Artist-in-Residence James Ilgenfritz: The Ticket That Exploded: An Opera (based on a novel by William S. Burroughs)
Artist-in-Residence James Ilgenfritz presents The Ticket That Exploded: An Opera based on William Burroughs’ 1962 dystopian novel about identity disintegration, oppression of humanity’s collective consciousness through technological influence, and revolution through the subversion of those very technologies. Featuring vocalists Ted Hearne, Nick Hallett, Melissa Hughes, Anne Rhodes, Steve Dalachnsky, and Ryan Opperman, an ensemble of fifteen instrumentalists, and live video projections from Jason Ponce, the opera will be organized using the same cut-up techniques and emphasis on language that distinguishes Burroughs’ literary work.
ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; Meet the Composer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
“Knots and Fields” (Darmstadt Summer Course Documentary Film Screening)
NYC Premiere of the documentary “Knots and Fields” by filmmakers Andrew Chesher and David Ryan. Since 2008, both British artists Andrew Chesher and David Ryan have intensely worked with interview and archive material on their film about the Darmstadt Summer Course. “Knots and Fields” documents the history and present activity of this important institution, which Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant-Garde” has taken inspiration from since the beginning. The International Summer Course for New Music was brought to life immediately after the end of the World War II, 1946, and became one of the most important centers for the music of our time. Olivier Messiaen, Edgar Varèse, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm are just a few of the legendary faculty who have taught at Darmstadt.
Excerpt from Knots & Fields: Pierre Boulez on John Cage
The Darmstadt Institute is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Dedalus Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council
Table of the Elements – The Copernicium Festival:
May 12-14 at ISSUE Project Room
Image from Robert Longo's Pictures for Music (1979), to be shown alongside Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio
Jonathan Kane’s February, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, Stephen O’Malley, Zeena Parkins, Films by Robert Longo, Tyler Hubby, & Tony Conrad
May 12 – 14, 2011
Since 1993 the record label Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise, intending nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century, and beyond. Its projects have focused on musicians whose light shimmers outside the frames of convention, and comprise a vital contemporary archive of experimental, minimalist, improvised and outsider musics.
Table of the Elements – Free / Not Free: Guitar Trio (by Rhys Chatham) with projections by Robert Longo + Text of Light + Jon Mueller + Peg Simone
Still from Robert Longo's Pictures for Music (1979)
Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio sparked an electric guitar revolution with three guitars and a single chord. The 2008 Table of the Elements release Guitar Trio is My Life! is celebrated here with a much larger ensemble, the Lords of Tinnitus, anchored by drummer Jonathan Kane and accompanied by images by artist Robert Longo. The ensemble includes Ernie Brooks, Robert Longo, Jonathan Kane, Robert Poss, Bill Brovold, Zach Layton, Adam Wills, and Colin Langenus.
Text of Light (William Hooker, Alan Licht & Nels Cline) was initially formed to perform with American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s film The Text of Light. The group takes on various permutations, and at ISSUE will feature William Hooker, Alan Licht, and Nels Cline. The group has headlined both film and music festivals, and has toured European and USA club and cinema venues.
Jon Mueller has been an active drummer and percussionist over the past 25 years. His recordings have been featured in a variety of contexts, from cassette tape to MTV, and he has performed concerts throughout the U.S., Japan, and Europe. He has worked with members of the groups Swans, Wilco, Bon Iver, and Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, as well as been a longtime member of the groups Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and more recently, Volcano Choir. He has collaborated with artists such as James Plotkin, Marcus Schmickler, Bhob Rainey, Dan Burke, Asmus Tietchens, Lionel Marchetti, Z’EV, Jason Kahn, Jack Wright, and many others. His recordings have been released by record labels as disparate as Table of the Elements, Polyvinyl Records, Type Recordings, Jagjaguwar, and many others.
New York-based singer-songwriter Peg Simone employs the slide to bone-chilling effect, fracturing raucous rock choruses and sepia-toned ballads into ghost images with its off-tuned eeriness & pure blues tones stuttering across hectic post-punk rhythms. Her recent release is Secrets From The Storm (Table of the Elements, 2010).
