space, contrasting the esoteric and the modern. Phuntsog founded the Tibet Film Archive in 2005 to restore and preserve films from Tibet’s bygone era for future generations. By restoring and preserving these cultural relics to archival standards and digitizing them to modern media formats, Tibet Film Archive hopes to bring together the qualities of archival preservation and philanthropic service.

FOUR RIVERS
HD Video, color, sound, 2010, 67min
Director & Concept: Tenzin Phuntsog
Camera & Unit Director: Anders Uhl
Post Producer: Eric Nyari

Four Rivers is an imperfect film, and problematic on many levels — a by-product of the political climate.
It’s through the consequences of these limitations that this film explores and questions fundamental and provocative aspects of cinema, time, space and perspective. Inspired by an old book written by an Indian Swami from the 1940’s, the film was conceived, designed and researched for over two years. In that time, I put together a small budget for cameras, a cinematographer, travel expenses to cover flying to Tibet via Nepal, mapped out the Tibetan river sources and design an itinerary with permits, guides and drivers to the sources of Tibet’s four rivers; The Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej and Karnali.

Since I was denied an entry Visa to Tibet, I sent my camera man without me under strict visual guidelines. Regardless of success or failure in reaching the four river sources, the intention was to capture the journey with an unbiased and unobtrusive eye.

In short, the direction given was to film “moving still shots” on a tripod for elongated periods of time at varying degrees en route the river sources in order to capture an unobstructed recording of time and space on the plateau. Four Rivers was filmed without government film permits as the camera setup was that of a tourist or amateur, which allowed for raw and uncanny footage to be acquired.

What was achieved was not only a document to the time and space en route Tibet’s four river sources but a conceptual framework in which the approach questions one of the most basic aspects of cinema: perspective.

Four Rivers is witness not only to the raw natural landscapes and unnatural development projects being put in place on the Tibetan Plateau, but the political and social landscape as well.

– – Tenzin Phuntsog

All images are courtesy of Tenzin Phuntsog © 2011

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ARE WE THERE YET?
FILMS BY MOIRA TIERNEY
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 26, 7PM
Admission $6

Brooklyn based filmmaker Moira Tierney presents “Are We There Yet” a program of her new & recent films shot on mostly on16mm, but also on Super8 and DV. Born in Dublin, Tierney’s works often deal with the political and social barriers that try to divide us and on acts of resistance to oppression. Participating in artists workshop and screening films around the world, Tierney shoots much of her footage on the road. The title film of the program was filmed at a children’s workshop in the Northern Ireland border towns of Leitrim & Fermanagh where Tierney finds in the thick mist a metaphor for the calming down of former high tensions in the area. The program also takes us to Mexico City, Brooklyn, Mauritania and the Bronx. Tierney also has a sound installation & photos on view as part of our current “What Tornado” exhibit that runs thru 2.27.

Tierney received a Master in Fine Arts from the École nationale d’arts in Cergy-Pontoise and arrived in New York on a Fullbright Scholarship to Anthology Film Archives. Her works have sceened at cinemas, festivals, and galleries worldwide including: Collectif Jeune Cinema Paris; Dublin Electronic Arts Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam, Chicago Underground Film Festival; New York Underground Film Festival; Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Centre, Lithuania; Cinema Texas Film Festival, Austin; Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Emily Harvery Gallery, NYC; International Edinburgh Film Festival; Festival des Cinemas Differents, Paris; International Festival of Short Film & Video, Bilbao; and many others.
More info: www.moiratierney.net

PROGRAM

ARE WE THERE YET?
16mm, 10 minutes, colour, 2010, music by Macdara Smith & the Bahh Band
Originally a 16mm loop installation created for the Peace III Project (Leitrim/Fermanagh 2010)

When I arrived up in Manor to start the workshops, it was with great delight that I discovered the irrelevance of the border to the participating children; as one of their teachers put it Sure we don’t use those words any more; I’ve a 20 year old who doesn’t remember what the troubles were like; there’s no border any more … and sure enough, driving backwards and forwards between Leitrim and Fermanagh, there was no way of telling at which point the mysterious line had been passed; even my phone was undecided as to when exactly to welcome me to the UK.

It was on one such trip that the footage for the exhibition was shot – an afternoon in January, with one of the celebrated local mists hanging heavy on the hills and the road disappearing into itself around every bend. When the film came back from the lab there seemed to be something interesting about it – enough anyway to provoke me to blow it up to 16mm, with a view to making a loop for the exhibition. The optic printer broke down, repeatedly. It stuttered, it jumped, it stuck; I rewound, started again, reloaded …

In the end I kept it all in – the jumps and the flares as well as the conventionally well-behaved footage; for me it represents the apparent paradox of the border and the struggle one faces when attempting to describe something that slippery – landscape? political imposition? colonial hangover? to be avoided in polite conversation? fact of fiction? comedy, tragedy or farce? to which the only answer I could find is another question: are we there yet? –MT

LUCHA LIBRE
16mm, 4 minutes, b/w, 2009, silent
Shot in El DF – Mexico City – canvas pounding and divided allegiances … –MT

HABIBI
16mm, 7 minutes, color, 2008, sound
Filmed in New York in the summer of 2006: a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of the Lebanese population. Habibi means Beloved in Arabic. –MT

AMERICAN DREAMS #4: COURTESY, PROFESSIONALISM, RESPECT
16mm, 8 minutes, color, 2008, sound
Shot on Elder Avenue in the Bronx: a mural painted in honour of Amadou Diallo, who lived just down the block; daily life in the ‘hood, where people are de facto targets for police bullets, but go about their daily lives regardless, doing the shopping, sweeping the street, looking after the kids … –MT

NOUAKCHOTT ROCKS
Super-8mm/DV, 19 minutes, sound, b/w, 2010, sound
The neighbourhood of Tevragh Zeina in Nouakchott, Mauritania: football on the Saharan sand, passersby busy about their daily affairs, a Berber tent slowly taking shape and a factory producing hand-made concrete blocks for the steadily growing city… –MT

All images are courtesy of Moira Tierney © 2011

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JEFFREY PERKINS
MONDAY FEBRUARY 21, 7PM
Director in person!
Admission $6

The Painter Sam Francis
by Jeffrey Perkins
a film 40 years in the making
85 minutes, shot on 16mm, Super 8, Hi-8, DV

The Painter Sam Francis is artist Jeffrey Perkins’ lyrical and intimate portrait of a friend, mentor, and leading light of American abstract art. The film retraces Francis’ life and career from his childhood in California to his artistic maturation in post-war Paris, his time in Japan, and his preeminence in the United States. Revolving around footage of an interview Perkins conducted with Francis in 1973, as well as extended scenes of the artist at work in the studio, the film provides deep insight into a man for whom creativity was a powerful life-sustaining force.

Director’s Statement
When Sam Francis said, “I paint time,” this concept could very well have been the primary template for the making of this film. When one considers that I started filming Sam Francis in his studio in Santa Monica in 1968, and that the film was completed in 2008—a forty year life span—“time” must be seen as the best possible metaphor to describe it.

The great filmmaker Maya Deren once said that when one takes on a subject in making a film, one must assume the full responsibility for the life of the subject itself. Sam Francis was an abstract painter, and therefore the dimensions of the subject do not follow the preconceptions that form our lives, but rather, spread across space and time in certain ways that are not spelled out for us in logic. The very idea of abstract painting was not about logic; there was an individual anarchy about making truly abstract paintings, and of course Sam Francis was about that. All I could do in making a film about him was to facilitate the mechanical witness to the act of painting, and to attempt to “interview” him.

Our relationship began as that of one artist to another, and remained that way throughout the filmmaking process and in our friendship, so the course of the film was informed by the dictates of intuition and a respect for the enterprise of making abstract paintings.

It was many years after he died that I returned to him. It was through the mouths of many people, and through the enthusiasm of those people who were also deeply affected by him, that he stepped forward. I discovered that in his personal life he was both mercurial and mischievous, often setting complex things in motion with those who knew him. The character “The Trickster” was a mask that he often wore with a kind of wicked enjoyment. But he gave a lot to me, and I learned great things through him, mostly how to act in time. It could be said that in the making of this film, I have simply served as a shepherd. Really, Sam Francis is the author of this film. Yet I too have been brought to bear, and take my part of the responsibility. –JP

BIO

Jeffrey Perkins is an artist and filmmaker living in New York City. In 1963, while stationed by the US Air Force in Japan, he struck up a chance friendship with Yoko Ono, which led to an association over the ensuing decades with John Lennon, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, and the Fluxus Art Movement. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Perkins worked for the Fox Venice Theater, managed Cinematheque 16, and co-founded the psychedelic light show group Single Wing Turquoise Bird, which performed with the Velvet Underground, Yardbirds, Cream, Sly and the Family Stone, and others. It was in Los Angeles that he developed a creative relationship with abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis. Making film and audio recordings that date from 1968 to 1977, Perkins created an expansive collection of footage of the artist, both at work in the studio and in intimate conversation.

