Distilled Motion I: A night of 16mm
Organized by Radon Lake.
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011, 8pm
Spectacle
128 Brookside Ave, JP
Allow your eyes to be hypnotized and your mind to be fooled into seeing things that never were. Thousands of individually rendered frames express movement not captured but merely implied. Some works possess a quiet grace; some produce a wonderful malaise through erratic colors, textures and sounds. All willfully exploit the entrancing flicker of analog film projection.
PROGRAM
Zeil-Film, Urs Breitenstein (Frankfurt), 1980, 6 min
The camera rotates on the main shopping street, Zeil, in a structural pattern of acceleration.
Dig, Rob Todd (Boston), 2007, 2.5 min
A constricted frame in agitation … the sweet music of jackhammers raging throughout – with Intermission.
I Swim Now, Sarah Biagini (Boulder), 2010, 8.5 min
An exploration of the experiences of one Violet Jessop, who happened to be onboard all three sister-ships of the White Star Line – the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic – while each suffered varying degrees of collision and wreckage at sea.
I Hate You Don’t Touch Me or Bat and Hat, Becky James (New York), 2008, 5 min
A lyrical and monstrous meditation on when the mundane becomes gruesome.
Pillager, Joshua Lewis (New York), 2011, 4 min
A document of aggressive and proximate manipulations of competing photographic reactions.
The Roar from Within, Flip Johnson (Boston), 1982, 6.5 min
A personal, psychological horror film, painted on paper in dark watercolors.
Tusslemuscle, Steve Cossman (New York), 2007-09, 5 min
Seven thousand Viewmaster cells & splicing tape.
Word Picture Verses, David Goodrich (Boston), 2005, 4 min
A life story told in India ink.
Kosmos, Thorsten Fleisch (Berlin), 2004, 5 min.
The mystery of the crystals under closer examination. What is it that makes them possess magic powers as claimed by mystics of all ages?
Star Film, Saul Levine (Boston), 1971, 15 min
Starring a hand-made emulsion.
(Please save the date of July 25th for Distilled Motion II, featuring a completely different program in the parking lot of Lyndell’s Bakery in Cambridge.)
Friday May 27, 9PM. $5-10 suggested donation.
Jenny Graf the other half of the duo Metalux intrigues with black lace vocals that mirror the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains meshed over a sound scape that includes sampled sounds and layered guitar riffs.
Secondly, Childe Bride plays dark wave, ambience with haunting vocals over laying lo-fi beats and synth squelching. Shana Palmer a Mass Art Graduate has been residing in Baltimore, MD since 2008. Her work will be featured in the upcoming 2011 High Zero Festival of Improvised Music (www.highzero.org) along with her first LP release of Secret Secrets a collaboration with Mellissa Moore on ehserecords.com/.
Berglind Agustdottir, Icelandic pop gets weird. Some of her songs are uplifting covers of popular american hits while others find the beauty and aggression reminiscent of the 80′s German, dark pop, girl group Malaria.
Duck That- Duck That were once seen in the same room as Paul
Whiteman, although they’d deny it if asked. Angela Sawyer, electronics
and game calls, etc… Josh Jefferson, reeds and game calls, etc…
Steve Norton, reeds and game calls, etc…
elks- screwed and glued sacred musics, incandescent lights and post everything dance mayhems featuring Alan Lomax engaged in the Dutty Wine.
Also featuring the super not secret after it all dance party with DJ’s Philomena (Ivanna B), Oxycontinental (Ricardo De Lima) and Ultratumba (Ethan Kiermaier)
¡yessssss!
Hosted by Adam Paradis
May 14, 2010. 8pm, $5 suggested Donation
World Within Worlds will be a mind-bending exploration into the symbolic and creative potential of the scientific artifact. Territory both strange, shocking and bizarre will be examined through the aid of the projectors lens. We will discover new cinematic landscapes as World Within Worlds opens our eyes to a world in which we were all once blind.
So come one and come all, to witness an amazing night of cinema delights.
Films by Luther Price, Gordon Nelson, Brittany Gravely, a very special quad 16mm projection performance by Projexorcism (North Carolina) along with a choice selection of ephemeral 16mm films produced by Bell Phone Film Labs (featuring Stan Vanderbeek!), National Geographic, and Coronet Films.
The Eye: An Inside Story
Coronet Films, 16mm, 10min
How does the eye see? Photography allows us to assume a unique perspective: from a position behind the retina, we observe the eye itself as it recreates the process of vision through the laboratory dissection of a cow’s eyeball.
Fancy
Luther Price
15min, 16mm 2005
“Dissection reconstruction examination cool crips and thread blue and white greenish in tone with apron and mask pretty pretty flesh lip lip……”
Frankensteined Film
Gordon Nelson
16mm, 5min
World Within Worlds
National Geographic Society, 16mm, 23min, 1981
Though remarkably versatile and sensitive, and powerful, our eyes are limited, literally blind to much of the world around us. Time and size hide many things that cameras and other scientific instruments can reveal, dramatically enhancing our knowledge and perception. World Within Worlds will take us on a magical journey beyond the limits of the unaided human eye.