April 16, 17 & 21 – The Sonic Unconscious: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris & Gina Badger
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”
—Robert Smithson
Saturday April 16
Gina Badger
Mongrels, Part 1: Weeds
3 – 4:30 PM ($10 / $8 Members)
Yolande Harris
Pink Noise (The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea)
& Tropical Storm
5 – 7 PM (FREE)
& April 17 5 – 7:30 PM
Scorescapes
7 PM ($12 / $10 Members)
Sunday April 17
Gina Badger
Mongrels, Part 2: Elixirs
6 – 7:30 PM ($10 / $8 Members)
Mongrels: Screening & Reception
8 – 10 PM (FREE)
Thursday April 21
Jana Winderen
Scuttling around in the shallows
8 PM ($12 / $10 Members)
Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?
The Sonic Unconscious: Yolande Harris — Pink Noise & Tropical Storm
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
These installations will run on 4/16 (5–7 PM) & 4/17 (5–7:30 PM).
Pink Noise:
Pink Noise (The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea) uses sound recorded underwater at a National Marine Reserve in midsummer. A surprising range of sounds – loud thumps, grinds and tones from boat engines, anchors and depth sounders – are juxtaposed with video of colorful light reflecting on the sea from the same location. Headphones are suspended from the ceiling directly above the video projection on the floor, physically emphasizing the technological mediation required to make audible the inaudible underwater sounds.
Tropical Storm:
Sound and video recordings of a tropical storm evoke the multisensory experience of being immersed in a torrential downpour in a rainforest. Tropical Storm presents the intensity of noise and energy through minimal editing, allowing the exact synchronisation of sound and image to work up an affective space of palpable intensity that can be both overwhelming and meditative.
Yolande Harris (UK) uses her performances, installations and instruments to investigate how we use sound to relate to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data.
Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.
The Sonic Unconscious — Gina Badger: Mongrels: Screening and Reception
The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.
Mongrels, a short film
Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.
Badger’s work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.
Littoral: The Hole Picture: Barbara Hammer, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, moderated by Kelly Dennis
The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.
Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. She has received numerous awards, most recently the Teddy for the best LGBT film at the 2009 International Berlin Film Festival. Her first book on queer cinema, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life launched at The Elizabeth Sackler Center at The Brooklyn Museum of Art on March 6, 2010 and is published by The Feminist Press of City University of New York. For one month in fall of 2010 Hammer was honored with her first US retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to be followed by The Tate Modern in London in fall 2011.
A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, the co-curator of Ridykeulous, a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work has been recently featured in Greater New York 2010, P.S. 1, New York and has been subject to solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the New Museum, New York. She is a visiting instructor at the School of Visual Arts and University of California Los Angeles, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, NY.
A.K. Burns lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A.K. uses sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions to pervert and exploit interpretations and implications of form. A.K. is a founding member W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), and co-editor of RANDY, a biannual transfeminist arts magazine. During 2010 the feature length video Community Action Center, created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner was released consecutively at Taxter & Spengemann, NY and Horton Gallery, Berlin. A.K. was also the artist-in-residence at Recess Activites Inc., NY, with her partner Katherine Hubbard. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Kelly Dennis is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of Art / Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Berg, 2009), on the role of touch in the reception of the nude from Plato to the Internet. She has published on fetishism and masturbation in art and wrote the definitive essay on beaver shots. She appears, along with Dr. Jocelyn Elders, Betty Dodson, and Scarlot Harlot, in the forthcoming feature-length documentary on masturbation, Sticky. Her work on photography, performance art, and pornography appears in A Cultural History of Sexuality (Berg, 2011), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge, 2008), Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna (SUNY, 2003), and in such journals as Art Journal, History of Photography, and n.paradoxa. She has lectured on pornography throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She also has been a consultant for documentary films and theater productions on sexuality and cultural representation in photography. She is currently at work on a history of the political aesthetics of Western regional landscape photography.
Since 1987, MIX NYC has presented the latest in queer experimental film and previously unseen works from legendary figures in avant-garde cinema. In addition to our vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations, and infamous parties, MIX NYC also provides year-round community screenings, a summer media workshop for queer youth, film preservation projects, and the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, documenting how collective action transformed AIDS activism, queer identity and health care in America.