In 1981, Perkins returned to New York, where for the next twenty years he drove a taxi to support his artistic endeavors. On the occasion of Francis’s death in 1994, Perkins screened his footage at a memorial program hosted at Anthology Film Archives in New York. It was then that he returned to the project with the support of Jonas Mekas, who challenged Perkins to revisit and give shape to the remarkable footage that had lain idle for many years.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
All images are courtesy of Jeffrey Perkins © 2011

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STEPHANIE GRAY: SIG(H)NS
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 19, 7PM
Admission $6

Bikes. Buildings. Poetry. Metallica.
This is what the world is made of, as it appears in this selection of short super8 films by Stephanie Gray, an out-and-out modern bike heroine riding among urban decadence and sighing, lamenting for the disappearance of brick-built pieces of reality. Although poetry and metal music can partly relieve her, Poe’s cravens seem to keep storming over the city pronouncing their nevermore at the funerals of empty buildings, houses, stores. Gray is able to zoom in and rediscover the beauty of what is simple, the poetry inherent in little things, and even a single bike ride to work can find its way to happiness. Seeing through her eyes gives us the chance to practice this very special, fertile, right – if ever rightness existed – perspective on the world. – – andrea monti

“…we just never get used to it, the higher and
higher we fly and the easier it is to say,
“TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT”, and soon
we burst and it is very very lite, and we just get
used to the dark, but the reds, and the smokes and the steel
and the cries of “justice”, of “fairness”,
of “it’s the principle of the thing, bud”,
it’s like strangers, it’s like fire.”
(from School of Work, by Stephanie Gray, published in Heart Stoner Bingo, 2007)

The program features 11 super8 short films by Gray, including the premiere of her fresh-from-print Satanic Bible on Interlibrary Loan. Few of them will be projected with live narration by the artist.

PROGRAM

Dear Joan
Hand processed super8, b/w, sound/live narration, 1999, 3 1/2 min
A film letter to the heroine Joan of Arc, as our bike riding heroine laments both the state of Buffalo’s downtown & lack of public knowledge of Joan’s real identity, ending in a hissyfit at the library.

Who Do You Think You Are?
Hand processed super8, b/w, sound on cd, 2000, 4 min
Zoom to1986, a revisiting of 8th grader Gray’s Fuck X-mas day, an eloquent study in Metallica appreciation as fellow family members retaliate, who do you think you are to blast Metallica on x-mas morning Miss Individuality?

I Luved This City
Kodachrome super8, color, sound/live narration, 2000, 3 1/2 min
A crash on a hard to get city. A Valentine to its buildings melting in snow. Frozen hands trying to focus. Soggy wet sneakers and socks persist through the rough terrain of this luved city. Desperate attempts to perform magic, miracles, and walking on snow without sinking. Do not, I repeat, do not deconstruct this.

Sig(h)ns
Hand processed super8, b/w, silent, 2001, 3 min
Only seeing the sig(h)ns, the bike ride heroine again tries to read downtown, seeing decades flying before her eyes, ending in yet another hissyfit at some beautiful-in-decay-city owned building. These are just .00000001 of all the similar sig(h)ns in this city. Do your part & count them. You are spared the sound of sig(h)ning, so supply your own.

This is the last time you will probably ever see this building
super8, color, silent 2001, 3 min
The title speaks. Is it real, only a memory, or the future? A foray into color of forgotten buildings, the river glimmering, the paint peeling, 70s graphics gone.

I Can’t Stop Thinking about Eileen Myles’ School Of Fish Poem
super8, color, sound/live narration, 2002, 3 1/2 min
Riding her bike through the March winds in Buffalo, the filmmaker keeps hearing lines from School of Fish. She keeps seeing the blue in everything. The film’s images are the inspired visual thoughts of Eileen’s poem. Sadly, no dogs were out in such cold weather. School of Fish is in fact an aesthetic female poetry movement started by the poet Eileen Myles.

This is the Bike Ride to Work
Hand processed super8, b/w, sound/live narration, 2002, 10 min
The bike ride to work is swiftly and slowly, dreamily documented with stories of real life scenes along the way as the bike ride heroine is thinking them. When was the last time you rode your bike and noticed the neighborhood? It’s all true you know.

I bought the Last 4 Bagels at Jon Vie Pastries
super8, silent, b/w & color, 2005, 7 min
I did it. Before it closed. Forever.

Never Heard the Word Impossible
super8, sound, b/w, 2007, 7 min
Never Heard the Word Impossible takes its sampled super8-shot images from Laverne & Shirley (for those old enough to remember, the 70’s tv show with, curiously two women living together working in a beer factory) which is remixed through hazy sound and video layers. Shot in b/w off of a blurry old tv, of a track-filled old blurry tape, and the unmistakable images of B-tv stars still come through a super8 frame. What did the L really stand for, anyway? All sound is sampled, reworked, and distorted from the theme song.

You know they want to disappear Hell’s Kitchen as Clinton:
Dear E.B. White: I desire your queer NYC prizes
super8, color & b/w, sound/live narration, 2010, 17 min
In mysterious insistent shots, Stephanie Gray films an inspired letter of sorts to writer E.B. White, author of the mid-century infamous Here is New Yorkessay. The sound is a mix of the filmmaker’s voiceover which is short bits of poetic prose prefaced by, and inspired by quotes from White. Interspersed is delayed and reverbed lines from a 60s surf song New York’s a Lonely Town. She treats this letter as a film essay of old and disappearing Hell’s Kitchen which developers have been trying to rename Clinton for years. Maybe that should be Hell’s Clinton, or Clinton’s Hell.

Satanic Bible on Interlibrary Loan
6 min, b/w, live voice, 2011
The words you hear came together with the images you see on the screen. I was an ardent metal head in junior high and of course the devil worshipping, while it seems funny today, was a real thing in the metal scene. I mean as real can be said for a teenager to believe. (Especially one that grew up Catholic.) I never exactly did it, like really do it. I was more of a Metallica freak as we called ourselves and proudly said it was all about the music. But there was a window of time when I wanted to find out who Aleister Crowley was (Mr. Crowley is a famous, infamous song by Ozzy) and I went looking for his satanic bible. But then I found out he didn’t write it, someone with a less exciting name did, Anton LaVey. I guess the poem sort of fills in the rest, if the devil’s music can be filled in with anything else but the devil’s music.

TRT: approx. 68 minutes

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

STEPHANIE GRAY
Stephanie Gray is a NYC-based experimental filmmaker and poet who has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film, New York State Council on the Arts Distribution Grant, and an Experimental Television Center Finishing Fund Grant. Her work has been featured in one-woman screenings/readings at the Poetry Project, the MIX NYC Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Fest at Collective Unconscious, Millennium Film Workshop, and Massachusetts College of Art. Her films have been shown among others at the Ann Arbor Film Fest, CinemaTexas, Nashville Film Fest, Oberhausen (Germany), Viennale (Austria), Antimatter (Canada), Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her first poetry collection was published in December of 2007, titled Heart Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books).

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NICK ZEDD
MONDAY FEBRUARY 7, 7PM

We’ve asked Nick Zedd back to Microscope Gallery on Monday 2/7, for one more fix of his radical flicks before he heads to Mexico. This time the Master of Transgression brings a range of 16mm and video works including his b&w underground classic Police State; I of K9, his contribution to a collaborative remake of Warhol’s Kiss; Lord of the Cockrings, featuring art stars Rev Jen, World Famous *BOB*, Faceboy, and Of Lice & Men: Episode 10 of his Electra Elf series in which hate radio host Rush Lintball becomes Captain SUV and goes on a rampage.

Monday is also the final day the “Eye Transgress” exhibit at the gallery, revealing the depth of Zedd’s artist vision with new paintings, drawings, cover art and more on view.

BADLIT on  Zedd & the exhibit: http://www.badlit.com/?p=13387

PROGRAM

Police State
1987, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min

I Of K9
2000, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min

Lord Of The Cockrings
2001, video, col, sound, 27 min

Electric Elf: Of Lice & Men
2005, video, col, sound, 28 min

TRT: approx. 76 minutes

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
Reservation Recommended: info@microscopegallery.com

All images are courtesy of Nick Zedd © 2011

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BRIAN FRYE & PENNY LANE
From Here to Eternity: Occasional Histories
Films & videos by BRIAN L. FRYE  and PENNY LANE
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 5, 7PM

This dynamic (recently married) duo present “From Here to Eternity: Occasional Histories” a night of films (Frye) & video (Lane), concluding with 15 minutes of their new collaborative work-in-progress Our Nixon, a feature documentary including the Super 8 home movies of some of Nixon’s aides to be completed this year. Expect found footage, war reenactment, poetic essay, science, humor and more during the 75-minute program.

Brian L. Frye is a filmmaker, journalist, and law professor. His films have appeared in many museums and festivals, including the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. He was awarded a 2000 Jerome Foundation grant. His writing on film and art has appeared in many books and magazines, including The New Republic, Film Comment, and Cineaste. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hofstra Law School.

Penny Lane is a filmmaker, programmer, writer and art professor usually found somewhere in New York state. Her films have screened at Rotterdam, AFI FEST, MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight, Images Festival, Rooftop Films, and other venues. She’s been awarded grants from NYSCA, ETC, LEF Foundation and Puffin Foundation. Her award-winning 2005 documentary “The Abortion Diaries” has become an important organizing tool in the reproductive rights community, having shown in almost every U.S. state and worldwide.