Incredible Machines
Bell Phone Labs, 16mm, 15min
An incredible display of early computer generated motion graphics and sound systhesization created at the Bell Phone Labs for AT&T. Featuring a rare glimpse of Stan Vanderbeek during his work with the Bell Labs and a prophesy that phones themselves, would one day be a tool used to create movies.
Introduction to Living in a Closed System
Brittany Gravely
16min, 2001, 16mm
“What each of them [Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller] has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true.” — Allan Temko
Introduction to Living in a Closed System is a fractured educational film based upon the idea of a biospheric utopia: a contained, self-sustaining, controlled environment which survives through dynamic systems (here, involving machines, plants, animals, and humans), each of which effects the development of the others. This hope of human-made technology and the natural world in harmony manifests itself in the collage of imagery, sounds, and text. The disparate elements variously unite or fall apart as all of the visions, fears, and dreams of this retrospective/future place attempt to operate within the ideal of a unified, efficient system. The film serves as an introduction to the complexity of the poetry and the problems created by pastoral dreams of synthetic futures.
Projexorcism (North Carolina)
Spaceglue Continuum
30 min, quadruple 16mm performance
John Glenn is in space and you are worried about him. The glue binding his spaceballs together is strong, but his heat shield is loose – though he maintains an outward calm we find in this heartwarming story that his photons are only human. Projexorcism melds the fuse that welds the salad bowl of educational entertainment to the fondue pot of random word association, positing firmly in your mind: “What the fuck are we doing in space?” Projexorcism uses quadruple 16mm Bell & Howell film projectors, dangling like low fruit from the Tree of Knowledge Dispensation, controlled by an audio actuated Mechanical Turk – all working together to improve your neural bandwidth benchmark tests. Standing guard are a dual headed video feedback Hydra and an overclocked Speak & Spell with 256-bit encryption. They have toured the world, played with every band, and are the greatest thing to ever be.
April 9th 7:30-9:30pm
Corvid College Presents:
Urban Sojourns: The Art of Traveling.
Study Philosophy, Die Crazy Lecture Tour.
Excerpt from the course description:
“In the Old Days tourism didn’t exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them ‘tourists’.” -Overcoming Tourism, Hakim Bey
What does it mean to be a ‘tourist’?
What are the alternatives?
How can we go about changing the practices and discourses that make us tourists and not something more… I don’t know… romantic? Something more fulfilling?
These questions, as well as Hakim’s reflection, will act as a point of departure as we collectively renegotiate what it means to travel, and to be a traveler in our post-everything world. During the course we will (lightly) engage travel-narratives by Henry Miller, J.R.R. Tolkien, Guy Debord, Ernest Hemingway, the guy who wrote Hopping Freight Trains In America, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Bowels, Nobokov, and Jack Kerouac. However, more important than the words of these people will be our engagement with penpals, ‘travel photography’, exotic alcohol, and nature walks. Most important of all, we will let our personal insight lead us into the terra incognita that is the world that awaits to be re-discovered. This world, of course, awaits not only in lands far away, but also outside our door, and, perhaps most elusively, within our own minds. Running interests will include food, drink, sleep, maps, sex, the law, nature, animal companions, customs, companionship, and all earthly delights!
With a bit of luck and the wind behind us, we will host some guest lecturers from the urban cycling group SCUL, Harvard Divinity School, and beyond.
Method/Procedures: shared inquiry, light reading, ventures around town, trips to NYC-Brooklyn, camping adventures, and both walking and biking trips to other interesting environs.
Links:
Friday March 18. 2011
Non-Event presents
Tumble
with Mark Cetilia
Spectacle
17 Edinboro Street #3
Boston (Chinatown)
617.435.2566
8 p.m. / $10
TUMBLE is the duo of Attila Faravelli (laptop and electronics) and Andrea Belfi (percussion and electronics) from Milan, Italy. Belfi and Faravelli create sound worlds through instant composition and improvisation. The results of this compositional process is somehow simultaneously chaotic and rational. The rhythms and textures created by drums and electroacoustic devices melt together to create volcanic movements of sound that are diffused through broken and modified speakers. Their first recording, On Tumbling, was released as a part of the 12-CD box set Musica Improvvisa on Die Schachtel this past year.
MARK CETILIA is a sound / media artist working at the nexus of analogue and digital technologies. Over the past decade, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image. Mark is a member of the electroacoustic ensemble Mem1 and the experimental media art group Redux, recipients of a 2006 Creative Capital grant for their Callspace project. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D in computer music and multimedia at Brown University.
His solo sound works have been published by Iynges, Anarchymoon and Quiet Design. His group Mem1 has collaborated with a variety of artists including the Penderecki String Quartet, Steve Roden, Jan Jelenik, Frank Bretschneider, and Stephen Vitiello. Age of Insects, a full-length album by Mem1 and Vitiello, will be released in May 2011 by Dragon’s Eye Recordings. Together, Mem1 curates the experimental music series Ctrl+Alt+Repeat and the record label Estuary Ltd., who recently released the group’s fourth full-length album, Tetra.