The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Littoral: The Hole Picture: An Intergenerational Dialogue on Erotics & Porn in Lesbian-Feminist Queer Cinema
The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.
Dyketactics, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Menses, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 6 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Women I Love, 1976, 22 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1977, 20 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Community Action Center, 2010, 69 mins., A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner
Share – free audio & video jam – Featured guests: 1) Simone Weißenfels and 2) Hylantown – In the Munch Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
What is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Tonight’s featured guest are 1) Simone Weißenfels and 2) Hylantown.
1) Simone Weißenfels
Simone Weißenfels is one of Leipzig, Germany’s most versatile artists in contemporary, classical music and jazz. She performs successfully both the works of contemporary and classic composers as well as her own compositions.
Since her career start in the mid 80s, she is well known for her genre-spreading omnipresence with actors, cabaret artists as well as a vast number of jazz a.o. musicians like:
Gisela May, Uschi Brüning, Klaus Kugel, Elliott Levin, Jair-Rohm Parker Wells, Lol Coxhill, John Sinclair, Ian Smith, Adam Smith, Ken Yamazaki, Manfred Hering …
She has played jazz
.festivals in:
Berlin, Bochum, Detroit, Leipzig, Münster, Nanjing and many other cities as a soloist, in duos, ensembles and big band music.
Similarly, she has claimed great success with
.concerts and tours to:
USA, Taiwan, Poland, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ukraine and throughout Germany, in Gewandhaus and Mendelssohn Hall in Leipzig among other places
.Broadcasting company productions with the DLF and West German Radio, broadcasting company interviews and recordings in Germany, Taiwan, China and Bosnia-Herzegovina
She has performed the works of Ullmann, Schönberg, Weill, Eisler, Webern, Schostakowitsch and many others.
After her ensemble multiboxx performed the World Historical and Cultural Festival in Nanjing 2004 in 2006 though 2008, she organized and conducted one of the first practical youth exchange projects of young Chinese and German musicians in Nanjing and Shanghai as a youth symphony orchestra.
This international orchestra performed the premiere of her composition “lullaby for K.” in Nanjing for 10.000 people and also in Leipzig within the scope of the ‘Bach-Fest’ in 2008.
Recently she performed again in New York in July 2009 with Levin, Yamazaki a.m.o. and toured with Elliott Levin, Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and Klaus Kugel through Germany and Austria.
Simone Weißenfels is teaching piano at the world famous Thomanerchor in Leipzig.
http://www.lastfm.de/music/mspiano
http://www.myspace.com/mspianotaste
http://www.reverbnation.com/mspiano
http://www.jazz-kalender.de
http://www.share.dj/share/event_info.php?eventID=745
2) Hylantown is Leo Hylan a composer/VJ from the Baltimore area. The moniker name comes from a play on Leo’s last name and the infamous Baltimore neighborhood “Highlandtown”. Hylantown’s music ranges from ambient to techno, from pure electronica to electro-acoustic. Coherence of these styles is maintained through emphasis melodic tones. Influences include Boards of Canada, NIN, Orbital , Underworld, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Hylantown’s video performance lends itself to the abstract filmmaking style of Stan Brakhage and is heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionistic paintings of Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter. Leo Hylan has a B.F.A. in NEw Media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago , and has been a performing and visual artist as well as arts educator in Maryland for several years.
http://www.share.dj/share/event_info.php?eventID=735
———
Share will take place in the Munch Room tonight. The Munch Room is located on the first floor of The (OA) Can Factory.
232 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
Soundscreen Design Presents: Seriously Ecstatic: Joshua White at the Fillmore East, 1968–70
Seriously Ecstatic: Joshua White at the Fillmore East, 1968-70 is an account of the Joshua Light Show’s legendary two years at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. Performing with The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, The Band, and many others, the Joshua Light Show created extravagant visual experiences to accompany the music. The book includes exclusive photos and film stills from those performances, along with pleasant detours to the set of Midnight Cowboy and the Woodstock festival. Dan Nadel has interviewed Joshua White and scoured his archives to compile this mini-history.