PROGRAM
From Here to Eternity: Occasional Histories

NADJA
Brian L. Frye, 2001, 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
Brakhage called her the muse, perhaps because she appears only to those who hold a filmstrip in their own hands. But here she visits – if only momentarily – all those who care to see her.
“Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.” — Andre Breton.

THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
Brian L. Frye, 1999, 11 min., 16mm, b&w, sound
Sometime in the 1960s, a chiropractor from Kansas City directed a short film titled “A Portrait in Fear.” In 1999, I bought the outtakes from the cinematographer. The poetry came naturally.

OONA’S VEIL
Brian L. Frye, 2000, 8 min., 16mm, b&w, sound
Using a found screen test of Oona Chaplin (Charlie’s daughter), broken up by irregular interruptions of black emulsion, Frye creates a continuously shifting exchange of glances between her image and the audience: ‘a surpassingly intense meditation on viewing and being viewed.’” Images Festival (quoting Fred Camper)

IN LOVE WITH LOVE
Brian L. Frye, 2000, 16mm; 3 minutes
“One can hardly imagine a more charmingly Freudian love triangle.”– B.F

HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Penny Lane, 2010, 4 min., video, color
The first thing you do when writing an autobiography is start off with a lot of facts about your life. Try to find interesting facts.

THE VOYAGERS
Penny Lane, 2010, 16 min., video, color
In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth. According to Carl Sagan, “[t]he spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

THE COMMONERS
Penny Lane, 2009, 12 min., video, color
In 1890, one man had the idea to collect every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare and release them into Central Park. The only bird to survive in the New World was the European Starling, now one of the most common birds in America. Its introduction is widely considered a major environmental disaster.

OUR NIXON: NIXON GOES TO CHINA
Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye, release date 2011, 15 min
This is a scene from our first collaborative feature film, OUR NIXON. OUR NIXON is composed of never before seen Super-8 home movies of some of President Nixon’s closest aides. During the Watergate investigation, the FBI confiscated more than 3700 hours of Nixon’s secret tape recordings. But the FBI also confiscated 204 reels of Super-8 film. The confiscated films were home movies made by Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman, Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin, and Deputy Assistant Larry Higby. Everyone knows about the secret tapes because they forced Nixon to resign. But the home movies were filed away and forgotten. For the first time, OUR NIXON presents those home movies to the public – to tell a familiar story from an unfamiliar perspective.

TRT: approx. 75 minutes

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
All images are courtesy of Brian L. Frye and Penny Lane © 2011

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LEA BERTUCCI
+ TWISTYCAT
w/ visuals by Bradley Eros

Please join us for an evening of sound art at Microscope Gallery!
Bushwick-based artist Lea Bertucci will present her new piece for ¼ inch tape, Magnetic Collage #2, with live double screen projections visuals by film-maker Bradley Eros. Afterwards, Ed Bear joins Lea for a performance of their elctro-acoustic woodwind duo Twistycat.

Magnetic Collage #2 is a new piece for ¼ inch tape in which the method of recording itself abstracts otherwise recognizable sounds. In this 20 minute composition, recordings of the Bass Clarinet are mixed with contrasting textures and are organized into a palindromic structure. This rhythmic collage fills the space with a translucent, immersive sonic movement. With visual accompaniment by Bradley Eros, Magnetic Collage #2 results in an expanded performance in which sound and image engage with integrated areas of audience perception. — Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is a Brooklyn-based artist who works with photography, video installation and sound. Her visual art focuses on subverting the representational boundaries of the photographed image through light, space and architecture. She received her BA in Photography from Bard College in 2007 and after relocating to New York City that year, she was awarded a fellowship from the Tierney Foundation to expand her body of work. Formally trained in various woodwind instruments, she is also one half of the electro-acoustic woodwind duo Twisty Cat and continues to work with sound in the context of microtonal harmony and feedback. In 2009 she was awarded a Young Composer’s Commission from Roulette Intermedium and in 2009 she was artist in residence at the Smack Mellon gallery in Brooklyn.
For information see artist’s website: http://brokendiorama.com

Twistycat is the electroacoustic bass woodwinds brainchild of Ed Bear and Lea Bertucci. The Bass Clarinet and Baritone Saxophone are acoustically related to each individual venue through electroacoustic feedback. The creation of an immediate awareness of space aims to break the antiquated barriers between performance and audience, and realize the innate potential of sound as energy and information. TwistyCat’s compositions explore themes such as electronic abstraction of acoustic timbre, the bleed between the senses of sight and hearing, post-industrial dissonances, and radio as a vehicle for displacing sound. TwistyCat has performed at many venues and events in the Northeast, including the Darmstadt Festival at Issue Project Room, Mono No Aware at Galapagos Artspace, The New York Underground Film Festival at Anthology Film Archives, Roulette Intermedium at Location One, free103point9, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church. TwistyCat was the 2009 recipient of Roulette Intermedium’s Emerging Composers’ Commission. For more info, see: http://www.twistycat.org

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
Reservation recommended: info@microscopegallery.com

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FRANS ZWARTJES – Part 2
SATURDAY JANUARY 29, 7PM

Please join us for PART 2 of a mini screening series dedicated to experimental Dutch film-maker Frans Zwartjes, featuring 4 short films made between 1969-1974. A musician, violin maker, draughtsman, painter & sculptor, Zwartjes made his first film in 1968, being one of the first Dutch visual artists to make use of film. The master of alienation from and nausea with conventional ways of living, Zwartjes reduces human beings to mere body objects and set props better than anyone else. Susan Sontag once referred to him as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his time.” He has made more than 50 films, shooting, editing (much in camera) and even developing his own works.

What impressed me enormously was the “New American Cinema”…. I saw for the first time the films of Bruce Connor, Markopoulos, that fat bloke…Peter Kubelka and Andy Warhol. I thought: Jesus Christ, what’s going on here?!

[…] My students often want to know all sorts of things. But in all the arts the point is that you shouldn’t know anything. Or you end up doing what you know. I don’t tell them anything. They have to find out for themselves. There are no rules. I’m against telling them: “Don’t cross the line”, or: “You shouldn’t have an extreme wide view shot after a tele-shot”. I wouldn’t know why not! It’s not going to crash your film. Or: “Don’t film from the shoulder with a telelens”, because if the juddering images are what you’re after, then it’s exactly what you should be doing. So, there are very few rules left. It’s all a matter of taste. If they can find the release button, that’s enough. — Frans Zwartjes

PROGRAM
Films will be projected in dvd

BEDSITTERS
1974, b/w, 16mm, 18 min
Bedsitters is set on the landing and the stairs of Zwartjes’ new house, then still empty, in The Hague.
The filmmaker suggests a mysterious and complex space by using a ‘floating’ camera to film a number of crawling, creeping personages. Even when Zwartjes is in the picture himself, the camera keeps floating. The flowing movement and the impressive wide-angle lens turn the house into a building that resists logic. It seems, as in a modern computer game, to have several levels.

LIVING
1971, col, 16mm, 15 mins
Zwartjes’ own favourite film, Living is the much praised climax of his series Home Sweet Home, in which he explores the rooms of his new house in The Hague. “Living has this weird, indefinable atmosphere”, Zwartjes said in an interview, “The strange way people move around and the whining music with it…”
The film is a demonstration of Zwartjes’ virtuoso camera work. He plays the main character and at the same time operates the camera, which is hand held while he films himself. Two persons, Zwartjes and his wife Trix, move aimlessly through the house. Living was filmed with an extremely wide-angle lens that suggests a powerful atmosphere of alienation.

SPECTATOR
1970, b/w, 16mm, 16 min
Safely hidden behind his camera, the photographer cannot get enough of his bewitching model with the long eye-lashes.

ANAMNESIS
1969, b/w & col, 16mm, 16 min
A film in three parts in which a man and a woman, Zwartjes’ wife Trix and his regular actor Lodewijk de Boer, in a house and outside along the water side, circle around each other, repulsing and attracting each other. Zwartjes himself wrote the music for the film.

TRT: approx. 60 min

ADMISSION $6 – Tickets available at door
Special thanks to Filmmuseum Amsterdam.

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NICK ZEDD
TUESDAY JANUARY 25, 7PM

In connection with our current exhibition “Eye Transgress” – running through 2/7 – we present artist Nick Zedd in person screening his most controversial films. A leading figure of the Lower East Side’s Cinema of Transgression, a term Zedd himself coined in a manifesto published anonymously in his “Underground Film Bulletin” publication, Zedd is known for his shocking, often humorous, yet often intensely beautiful films. These works were made to “…go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men.” They feature the leading figures of the LES underground performance scene including, Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Kembra Pfahler, Ron Rice, Annie Sprinkle and many others in action.

NICK ZEDD Program (approximately 60 min):

Thrust In Me, 1984, 8 minutes, super-8 film
Shot in 1984 on super-8, Thrust In Me is a collaboration between Nick Zedd and Richard Kern. Zedd came up with the concept, portraying two characters with dissimilar personalities drawn together by suicide. Coincidentally, Kern was at the time shooting a series of suicide shorts, The Manhattan Love Suicides in which Thrust in Me fit perfectly. Zedd storyboarded, then co-directed, acted in and edited Thrust In Me with Kern, who did the camerawork, then selected music by Dream Syndicate, securing permission from singer Steve Wynn. Don Houston, a legendary street singer and Margot Damian, a local singer/dancer briefly involved with Zedd also appear in the film.