Soundscreen Design, a “product company inspired by music” and publisher of the Artist Music Journals series hosts a party celebrating the book’s release. The evening will include music by “Gary, Devin, and Ross,” the musical collaboration between Gary Panter, Devin Flynn, and Ross Goldstein. Joshua White and his team will enliven ISSUE’s performance space with a multi-channel video environment, incorporating never-before-seen archival footage.
Alexander Hacke & Danielle de Picciotto Presents New Album Hitman’s Heel
Alexander Hacke & Danielle de Picciotto combine experimental film with music drawn from gypsy rolls, Italo-Western piano tunes, loops and Autoharp picking. They have worked in Berlin since the eighties, and tour the world regularly. This album, Hitman’s Heel, celebrates the restless life of a nomad, with a performance accompanied by de Picciotto’s visuals. Pete Simonelli will kick off the night by reading a few of his poems.
Light Industry at ISSUE Project Room: films by Warren Sonbert and readings by Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman
Two Films by Warren Sonbert
With readings by Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman
Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art, is crashing with friends in November and December, organizing a series of events at like-minded spaces across the city while it relocates to its new home. For more information on these shows, please see their calendar.
The Cup and the Lip, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1986, 20 mins
Friendly Witness, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1989, 32 mins
Though Warren Sonbert has frequently been described as a maker of diary films, the label fails to capture the emotional and formal intricacies at play in his work. In less than twenty films made from 1966 to the mid-90s—his career caught short by his death from AIDS at age 47—Sonbert’s primary method was indeed the creation of dense montages from 16mm shot in the course of daily life. The same images and ideas were often reused in different permutations for new films and, through this process, footage of his friends and colleagues attains an iconic status that transcends its documentary valence, becoming vibrant evocations of Sirkian melodrama. “I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments,” Sonbert said of his own work, “with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn.” The rich use of color and delicately punctuated editing also point to the influence of his mentor, Gregory Markopoulos, and Sonbert’s love of Hitchcock, Kenneth Anger, and opera.
The Cup and the Lip and Friendly Witness both date from the late 1980s, when Sonbert was refining and deepening his use of montage. Amy Taubin noted that The Cup and the Lip “is so dense it’s impossible to apprehend it at a single viewing,” calling it “Sonbert’s darkest work.” Precisely composed of 645 individual shots over 22 minutes, set to girl-group songs and the overture to Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s 18th-century opera Iphigeneia in Aulis, Friendly Witness was Sonbert’s return to sound after two decades of purely silent films. Tonight’s event pairs Sonbert with readings by three poets—Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman—a testament to the fact that, though long-admired as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, he always worked in conversation with other forms, literary and otherwise.
Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. In the 1990s, he co-founded and directed the Poetics Program at the State University of New York Buffalo. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound.
Corrine Fitzpatrick is a Brooklyn-based poet, and former Program Coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is the author of two chapbooks – On Melody Dispatch and Zamboangueña, and her poetry appears in numerous print and online journals. She recently completed the MFA program at Bard College.
Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Recent books include Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001), an experimental novel dedicated to the memory of Warren Sonbert. Forthcoming books include The Wide Road, an erotic picaresque written in collaboration with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna). She is co-contributor to The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975-1980. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Artist-in-Residence: Richard Garet — Rupture: Material Landscape
From Material Landscape (click for larger image)
Rupture: Material Landscape
Moving Image and Sound: Richard Garet
Special Guest Artist Collaborator: Bonnie Jones on Live Text and Voice
Special Guest Artist Collaborator: Wolfgang Gil on Max/MSP, spatializing Richard Garet’s treated sound and Bonnie Jones’s vocals.
Rupture: Material Landscape consists of a single video channel, presenting a moving image piece originating from treated and processed 16mm film. Accompanying the moving image presentation Garet prepared an aleatoric sonic system based on sounds recorded from processed and modified audiocassette tapes. Garet invited Wolfgang Gil, a programmer and sound artist, to execute the aleatoric system with Max/MSP and Gil’s custom-made software Roctor. Gil will distribute Garet’s sonic material throughout the overhead multichannel audio system during the presentation of the footage. Garet also invited, as a special guest, interdisciplinary artist Bonnie Jones to contribute to the piece with live text and voices, which Wolfgang Gil will also be spatializing throughout the overhead multichannel sound system.
Theoretical Music: Rome ’78 – Film Screening and Conversation with Filmmaker and Artist, James Nares
Buy the three-night package for $25, a discount of $5.
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
Rome ’78 (1978, 90 minutes, dir. James Nares)
Starring Patti Astor, James Chance, Bradley Field, David McDermott, Eric Mitchell, Lance Loud, John Lurie, Lydia Lunch, Anya Phillips, and Pat Place, among others.
British-born artist James Nares has lived and worked in New York for more than three decades. He is known both as a painter and as a filmmaker, and his films were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Jim Jarmusch described Nares’s films as “luminous jewels scattered in the dirt—as varied and striking as his paintings, his photographs, and his train of thought.” As a painter, Nares uses his mastery of the balance between spontaneity and control to create a single elegant stroke that pulsates with energy, relating to Franz Kline as well as to the cartoon brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein. As a musician, Nares played with the Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens.
Martha Colburn with Thollem McDonas
Martha Colburn
Martha Colburn’s work utilizes the language and materials of filmmaking to comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics and sexuality. Through a collage of live action (paint-on-glass) animations, found footage, and documentary filmmaking techniques, she addresses contemporary topics to express her personal anxieties and passions. Martha’s films are a disturbing and at times humorous take on popular and political culture. She creates elaborately layered collages, paintings, and installations that incorporate transparencies, recordings, and live performances. As her conceptual process grows, so follows advances in an already detailed and labor-intensive animating process. Martha is expanding her technique into working with multi-plane glass animation, which represents a physical manifestation of her conceptually layered ideas.
Currently, Martha is working on films that combine art historical representations and current depictions of politics to challenge our notions of truth and fantasy. As a descendent of some of America’s earliest settlers (ministers, farmers and wagon train members), her work demonstrates an awareness of the repository of the guilt haunted twisted history of the American soul. Martha’s current work draws from this perspective and personal experience to address issues such as Methamphetamine use, environmental catastrophes, and man’s relationship to nature.
Thollem McDonas
Thollem McDonas is a pianist and composer of Irish and Cherokee descent, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not long after birth, he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the Medieval era to the 20th century. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition, he dedicated his time to grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects, before returning to music with his full focus. Currently on tour, his extensive travels as a performer and teacher have covered much of the North American continent and Europe (he often leads listening and group improvisation workshops). He is a founding member of several innovative ensembles, all of varying and disparate musics. In the past 6 years, he has added 20 albums to his discography on 9 different vanguard labels in 4 different countries.
As the founder and Artistic Director of Estamos Ensemble, Thollem McDonas is the recipient of the 2009 US Artists International Award, as well as a 2010 CAP grant from the American Music Center. He was commissioned by The Limon Dance Company for a large-scale commemorative piece for their 50th year anniversary. In September 2008, he was invited to perform the late works of Claude Debussy on the piano on which they were written, as well as his own comprovisations with Stefano Scodanibbio. On Debussy’s Piano And…(Die Schachtel, Fall 2010) is the first album ever recorded on Debussy’s piano.
“Thollem’s keyboard flights unleash cascades of notes of seemingly impossible velocity and no matter where he goes tonally, it always seems right, fresh and satisfying. He should be on everyone’s listening list who appreciates great piano music. As an improviser, he inhabits a world uniquely his own, rhythmically, harmonically and formally. A true original.” - Terry Riley
A Sublime Frequencies film screening: THIS WORLD IS UNREAL LIKE A SNAKE IN A ROPE
THIS WORLD IS UNREAL LIKE A SNAKE IN A ROPE
A film by Robert Millis (Sublime Frequencies)
55 minutes
A collage of sights and sounds from the eternal never-ending collage that is INDIA. A trip through the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, processions, devotion, blessings, color, abstractions, detail, music and more. India is impossible to know: it is too vast, too rich and too much of a dream. Offered here is one perspective, one dream, subjective and flawed, hanging by a thread. Robert Millis is a musician and artist, a founding member of Climax Golden Twins and AFCGT and a frequent contributor to the Sublime Frequencies and Dust-to-Digital record labels. His previous films include Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan and My Friend Rain and was the co-author of Victrola Favorites released on Dust to Digital in 2008.