Triple screen live 3 projector performance, 45 minutes
featuring War is Menstrual Envy, Whoregasm, & Smiling Faces Tell Lies
This unique version includes secret footage added to this ever-evolving work, which is in a state of constant flux. This time, the footage will be projected vertically.

War Is Menstrual Envy, shot between 1990 and 1992 is an ambitious experimental/non-linear film utilizing triple projection; combining 16mm, video, found footage and chroma-key effects to depict an apocalyptic vision of an uncertain future. Appearing in the movie are a Who’s Who of Lower East Side luminaries; Annie Sprinkle, Kembra Pfahler, Ari Roussimoff, Daniel Oxenberg, Ron Knice, Kimona 236 and Ray, a burn victim who inspired Zedd to undertake this extraordinary piece. The resulting footage was considered so shocking and original that the first cameraman stole it and held it for ransom in a film lab vault until Zedd paid him off. After the ransom was paid, the first DP was fired and replaced by veteran cameramen Mark Brady and Theo Stephano, who later was shot by a crazed roommate with a glock, but fortunately survived the experience.

Whoregasm, shot in 1988, is Zedd’s first double screen picture, a stunning example of xenomorphosis combining hardcore porn with politically charged iconography augmented by subliminal aphorisms that enhance transcendence.

Smiling Faces Tell Lies, 1995 is an extreme visual assault in the transgressive idiom, continuing Zedd’s exploration of simultaneity and quantum physics with a homosexual twist.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
RESERVATION RECOMMENDED – write to info@microscopegallery.com
For more info about Nick Zedd’s exhibition, see under CURRENT EXHIBIT
All images are courtesy of Nick Zedd © 2010

Cinema of Transgression Manifesto
by Nick Zedd
We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank – such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression – to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.

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JEREMY SLATER
SATURDAY JANUARY 22, 7PM

Brooklyn based artist, Jeremy D. Slater, presents a live improvised performance with video and sound from material that he shot and recorded during his recent residency at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon in Seoul, South Korea. The performance will consist of mostly nocturnal video footage and field recordings from his 4-month stay in Seoul, performed live with projected video, a laptop, guitar, and objects.

“I am a sound artist who also works with video in performance and installation settings. I perform live and much of my work happens in an improvisational manner with sound and video environments that have a live audience with video projections and live music/sound.
As a sound artist/musician, I work with performers and dancers as well. In the studio, I create installations with sound and video and occasionally interactive/reactive work that runs on a computer which is either visible or hidden.”– Jeremy Slater

Jeremy Slater has exhibited and performed in the US and abroad including: White Box Gallery, Here Art Center. Cabinet Gallery, The Kitchen, “Situ’arte” Pátio da Inquisição” (Coimbra, Portugal), “Electrochoc Festival” (Rhône-Alpes, France), NPR sound performance at The Whitney Biennial. and sound/video presented with the “Flatland Limo Project” (Melbourne, Australia and Armory Art Fair, New York). He is a member of ROTC (Rubaiyats of the Cicadas) with 
Aaron Halley (North Guinea Hills), Red Chair (with Patrick Todd), tu (with Tamara Yadao), and Frogwell (with Richard Kamerman, Bob Lukomski, Robert Hardin, Tamara Yadao).

Dur.: approx. 50 mins
Admission $6 – tickets available at door
For more info, see artist’s website: www.jeremyslater.net

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ANDREW LAMPERT
MONDAY JANUARY 17, 7PM

Andrew Lampert joins us Monday January 17th to present a program of video works including his split screen collaborative work The Golden Mean: Charlemagne Palestine, made with Saul Levine and a selection of new, recent, barely seen and entirely unwatched shorts made by Lampert in 2010 and 2011. Door prizes will be awarded.

Andrew Lampert isn’t as concerned with making films or videos as he is with creating moving images. He’s happy to work with whatever is on hand, whether it be Super 8, 16mm, video, an audio recorder or a pen. As influenced by writing and music as he is by movies, if not more so, Lampert’s work regularly investigates various notions of play by using a wide range of humorous, and highly formal, approaches. Whether producing short single screen works, expanded cinema performance pieces incorporating films, live music, texts and performers, or installations, Lampert is fascinated by the present moment, as experienced by the viewer, and as constructed through the use of image and sound.

Born in the mid-70s in the Midwest, Andrew Lampert has staged performances and exhibited his films/videos at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Museum, PS1, The British Film Institute, The Kitchen, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion Festival, Light Industry, The Poetry Project, The Brakhage Symposium, Mitchell Algus Gallery and many other venues here and abroad. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Golden Mean: Charlemagne Palestine
by Andrew Lampert & Saul Levine
2009, video, 66 mins
In 2006 legendary composer/performer and raconteur Charlemagne Palestine appeared in Boston for the first time in over 30 years. On a stage festooned with teddy bears he told tales of Morton Feldman, imbibed cognac and simultaneously performed on two Steinway pianos. Andrew Lampert and Saul Levine ran into each other in the New England Conservatory lobby, each with video camera serendipitously in hand. Lampert took a seat in the front row on the left side of the aisle while Levine sat in the front row on the right. They both documented the performance in its entirety, each unaware of what the other one was focusing on. The Golden Mean is a stereo-vision portrait of the highly energetic, iconoclastic Palestine that presents Lampert and Levine’s footage side-by-side. A beautiful, hysterical and bewildering musical moment captured by pure providence and presented here for you. – A. Lampert

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Bomb Magazine on Lampert: http://bombsite.com/issues/112/articles/3516

All images are courtesy of Andrew Lampert.
For more info, visit artist’s website: http://www.andrewlampert.com

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FRANS  ZWARTJES: LIVING
SUNDAY JANUARY 16, 7PM

Please join us for a screening of 8 short works by experimental Dutch film-maker Frans Zwartjes. A musician, painter & sculptor, Zwartjes made his first film in 1968. The master of alienation from and nausea with conventional ways of living, Zwartjes reduces human beings to mere body objects and set props better than anyone else. Susan Sontag once referred to him as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his time.”
He has made more than 50 films, shooting, editing (much in camera) and even developing his own works.

What impressed me enormously was the “New American Cinema”…. I saw for the first time the films of Bruce Connor, Markopoulos, that fat bloke…Peter Kubelka and Andy Warhol. I thought: Jesus Christ, what’s going on here?! — Frans Zwartjes

PROGRAM
Films will be projected in dvd

SEATS TWO
1970, b/w, 16mm, 9 mins
Two women, Zwartjes’ regular actresses Moniek Toebosch and Trix Zwartjes, are sitting side by side on a bench. They’re looking at a photo of a mountain landscape. The physical between the two is clearly perceptible, but nothing happens…

BEHIND YOUR WALLS
1970, col & b/w, 16mm, 12 mins
The push-buttons on a radio, a glass of water with an effervescent tablet, an alarm clock, men and women in a room.

LIVING
1971, col, 16mm, 15 mins
Zwartjes’ own favourite film, Living is the much praised climax of his series Home Sweet Home, in which he explores the rooms of his new house in The Hague. “Living has this weird, indefinable atmosphere”, Zwartjes said in an interview, “The strange way people move around and the whining music with it…”
The film is a demonstration of Zwartjes’ virtuoso camera work. He plays the main character and at the same time operates the camera, which is hand held while he films himself. Two persons, Zwartjes and his wife Trix, move aimlessly through the house. Living was filmed with an extremely wide-angle lens that suggests a powerful atmosphere of alienation.

SORBET 3
1968, b/w, 16mm, 6 mins
Sorbet 3 is one of Zwartjes’ first films and shows the strong influence of New American Cinema he admired. It all hinges on the interplay of the eyes between the neurotic, restless camera, and an equally neurotic man in cross-dressing, who reaches for a sorbet and looks intently at what lies beside him on the sofa.

BIRDS
1968, b/w, 16mm, 5 mins
A black & white film, rich in contrast and edited in the camera, about a woman, a Japanese toy bird and their relation to the viewer. With Trix Zwartjes.

A FAN
1968, b/w, 16mm, 6 mins
A man in cross-dressing sits on a divan with a fan. The wall behind him is covered in flowery wallpaper. Although the man does little more than look around and move his fan, Zwartjes manages to create terrific tension.

VISUAL TRAINING
1969, b/w, 16mm, 8 mins
A seemingly imperturbable man gets involved in a food orgy with two voluptuous, half-naked women. All the actions – one of the women is blindfolded and sprinkled with baking powder, after which lots of food is smeared about – have a strong, sinister charge. Make-up, lighting and the editing reinforce this effect. With Christian Manders, Trix Zwartjes and others.

SPARE BEDROOM
1970, b/w, 16mm, 15 mins
International prize-winning film from Zwartjes’ series Home Sweet Home, with Moniek Toebosch and Christian Manders as two sombre personages who are engaged in a claustrophobic game of attraction and repulsion. “I film about me”, Zwartjes said once in an interview, “Me and the world, me and its relationships…For all sorts of reasons it remains a mystery”.

ADMISSION $6 – Tickets available at door
Special thanks to Filmmuseum Amsterdam.

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TURNING AROUND
A celebration of change
Rescheduled to: SUNDAY JANUARY 2, 7PM
by Ursula Scherrer & Yael Acher-Modiano

Ursula Scherrer – live video
Yael Acher-Modiano – flute and electronics

Microscope is very happy to welcome video artist Ursula Scherrer for a special, super-expanded video-perfomance with live sound by artist Yael Acher-Modiano on Monday Dec 27. Performance starts at 7PM sharp. And party afterwards! Reservation is recommended.

“Turning Around frames a reflection on our present. We are one year older, having passed the longest night and a few days before the New Year. Using three projectors, Ursula Scherrer will let the images orbit along the walls and turn the space around itself. The shapes and colors will seem to feel their way into corners, extend themselves along the walls, grow, shrink, meet, overlap, and separate. An audio collage played live by Yael Acher-Modiano’s flute & effects with electronic tracks will create an electro/acoustic noise and sound tapestry, coexisting with the visual elements.” Ursula Scherrer

Admission $6 – tickets available at door
For RSVP: info@microscopegallery.com

URSULA SCHERRER
The poetic quality of Ursula Scherrer’s work reminds one of moving paintings, drawing the viewer into the images, leaving the viewer with their own stories. She transforms landscapes into serene, abstract portraits of rhythm, color and light, where the images have less to do with what we see then the feeling they leave behind.
Scherrer is a Swiss artist living in New York City. Her work has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums internationally. Scherrer has worked with the composers/musicians Shelley Hirsch, Michelle Nagai, Kato Hideki, Flo Kaufmann, Domenico Sciajno, Michael J. Schumacher, among others, in the creation of video and sound installations, live performances and single-channel videos. She has collaborated with the choreographer Liz Gerring as well as the light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert.
Together with Katherine Liberovskaya, Scherrer organizes OptoSonic Tea, a series dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sounds.

YOEL ACHER-MODIANO (aka “KAT”) – Flutist & Composer
A multiple genres musician working with Classical, Contemporary, Free-Impro, Jazz Funk, and Electronics, with choreographers, ensembles, rappers etc. She also leads a jazz group that collaborates with rappers, DJs and Video artist. Acher received numerous grants including Fulbright. Her music has been reviewed internationally; “Alert and poetic flute”- JAZZ magazine, Paris. “Yael Acher is a flutist who isn’t about faking the funk… her hard-edged Junk KAT& Modiano ensemble is run from the kick drum.”- Time Out, New York. “Sophisticated multitracks and electronics create glinting, spooky “Audio Images”. All About Jazz, NYC.

For more info, please visit artists’ website: http://www.ursulascherrer.com & http://www.modianomusic.net

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DENISAS KOLOMYCKIS
MONDAY DECEMBER 20, 7PM

Dance performance
+ video of impromptu Chinatown street dance

This guy was taking chances — in Chinatown night street — cars honking — he was there, a dancer confronting New York traffic! It was an amazing performance!
–Jonas Mekas 12.19

Denisas Kolomuyckis is a young dancer, actor & choreographer from Vilnius LIthuania. He trained at the M.K Ciurlionus School in Vinius and the London Dance & Drama Conservatoire.  He will perform two short dance pieces. We will also screen video footage of his spontaneous short street performance in Chinatown on 12/19.

Denisas Kolomyckis is a dancer, actor and choreographer. He trained at the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art School in the ballet school department and at the London Dance and Drama Conservatoire in the U.K. (Conservatoire for Dance and Drama, under Sarah Matthews, Stephen Williams and Paul Lewis). Since 2007 Kolomyckis has been involved in the various modern and contemporary dance and theater performances, projects, seminars in Lithuania, Poland, Belgium, France, England and America. The young artist also directs and constructs performances. This year he will appear in a new play by Denis “paMISELIS”.

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WALKING TO WERNER

by Linas Phillips
MONDAY DECEMBER 13 7PM

On Monday December 13, Brooklyn-based actor/director Linas Phillips travels from Williamsburg to Bushwick to join us at MICROSCOPE Gallery for a rare screening of his feature Walking to Werner.
The film documens his 1200 mile walk from Seattle to the Los Angeles home of film director Werner Herzog.  Inspired by Herzog’s approach to life and film-making as well as the treks Herzog has made, including one from Munich to Paris to visit a deathly ill friend, Phillips sets off on his own personal quest. Walking to Werner has screened across the country on the festival circuit including the Seattle International Film Festival where it won the 2006 “Special Jury Prize”. It also opened in NYC at Anthology Film Archives. This is the first time it has shown in such a personal setting.

Linas Phillips will introduce the film and offer a Q&A afterwards.

WALKING TO WERNER
by Linas Phillips
2006, 93 minutes, video, col, sound

“The real interest in the film is not the journey or even Linas Phillips (who comes across a little like Timothy Treadwell of Herzog’s Grizzly Man), but the people he meets on the way…. These encounters are supplemented by Phillips’ narration, and by the voice of Herzog, often taken from Les Blank’s amazing documentary Burden of Dreams the record of Herzog filming Fitzcarraldo.” –Robert Ebert

Linas Phillips is a performer and a director. His films include: Walking to Werner (2006); Great Speeches from a Dying World (2009); and Bass Ackwards (2010) which opened at Sundance.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

For more info, please visit artist’s website: www.linasphillips.com

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OPTICKS I-XIV

Films by Liz Wendelbo
SUNDAY DECEMBER 12, 7PM

In connection with the current OPTICKS exhibition, Liz Wendelbo screens her 16mm, 40 minute “Opticks I-XIV” (color & b&w, optical sound, 2009).

The film is made up of 14 related 3 minute films (the length of a film reel) and were shot on with a 1955 Bolex. Color is a strong element of “Opticks”. It is the result  of the artist’s study  of Isaac Newton’s principles of color, founded in the book “Opticks”, published in the early 18th century and further developments by J.C. Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

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ON VENOM AND ETERNITY
by Isidore Isou
SUNDAY DECEMBER 5 & MONDAY 6,  7PM

The spectator must leave the cinema blind, his ears chushed, both torn asunder by this disjunction of word and image. The rupture between language and photography will form what I call DISCREPANT CINEMA. I hereby announce the manifesto of discrepant cinema! – Isidore Isou

On Venom and Eternity is Isidore Isou’s – the founder of the Letterist movement –  assault on cinema: through unrelated sound & imagery, the film destroyed by scratches and bleach, and presented upside down & backwards. Made when Isou was 25 the film premiered at Cannes and caused a riot.  It is a landmark film and a precursor to the Letterist and Situationist cinema that would later come. Stan Brakhage declared the work a “portal through which every film artist is going to have to pass.”

ON VENOM AND ETERNITY (TRAITE DE BAVE ET D’ETERNITE)
BY JEAN-ISIDORE ISOU
Original format 35mm, b/w, 1951, 123 minutes
with: Jean-Louis Barrault, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, André Maurois and others. Producer: MarC’O. Assistant Director: Maurice Lemaitre.
Please note: we will show the Re:voir Editions dvd, in French with English subtitles.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Many thanks to Pip Chodorov (Re:voir editions) For more info: www-re-voir.com

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SEAN MCBRIDE & R. STIRLING

An evening of live minimal electronic music
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 1ST 9PM

Photo © Alex Gaidouk

In connection with Liz Wendelbo’s current exhibition OPTICKS, the artist is inviting her band mate Sean McBride, of the minimal synth duo ‘Xeno & Oaklander’, to perform a live minimal electronics set to accompany a video projection of her new films: ‘Opticks XVIII, XIX, XX – Sets & Lights’. During the projection, Sean McBride will be performing a subtle melancholic dark and at times rhythmic set using three Serge Modular panels from 1979.
He will be preceded by electronic musician R. Stirling.

Sean McBride (of Xeno & Oaklander / Martial Canterel) has been scoring Wendelbo’s films since 2004. He is also known for his music projects under the name ‘Martial Canterel’. Since his first live performances in 2002, Sean McBride has produced a rich catalog of self-released and limited edition LPs, cassettes, and compilation tracks. The carefully crafted, private, raw, ‘minimal synth’ sound he has pioneered has been a pillar influence for the Brooklyn minimal electronics scene and beyond.

R. Stirling is the musical alias under which artist Ramsay Stirling II records and performs minimal electronic music. Ramsay Stirling II was born and works in New York.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

For more info, please visit:
http://lizwendelbo.com/films
http://xenoandoaklander.com
http://www.myspace.com/xenoandoaklander
http://www.myspace.com/martialcanterel

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HALLELUJAH THE HILLS
a film by Adolfas Mekas
MONDAY NOVEMBER 29TH 7PM
16mm, 1965, b&w, sound, 82mins
With Peter H. Beard, Marty Greenbaum, Sheila Finn, Peggy Steffans, Jerome Hill, Taylor Mead.
Camera: Ed Emshwiller. Assistant: Jonas Mekas. Editing: Adolfas Mekas. Music: Meyer Kupferman.