EMERGING ARTISTS COMMISSION: Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens Present “Hurricane Season”
“Hurricane Season” is a one-night screening of experimental documentary shorts reflecting the recent history of the U.S. Gulf Coast— catastrophic storms, an oil spill, a pattern of government un-response and other evidence of a complex system out of balance. The screening is programmed by Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens.
Still From Liza Johnson's South of Ten
Produced primarily in the Gulf region, the work included in “Hurricane Season” responds to complex issues with experimental strategies in an attempt to represent the landscape, people, the system, industry and their interrelationships. Representing a range of styles that are more lyrical and differently mediated than images seen in popular culture immediately following each disaster, the line-up features work produced since 2005, including some very recent work that is still in progress. Liza Johnson’s South of Ten considers how Mississippian survivors of Katrina are framed, with gesture and performance as alternatives to conventional interview-based forms of bearing witness. Pawel Wojtasik’s immersive video Below Sea Level (courtesy Priska C. Juschka Fine Art), partly shot with a 360° panoramic camera in and around New Orleans, articulates asense of impermanence inherent in the location, underscored by Steven Vitiello’s soundscape. A collaborative film/video by Courtney Egan and Helen Hill takes a more personal and fleeting look at one block, blending flood-damaged film found after Katrina with video shot of the same site. Work currently in progress examining the BP oil spill will include pieces by Ghen Dennis and Christina McPhee.
Framing the contemporary work will be excerpts from Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story from 1948 (courtesy Flaherty Film Seminar) and Tony Oursler’s Son of Oil from 1982. Louisiana Story, a lushly shot docudrama in black and white commissioned by Standard Oil, features an idyllic Bayou setting and an innocent boy’s adventures there as changes come to the region through the construction of an oil rig. The landscape and lifestyle of the Cajun people appear undisturbed by the drilling process, and even improved by the arrival of the oil industry. Tony Oursler’s colorful diatribe against the oil industry and our culture’s oil addiction is playfully enacted by performers and paper sets.
Although the program is regionally focused, the intricately intertwined economic, environmental, social, public and private issues suggested by the films and videos speak to a larger context as we collectively grapple with a gross consumption of fossil fuels, global warming, environmental erosion, newly diminished ways of life and unstable economies—and how to represent these things.
For a full list of work to be screened please visit http://hurricaneseason2010.wordpress.com .
ISSUE Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Greenwall Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Share – free audio & video jam
What is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
Share – all night free audio & video jam – In the Munch Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
What is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Share will take place in the Munch Room tonight. The Munch Room is located on the first floor of The (OA) Can Factory.
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
Littoral: Ariana Reines + Laurel Nakadate
ISSUE’s Littoral Series began in 2006. It is a monthly event curated by Tony Antoniadis, pairing writers with musicians, sound artists, and video artists. Named after IPR’s former location on the edge of the Gowanus Canal, Littoral is an attempt to cross-pollinate poetry and fiction with image and sound, and to bring New York City’s innovative (but often separated) creative communities together.
Ariana Reines will read from The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks 2006) and Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar 2007) and the translator of My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, for Mal-O-Mar, and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig, for Semiotext(e). TELEPHONE, her first play, was produced by The Foundry Theatre and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, February 2009. The production won two Obies. TELEPHONE will be published in Fall 2009 in PLAY: A Journal of Plays.