We begin the holiday season, with a rare screening of Adolfas Mekas’ “Hallellujah the Hills,” one of the classic, radical films of the 60s New American Cinema. The 82-minute black & white lyrical comedy will be projected in 16mm film. “Hallejuah the Hills” involves the loose story line of 2 men in love with the same woman and “stars” Peter Beard, Marty Geenbaum, Peggy Steffans-Sarno (in her first film), Jerome Hill, Taylor Mead and Shiela Finn.

Adolfas Mekas, born in Lithuania, arrived in the United States with his brother Jonas in 1949. They founded “Film Culture,” the magazine of independent cinema, in 1954. Adolfas Mekas’s Hallelujah the Hills bears witness to his knowledge and love of cinema, as well as the immense freedom to be found in all the films of the New American Cinema.

“Imagine a combination of Huckleberry Finn, Pull My Daisy, the Marx Brothers, and the complete works of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and you’ve got it. What have you got? A film which is both deliriously funny and ravishingly lyrical….” The Guardian, 1963

“Even avowed enemies of the New American Cinema, so called, were impressed by the film’s lack of pretentions and its unexpected lyricism and Zen serenity in the midst of nervous parody.” Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 1963

“Hallelujah the Hills is a gloriously funny and far-out farce about two great big overgrown boy scouts who pratfall in love with the same girl. The weirdest, wooziest, wackiest screen comedy…a slapstick poem, an intellectual hellzapoppin, a gloriously fresh experiment and experience in the cinema of the absurd, the first cubistic comedy of the new world cinema.” Time Magazine, 1963

“A satire on the American way of life, and at the same time a hymn to the joys of youth and friendship.” Richard Roud

Admission $6, tickets available at door

Many thanks to Adolfas Mekas and MM Serra (Filmmakers’ Cooperative)

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MASKED COCOON
Performance & videos by Genevieve White

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 27

Performance starts @ 7pm

Masked Cocoon is a new site-specific performance by artist/dancer Genevieve White, involving 7 different colors of duct tape. The artist is interested in the effects on her mind and body of the transformation into and release from a state of imprisonment. The night also includes screenings of 2 video performances related to the theme of the cocoon.

Program:

Masked Cocoon
live performance – approx. 30  minutes

Cocoon
2010 Video, 22 minutesperformed at NYSG Gallery, 2010

Unravel
2010 video, 8 minutes
performed at Chashama Gallery window space, 2010

Genevieve White  performed  earlier this month at the New Museum in William Pope.L’s  “Eating the Wall Street Journal.” She has also performed at Deitch Projects, The Kitchen, 151 Gallery, Artist’s Space, Envoy Enterprises, Cooper Union, NYU Gallery, Summer Stage Festival, the Whitney Museum, Deitch Gallery, the Perfoma Festival, the Neuberger Museum, the Rover Space. She received an M.F.A. at Parsons in May 2009.

“For this performance, I want to adorn myself with seven different colors of duct tape unraveling the tape around my skin, from my toes to my head, wrapping myself into a cocoon. The movement will be a very simple kind of organic precise dance. I will start wearing the seven tapes around my wrists like a series of bracelets. I will wear a blue bikini. I’ll wrap my whole body one duct tape at a time covering every body part, compressing and layering the tapes one after the other creating a physical tension and difficulty. With the last white duct tape, I will tape the who

le front surface of my body onto the wall of the gallery I will be performing in front of becoming part of the wall, a sort of insect coming off the wall, masked and obstructing space. I will stand there for ten minutes and then go about liberating myself as much as I can from all the tape. I’m interested in how my body and mind will ch

ange and react and adapt from a comfortable state of being to a state of imprisonment.”Genevieve White

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

For more info, visit artist’s website: www.genevievewhite.com

All images are courtesy of Genevieve White © 2010

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KEN JACOBS

A Loft
2010, 16mins, col, silent
Manhattan: Some top-floor private chambers without lifts are urban barns, ateliers under skylights, tree houses worth the climb. A few blocks from Robeling’s greatest bridge and the invisible shadow of the toppled towers is a residency under the clouds, neither tenement nor skyscraper. The street below, once a reliquary of unique discounts and rummage, held frontier workspaces to many artists, James Rosenquist and Yoko Ono and others since relocated. At the start of the 1990s it was a haven invaded by Wall Street bankers with pied à terres where they stopped before catching the train to Scarsdale. And secret sex-clubs now famously documented. Today some of the street looks like any other link in the development chains. But the particular dwelling seen here is saturated with history, a Mesopotamia in several senses of the word, as it occupies a land between two rivers (Hudson and East) and was a cradle of a civilization. The film culture of the New York avant-garde visited for talk and marvels. And it was the birthplace of most of Ken Jacobs’ work from the 1960s to the present. The walls can’t talk but the space releases a visual energy. In a loft this familiar home, this artist’s pad, this launching pad, itself seems launched, rocketing halfway to the stars breaking the 2D barrier of the screen and entering again into the third dimension.—
Mark McElhatten

Brook
2009, 2m10s, col, silent

DAVID BAKER
For Flo
2010, 10mins, col, sound
Description: Reflected light multiplied.
Inspired by a gouache by Flo Jacobs with doors in its depths.
Mine is colored differently, mercurial, meandering, and much messier.

The Optic Melon
2008, 10mins, b&w, sound
Description: Strobic intermittency and dilation as seen through the eye of a spinning watermelon.

RICHARD GARET
The Puritan Revolution
Description: Found 16mm film, intentionally modified, damaged, and degraded by handmade interventions and extended techniques, digitalized and processed further in the computer. This footage will be accompanied by audio generated in real time by a MAX-MSP patch.

Duration: 30′ approx.
NISI JACOBS & MICHAEL SCHUMACHER

Description: Processed video and algorithmically generated sound.
Sound is generative, algorhythmic, and composed in high detail of thousands of field recordings, recordings of musicians, speech, recorded music, analog synthesizers, etc. Video is generative, algorhythmic, and derives material primarily from sound, through a process Jacobs calls RGBAUDIO. RGBAUDIO gains visual media via analog-digital

conversion hardware/software whereby each color channel is driven by a separate audio stream: red, green and blue. Extremes of frequency are used, varying from 0.013 to 43,000 Hz, to produce variations in palette, tempo, shape, direction, pattern. Once harvested, the synthesized color fields become the basis for improvisations set to multiple vibrant scores.

BIOS

David Baker is a man of mystery. He lives in near obscurity,dividing his time between New York City and a 147 year old brick school house located one hundred miles north of the city on the Hudson River. A shadowy figure, he sold his first painting at the age of three, thereafter preferring to give his work away rather than submit to the imperatives of cultural commodification. He started making films after becoming wedged in a mine shaft sometime around 1969. He claims Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wool (respectively) stole most of the important innovations in their work from early paintings Baker exhibited at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1981. He asks, “If Bradley Eros can have ‘a jello-like puddle as an imaginary friend’ then why can’t I make a film about one?”

Richard Garet works interweaving multiple media including moving image, sound, live performances, and photography. He completed his MFA at Bard College and was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts grant. He currently has an artist residency at Issue Project Room, NY, and previously completed a residency at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Scottsdale, Arizona in 2006. Recent exhibitions and performances include: never can say goodbye at the former tower records store; sonochrome: an exhibition of recent works by richard garet, at the public trust gallery, dallas, texas; leervoll, diapason gallery; and previous exhibitions at the museum of contemporary art (macba), barcelona, spain; biennial museo de arte de puerto rico, san juan, puerto rico; el museo del barrio, nyc; and more. his sound compositions have been published through sound based labels such as and-oar, non visual objects, winds measure recordings, unframed recordings, con-v, leerraum, white_line editions, and contour editions. additionally garet co-curates with louky keijsers koning, the monthly performance event lmakseries, which integrates film, video, sound art, and media performance into the gallery’s mission at lmak projects in the l.e.s, nyc. garet also currently directs the independent media label contour editions publishing works that explore the various possibilities of sound and light.

Ken Jacobs is a world renowned experimental filmmaker, know not only for his films but also for his “Nervous Magic Lantern” performances and multi-projection “Nervous System” film performances. He holds a United States Patent, #7030902 “Eternalism, a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimensional motion – direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures”. He asks his audience to enter “a state of expanded consciousness, to look for impossible depth inversions, for jewelled splendour, for CAT scans of the human brain.”

Nisi Jacobs is a video artist who works with fixed media as well as live performance. Her video work has been screened at the Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Jeu De Paume (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), SONAR (Caracas), Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), Tribeca Film Festival 2003 (New York City), Hong Kong Film Festival, and at other venues throughout the world. She has also created live video performances for pop bands at The Bowery Ballroom, PIANOS NYC, The Living Room, and at other venues in New York.

Michael J. Schumacher is a composer and installation artist, works with electronic and digital media to create computer-generated sound environments which evolve continuously for long periods of time and which use spatialization techniques to relate his sound work to the architecture. His works are published on XI Records and his composition Grid was included in the group show Between Thought and Sound at the Kitchen. Schumacher lives and works in New York City. His directs the Diapason Sound Art Gallery.