The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal
The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is the portrait of a true humanist who made a career out of compassion. Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”
This volume includes lengthy dialogues from 1979–1981 with Réal conducted by journalist and author Jean-Luc Hennig, in which she eloquently discusses the theoretical implications of sex-positive whoring and relates her experiences both inside and outside the profession: from her lengthy love affair with the “Berber” to such “psychological” and “special” clients as the “moldy rhinoceros.” The “Little Black Book” that rounds out this book is drawn from the logs in which Réal kept track of her many clients, from “Pedro, hilarious fat Spaniard, devoted, simple, honest, fat peasant face, 70F” to “Pierre 8 (from Basel), blue eyes, fifties, slightly balding, cultivated, sweet-violent … licks my finger after I remove it from his anus … 100–400F.” It is a journal that not only chronicles Réal’s working life, but offers a clinically direct, investigative sociological analysis of the sexual subcultures of her time.
Laurel Nakadate will screen a number of short videos.
Laurel Nakadate is a photographer, video artist and filmmaker. She was born in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, The Yerba Buena, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia. In 2009, her first feature film, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors/ New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature film, THE WOLF KNIFE, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. Nakadate’s work is in many public and private collections including the Yale University Art Gallery, The Saatchi Collection and the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is supported, in part, by The Casement Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
ISSUE PROJECT ROOM and SAGIndie present “ACTOR AS AUTEUR” with STEVE BUSCEMI
John Hockenberry Leads Brunchtime Conversation
To Benefit ISSUE Project Room
Actor, writer, film director and ISSUE board member Steve Buscemi will talk with Emmy Award-winning journalist and Co-Host of WNYC Radio and PRI’s The Takeaway, John Hockenberry, about creating unforgettable characters that ultimately drive a film’s narrative and impact. The brunch which is presented in collaboration with SAGIndie, an organization that unites working thespians of the world with passionate filmmaking mavericks who buck the system. The afternoon will feature film clips from the actor’s career and will be held at Bussaco located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Actor as Auteur – There are numerous iconic characters in film history, from The Little Tramp to Charles Foster Kane to Colonel Kurtz to Travis Bickle, all of them well drawn and directed. However, had Chaplin, Welles, Brando or DeNiro not played these roles would the film had the same powerful impact on our culture? Can a case be made for actor as auteur?
It is difficult to imagine Buscemi’s roles and their indelible effect on each film without his personal, stylized approach in bringing them to life. They emit essential energies striking a balance between deeply held neuroses and outward bombast. From lead roles in films like Fargo, Resevoir Dogs, Living in Oblivion, Trees Lounge, and Ghost World to supporting roles and cameos in films such as The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink, his presence breathes life into every corner of a film. “Buscemi is a quiet tyrant of artistic fury who threatens to overrun every frame he’s in with the inner desperation he projects even in his most subtle performances,” says Hockenberry.
An active Board Member of ISSUE Project Room, Buscemi began his career in, and continues to support experimental theater, writing and performance. All proceeds from the event will benefit ISSUE Project Room, one of the country’s preeminent centers for experimental culture.
“Actor as Auteur” Brunch To Benefit ISSUE Project Room, Presented in Collaboration With SAGIndie
Sunday, June 6, 12 pm – 2 pm
Bussaco, 833 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
$125 Per Person ($95 tax-deductible, three-course brunch is included.)
SEATING IS LIMITED. Buy Tickets
For more information please call 718-330-0313.
Share – free audio & video jam – with featured guests SKIF++ In the Munch Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
What is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Share will take place in the Munch Room tonight. The Munch Room is located on the first floor of The (OA) Can Factory.
Tonight’s featured guests:
SKIF++
http://hardhatarea.com/SKIF++
The electronic audio-visual trio SKIF++ is a collaboration of Jeff Carey (laptop SuperCollider), Robert van Heumen (laptop LiSa) and Bas van Koolwijk (laptop Max/MSP/Jitter). Sound gets processed into video and back, ranging from sonic bursts to melodic melancholy, using joysticks and selfmade controllers to keep it all in line (most of the time). Every SKIF++ performance is improvised, but based on structures that give each set its distinct character.
This time SKIF++ will play as a duo, where Van Koolwijk is represented by an interactive Jitter patch.
The SKIF++ video is generated live with a digital application that was inspired by the workings of the 1972 Rutt/Etra scan. processor The Rutt/Etra scan processor was essentially an analog computer which allowed for electronic real-time manipulation of the deflection signals that generate the television raster. The SKIF++ digital application uses audio signals for input and scans the incoming data to produce its characteristic graphics, delivering a very tight connection between the three players. The SKIF++ audio is generated by SuperCollider3 and LiSa X – SC3 delivers highly complex synthesized audio blocks while LiSa takes care of magnifying sampled
material into territories unknown – all in a highly responsive environment. While the interaction from audio to video is digital, the counterpart is the musical response of the players to the green thing projected on the screen.
—————-
Jeff Carey
http://www.radiantslab.com/87central
Electronic music composer Jeff Carey, based in the US and in the Netherlands, has been working with experimental, improvised and composed electronic, electro-acoustic, and acousmatic music since the early 90′s. Originally from the suburbs of Washington DC, he has performed a handful of hardcore bands and has played electronic music or presented pieces and installations in the US and Europe at festivals and venues such as Boralis (NO), Gaudeamus Music Week (NL), Chelsea Museum of Art (US), Transmediale (DE), NuMusic(NO), Sonic Acts (NL), Ekko Festival (NO), Cave 12 (CH), DNK-Amsterdam (NL), Trondhiem Matchmaking (NO), MOCADC (US), The Network (BE), and Placard (UK). Having studied Audio Technology at American University (1994), and computer music composition at the Instituut voor Sonologie in the Koningklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag (2002), his work has evolved from an interest in no-input-mixer and field recordings to include a focus on non-standard synthesis, algorithmic composition and digital instrumentalism. Apart from purely acousmatic and electro-acoustic composition, he is focused on performative aspects of computer music and improvisation. He has played in the groups 87 Central, Office-R(6), SKIF++, USA/USB, N-Ensemble, and collaborated or performed with Francis Marie Uitti, Gert-Jan Prins, Cor Fuhler, Oren Ambarchi, Tobias Delius, Jaap Blonk and the numerous members of the N-Collective to name a famous few. Recent compositions include the acousmatic pieces ‘Blueshift’, ‘Music for Broken Flute and Stolen Computer’, and ‘Point Source 01′ for Double Bass and computer. Carey builds custom electronic instruments for musicians (most notably, MoHa!) and teaches courses in the synthesis programming language SuperCollider 3, recently at new media/arts institutions including NoTAM, BEK, TEKS (NO), STEIM (NL), and ITP (US). He is one of many founding members of the N-Collective, a pan-European music collective, and works to promote and present N-Events in the Americas.
————–
Robert van Heumen
http://hardhatarea.com
Robert van Heumen works with electronic means to create soundworlds. As a musician Van Heumen uses
STEIM’s live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis software SuperCollider, controlled by various physical devices. His soundworlds are a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices and sounds from kitchen appliances, some of the time smashed beyond repair. Live sampled source sounds are gesturally manipulated and reworked within open ended narratives, exploring cycles of repetition beyond episodic improvisation.
Recent fixed-media works include the compositions Stranger and Fury, which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments. Fury was presented at ICMC08, and Stranger premiered as a diffused work at Culturelab in Newcastle (UK) and was performed live at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Porto in 2009. Both compositions are available on Creative Sources Recordings. In the fall of 2008 Van Heumen constructed the radioplay No Man’s Land, commissioned by the CEM studio at WORM in Rotterdam, NL.
Van Heumen is performing regularly with the audio-visual trio SKIF++ (with Jeff Carey & Bas van Koolwijk), Shackle (working with electro-flutist Anne LaBerge on restriction), ABATTOIR (with cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen) and Whistle Pig Saloon (with guitarist John Ferguson deconstructing the guitar). He has shared the stage with dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit), Michel Waisvisz, Richard Barrett, Sakata Akira, Nicolas Collins, Oguz Buyukberber, Luc Houtkamp, Guy Harries, Tom Tlalim, Nicolas Field, Morten J. Olsen, Daniel Schorno, Roddy Schrock, Nate Wooley a.o.
Van Heumen is Managing Director of the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, curator of the Local Stop concert series and member of STEIM’s Artistic Committee. In a previous life mathematician, trumpet player and software programmer. He still reads L.E.J. Brouwer.
http://www.share.dj/share/event_info.php?eventID=667
———
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...