All images are courtesy of the artists © 2010

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POWER ANIMALS
Jason Martin
MONDAY NOV 15TH
Screening starts @ 7pm

Jason Martin is an artist and musician into glamorous paganistic animism, making work with films of light and water and half-animal people in shiny spandex inspired by 80s workout videos and Hanna Barbera cartoons. Topics include: power structures, species and gender hybridity, witchcraft, conflict, and analog electronics.

The animal works are based in drawings he made for years and kept hidden away til now. Jason will be screening a selection of videos: old, new, and never shown before, while exposing the dog people form space who contacted him as a child and have forced him to make this work instead of being a guitarist.

Power Animals are part of the species-queer transdimensional shift in New York City USA North America, in the 3rd dimension, around the year 2010 CE.

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Jason Martin

Jason’s topics manifest in video, performance, installation, drawing, and sound. Jason is living in Brooklyn NY, recently going back to school and completing an MFA at NYU Steinhardt School of Visual Arts. Jason comes from upstate New York, where he made art, music, curated events, and built analog music recording studios.

With the help of a few close collaborators, Jason led multi-media performance troupe Brown Cuts Neighbors (1989 – 2002,) which was based out of Schenectady NY’s local Public Access television station, and featuring countless members. This group was technically started in 1980, with Jason’s sister Colleen Martin and a bunch of stuffed animals, but that’s another story…

As a musician, in addition to building an extensive ongoing discography, Jason continues to perform live music and has toured, recorded, and performed with a variety of acts including Devendra Banhart, Dan Deacon, J. Mascis (Dinosaur Jr), Suzanne Thorpe (Mercury Rev, Wounded Knees), The Bunnybrains, His Name Is Alive, Raphe Malik, Lettuce Little, Denim and Diamonds, and many others.

All images and texts are courtesy of Jason Martin © 2010

Jason Martin’s website:http://www.jasonmartinwebsite.com

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THROUGH THE UNIVERSE
Gérard Courant
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 13TH
Screening starts @ 7pm

Through the Universe is the third section of my cinematic seriesMes Villes d’Habitation (The Places where I’ve lived).

The film represents an ‘autopsy’ of Saint-Marcellin, a small village in the Isère Region where I spent my childhood during the 50s.

Through the Universe displays, in alphabetical order, all the 127 streets and 17 public squares of the town (updated to the period of the shooting, in 2004-2005), all shot following the same rules: in a 20-second-long wide, static, single shot. Every vista is preceded by the sign indicating the name of the street or plaza.

Gérard Courant

A travers l’Universe (Through the Universe)
2005, 79mins, miniDV, col, sound
with: streets, squares and inhabitants of Saint-Marcellin (Isère, France)

All images are courtesy of Gérard Courant © 2010

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FEAR FOUND FOOTAGE FROM SPAIN

curated by Albert Alcoz
SUNDAY OCTOBER 31ST
& MONDAY NOVEMBER 1ST
Screening starts @ 7pm

The experimental filmmakers from Spain use found footage techniques to transform the original material appropiated into new aesthetic forms with ideological discourses. As Paul Arthur has stated: “It is only an ostensible paradox that as cinema nears the end of its filmic phase, the avant-garde has adopted the inquest of history as one of its dominant projects”. The pieces chosen for the Fear found footage from Spain recover the cinematic past to reveal the invisible side of the image suggesting fear and suspiciousness. Erotic amateur films, auteur cinema and feature horror films are subverted to celebrate the existence of moving images and the possibility to recycle them.

PROGRAM:

A Spanish Delight
by Eugeni Bonet, 2007, 5′
An ironic appropiation of an anonymous found footage film in black and white where the erotic images have been accompanied by a new song named “Canción española” by Antonio Paso y Enrique García Álvarez.

Miralls (Mirrors)
by Gerard Gil, 2006, 21′
A suspense montage of different scenes of feature horror films of free domain. The recycled images are associated with an instrumental music made with panic atmospheric textures.

Copyright is for losers
by Ninotchka Art Project, 2008, 24′
An inspiring video made with juxtapositions of comercial films and electronic sounds combined to discuss copyright issues and the notion of originality in the cinematic media context.

Profanaciones (Desecrations)
by Oriol Sánchez, 2008, 22′
A rhythmical video created to deprive cinema of his sacred character. Hundreds of superimposed images from famous terror films and vintage B movies are methodically arranged on three screens.

The End
by Fernando Franco, 2008, 6′
A composition of diverse death performed by known actors on fiction films. Showed in slow motion theses non happy-ending scenes question the representation of the decease of the human body.

Total Running Time: 78 minutes aprox.
Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Albert Alcoz

Albert Alcoz is a Barcelona-based filmmaker, programmer and writer specializing in avantgarde and experimental cinema. Designs the Visionary Film blog, curates the experimental cinema and video sessions named Amalgama, writes articles about cinema and contemporary art in magazines and books. He creates experimental films on super 8 and 16 mm.

Albert Alcoz’s blog: www.visionary-film.blogspot.com

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JEANNE LIOTTA

Sounds Like ?
SATURDAY OCTOBER 30TH
Screening starts at 7pm

Jeanne Liotta, film-maker, curator, performer, researcher, and academic ventures across the East River to our Bushwick gallery next Saturday 10.30 with her record player, audio recordings, Youtube channel works, and videos including her most recent piece “Crosswalks” (original format is 35mm) which premiered at this year’s New York Film Festival.  We are looking forward to this special and improvisational night and hope you will join us!

Stylistic contaminations for record player, youtube, music/and/video,
from the contrived and crafted to the perfect-as-is.
Including fragments and  sketches of point n shoot field recording research gathered on my zerojeanli youtube channel, with other discreet short works over the years motivated by a tense and lively engagement with music and sound. J L

All video/audio program by Jeanne Liotta.

PROGRAM

WHAT MAKES DAY AND NIGHT
1998, 16mm, 9′, sound
This 1940’s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth. A readymade film with the barest of interventions.

HYMN TO THE VOID (documentation)
2006, originally a 16mm sound film and hymn board
loop installation
Work for the Night is coming.

HEPHAESTUS OF THE AIRSHAFT
2005, DV, 3′, sound
The god of metallurgy manifests in Manhattan, with the radio on.

SWEET DREAMS
2009, screen captures / DV, midi sound files
Shot on location in Second Life at Beneath the Tree That Died by AM Radio, screen captures by Sunshine Hernandoz, editing by Jeanne Liotta. Commissioned for the second annual PDX Festival Experimental Filmmaker Karoke Throwdown.

SUTRO
2009, digital video, 3′, sounds by Scanner (from Lauwarm Instrumentals)
Animated portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay…

CROSSWALK
2010, 35mm, 19′, stereo sound
Uyo-realism from the streets of Loisaida.
The Cinema is an explosion of my love for reality – Pier Paolo Pasolini
(projected in digital version)

Admission is $6 – tickets available at door

From the ordinary
George Ives taught his son to respect the power of vernacular music. As a Civil War band leader he understood how sentimental tunes such as Stephen Foster ‘s songs, marches and bugle calls were woven into the experience of war and the memories of soldiers.  Charles Ives came to associate everyday music with profound emotions and spiritual aspirations. One of his father’s most resonant pieces of wisdom came when he said of a stonemason’s off-key hymn singing: “Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds–for if you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.” – Jan Swafford

JEANNE LIOTTA

Jeanne Liotta was born and raised  in NYC where she makes films and other cultural ephemera. Her most recent body of work, The Science Project, encompasses a constellation of mediums at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Observando El Cielo, her 16mm film of the night skies  was voted one of the decades’ best by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, won the Tiger Award for Short Film at Rotterdam in 2008,  and was listed in both the Village Voice and Artforum’s Top Ten Films of 2007.  Her exhibition history ranges from Whitney Biennial to the Cornell Astronomy Society’s Science Friday Lecture series at the Fuertes Observatory. This summer several media works from The Science Project were installed in “Covering Ground” at Denver’s Robischon Gallery , and The James Hotel in Soho has just permanently installed her photo series ‘Void of Course’ in their 6th floor hallway gallery. Together with Bradley Eros she also maintains scholarly research into The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives, and since the 90’s has been organizing Firefly Cinema, a free screening series at the 6th st /Ave B Community Garden . She has taught widely and variously ,i.e., The New School, Pratt Institute, The San Francisco Art Institute, and The Museum School Boston. She is presently on the film/video faculty at the Bard MFA summer program, and is Assistant Professor at The Univ. of Colorado Boulder, where she now spends  part of the year. Her newest film project Crosswalk (2010) premiered earlier this month at The New York Film Festival.

All images are courtesy of Jeanne Liotta  @ 2010.

Jeanne Liotta’s website: www.jeanneliotta.net

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MARTA HOSKINS
Butterfly Mountain
SATURDAY OCTOBER 23RD
Screening starts @ 7pm

Painter, performance artist & writer Marta Hoskins, in town from Paris, joins us this Saturday 10/23 at MICROSCOPE Gallery for an evening of short videos including the first gallery screening of Butterfly Mountain, a video performed and co-directed by Hoskins and french director Antoine Barraud as well as videos by underground film-makers Richard Kern, Dale Hoyt and Keja-Ho Kramer featuring Marta as performer.

Marta Hoskins began performing in Cleveland in the early 80s with Ralf Armin Kaethner and later in San Francisco, LA and NYC, collaborating along the way with many of the luminaries of the underground perfomance, music and film scenes.  On the west coast, she performed with Tony Labat and also joined the funk bank Premonition – playing ‘white cunt’ guitar and Farfisa and appeared in 2 video works by artist Dale Hoyt, Dancing Death Monsters (1981)and Over My Dead Body (1982). In New York, she took part in the ‘Cinema of Transgression’ experience, along side Nick Zedd, Kembra Pfahler, Bradley Eros and Richard Kern, for whom she performed in the 1987′s Submit to Me Now.

Butterfly Mountain is based on the documentation of the performance she wrote and realised in 2008 at Chateau de Sacy, Paris, commissioned by Hermine Deloriane. She has performed it live twice since then at Garage Mobile Archives and Lucca Film Festival, Italy.

Along with the video program, a Polaroids series of Marta shot by Bradley Eros in the 1980s will be on display for the evening.

PROGRAM:

Sky Rocket
by Keja-Ho Kramer
2005, 4’13”, color, sound, video

Submit To Me Now
by Richard Kern
1987, 17′, color, sound, super8

Dancing Death Monsters
by Dale Hoyt
1981, 2’29”, color, sound, video

Over My Dead Body
by Dale Hoyt
1982, 16′, color, sound, video

Butterfly Mountain
by Marta Hoskins and Antoine Barraud
2010, 20′, color, sound, video

Admission $6 – tickets available at door

Marta Hoskins on Butterfly Mountain (Nabi San)
I wrote the performance Butterfly Mountain on my Fender Rhodes during three months (Jan – March 2008), at the painter Ricardo Tarrega Shayegan’s studio in Paris – which we used to call Paradise – formerly apartment of his late mother the philosopher Yeganeh Shayegan. Her last interior decoration was a mirror lined cocotte, an integral philosophy boudoir. I concentrated on exhuming and interpreting Korean sijo poems with the rigour of Aristotle poetics.

The music is composed by choices of key scales of open and closed chords. Seven minutes time for each “song”, like a seven minutes movie. The interpretation of the music is by improvisation, following closely predefined rhythms, to fit with the sung words. I also included alternative parts to play or omit at will, based on the feelings I get from the audience. I wanted to make something that could be recreated.

It was commissioned, in English, by Hermine Deloriane of Chateau de Sacy, for “after-dinner entertainment” during her annual meeting. I insisted on having it documented, enticing Antoine Barraud into the performance as a consciousness mirror.

The editing of the film continued as a joint creation from the day of the performance until September 2010. The original 35-minute-long performance, along with its original text, were cut to 20 minutes.

This film represents for me the realisation of a dream I’ve always had: to make an object out of an ephemeral performance, and at the same time to have the experience of creating with someone else, someone as wonderful as Antoine Barraud. I met him at a midnight dinner hosted by Keja-Ho Kramer at a bistro by Gare de l’Est with glass images of dancing women and candles in the private oval dining room, oysters and champagne, hot and tight with 14 guests. Also present that night were my Italian friends Andrea Monti and Alessandro De Francesco. This first meeting was followed by a portrait painting I made of Antoine, where he appears in a mirror.

Marta Hoskins, Williamsburg, October 2010

MARTA HOSKINS
Marta Hoskins was born at the Providence Hospital, Oakland California, and raised in Wellesley, Massachussets. She graduated in 1982 at San Francisco Art Institute, under the direction of Paul Kos, Howard Fried and Kathy Acker.

Her early performances took place in Cleveland with Ralph Kaethner, and in S.F. and L.A. with Tony Labat. She also participated in a five days performance/installation Building a House at Diego Rivera Gallery. At the time, she also played ‘white cunt’ guitar and Farfisa organ in the funk group Premonition. During the same period, she started working with Dale Hoyt, appearing in 2 of his films.

She lived in Berlin from 1983 to 1984, acting in films and presenting her performances Der Streik, Die Hochzeit. Relocated to NYC in 1984, she continued performing in films, as well as doing paintings and wall paper designs for Brunschwig & Fils.

After spending a few months in Berlin and Budapest, back in NY she met Richard Kern and took part to his super8 film Submit to Me Now. Then she appeared in Ghislaine Jourdain’s Blood Lust, and later in a film by Jason Brandenburg. In 1985, after having her apartment-studio tilted out over E 3rd st and Ave C – episode documented by the NY Post – she moved to 88th street.

In 1986 she performed in the film Totes Geld by Hungarian Gisa Schleelein, dancing with a puma and singing a text she wrote inspired by poet Robert Frost, on a music composed by Mick Harvey. She left briefly for Berlin and Hamburg, coming back only to find all the furniture of her apartment shoved out into dumpster, and her paintings and all her possessions distributed freely in the streets.

In November 1988 she moved definitively to Paris, except for one year spent in Ife-Ife, Nigeria. There she became an expert of batik and Nigerian dye techniques in feminine and masculine traditions. Photographs of her ‘Freedon Ceremony’ were exhibited at Max Fish, NYC, in a show curated by Mike Osterhout.

Besides, a series of her ‘Pussy Prints’ were shown at CBGB’s in a curatorial project by Neil Martinson. In the meanwhile, in Paris, she did many reading performances at clubs and art spaces, including the Senate and Gallery Elizabeth Valleix.

She was also ‘Cultural Secretary for Liaisons Franco-Nigerians’ from 1992 to 1998, organising exhibits and events, and during the years 1996-2000 she regularly did scene decoration along with video/photo documentation of Tony Allen afro-beat jazz group, and other Paris-based groups.

In 1997, she wrote “Instabilité Divine” (Divine Instability), an event presented at FIAC consisting of five performances, that ended up in a publication with video and texts.

2003 was the year of the collaboration with Keja-Ho Kramer for her video Sky Rocket. Of the same period is the three-week-long performance with video installation she presented in a gallery-boutique in Paris, where she also exhibited her painting “Khaybar Pass: Portrait of a Warrior”. Later on, she realised the painting installation “Petit Champignon”, at Garage des Archives, Paris.

She completed the ‘Seven Year Portrait of Money’ in 2007, a continuous rendering in visual images of the financier Edouard de Lenquesaing. He was given the choice of possessing all of the 100 paintings and drawings, in addition to the commissioned, formal oil painting for his portrait gallery of his chateau, or they would be destroyed by fire. He took them all. Plus, still in 2007, at the Lucca Film Festival in Italy, she read a text called ‘Confession’ she had written shortly after leaving NYC in 1988.

In late 2008, she rendered and performed ‘Interruption’ again at Lucca Film Festival. The performance, inspired by musician Oghene Kologbo, was improvised on the piano in the occasion of ‘Felabration’, the celebration of Afro-beat major figure Fela Kuti. The piano accompaniment and a text were spoken over a recorded piece with Kologbo on bass and Marta on piano.  In the latest years, she has been regularly working with Antoine Barraud.

She lives and works in Paris.

RICHARD KERN
Richard Kern is best known in the film world as a pivotal artist in the 1980s Lower East Side “Cinema of Transgression.”  His films, shot on Super 8 often feature underground performers such as Lydia Lunch, Feotus, Kembra Pfahler, Nick Zedd, and Henry Rollins and revolve around extreme sex, drugs and violence and yet they are also know for having an aesthetic of beauty.

He also self-published zines including “The Heroine Addict” later renamed “The Valium Addict” and made music videos for Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson. He currently works primarily as a photographer. His photographs have been  Purple, Italian GQ, Vice and in numerous books and exhibited at MoMA, The Whitney Museum and in more than 30 solo shows around the world.

DALE HOYT
Dale Hoyt has been involved in the making, curation, and criticism of media art for over 32 years. His videotapes, drawings, and paintings are in numerous permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and the Getty Museum inLos Angeles, CA.

During the ’90s he spent several years curating the Video Program at The Kitchen Center in NYC and, in SF, founding C.A.L.F., the Coalition of Artists and Life Forms, the world’s first artist-run think tank devoted to researching Biotechnology and its impact on society. This lead him to be commissioned, along with Steve Thurston, to draw the first authorized portrait of CC, the world’s first cloned cat.

During the Aughts Hoyt concentrated on teaching in the Bay Area at CCA, 826Valencia and creating a new body of video shorts again dealing with the themes of man, technology and the natural world. He also recently completed the first official music video of Jazz/Rock pioneer Annette Peacock “young.” Dale has also been a licensed fire marshal in the state of New York since 1991.

KEJA-HO KRAMER
Keja Ho Kramer, born in 1974, California lives and works in Paris. Studied photography at The School of Visual Arts in NY, video and film at Le Fresnoy studio National des arts Contemporains in Roubaix, France. She has apprenticed and collaborated with such artists and filmmakers as Stephen Dwoskin, Kasper Toeplitz, Sarkis, Boris Lehman, Myriam Gourfink and Robert Kramer.

She has been working in video since 1998 and shows in international film festivals as well as galleries and museums. Among her latest videos: I’ll be your eyes you’ll be mine (2006, made with Stephen Dwoskin), Mechanical Nights (2007), Molecular Black (2007, in collaboration with Myriam Gourfink).

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RAY SWEETEN & STEPHEN DWOSKIN, SEPTEMBER 25 TO 27, 2011