From: Weekly Listing (email suppressed)
Date: Sat May 17 2008 - 08:14:33 PDT
Part 2 of 2: This week [May 17 - 26, 2008] in avant garde cinema
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FRIDAY, MAY 23, 2008
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5/23
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: International House Philadelphia
http://www.ihousephilly.org/programs-film-at-IHouse.htm
7 pm, 3701 Chestnut Street
ESSENTIAL VISUAL MUSIC: RARE CLASSICS FROM CVM ARCHIVE
From German pioneers to Light Show psychedelia to Experimental Animation
classics, rare films and preserved prints from the Collection of Center
for Visual Music. All 16mm unless noted. Films include: Oskar
Fischinger: R-1 ein Formspiel (single panel version) c. 1926-33; Hans
Fischinger: Tanz der Farben (Dance of the Colors) 1939; Charles Dockum:
Dockum Mobilcolor Performance at the Guggenheim Museum, 1952; Charles
Dockum: Demonstration of Mobilcolor Projector and 1966 Mobilcolor
Performance Film, both 1966; Harry Smith, Early Abstractions, Film No. 3
1949; Oskar Fischinger: Muntz TV Commercial, 1952; Mary Ellen Bute:
Pastorale; John Stehura: Cibernetik 5.3, 1960-65 (digital); Jud Yalkut:
Turn, Turn, Turn, 1966; Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film,
1971; David Lebrun: Tanka, 1976; Jules Engel: Celebration, 1978; Jules
Engel: 3 Arctic Flowers, 1978, and Jules Engel: Mobiles, 1978. (16mm,
most are preserved prints).
5/23
San Francisco, California: Oddball Films
http://www.oddballfilm.com
8:30PM, 275 Capp St
"SEE, REAPPEAR +BREATHE" INTERACTIVE SCREENING AT ODDBALL FILMS
For Immediate Release Event: "Jam Z Jammerz: See, Reappear + Breathe" ,
an Evening of Culture Jamming Interactive Cinema with Los Angeles Media
Archivist Gerry Fialka in person."See Reappear+Breathe" is a critical.
forward thinking, entertaining and subversive looks at media pranksters
and their victims amidst the electronic landscape. With rare clips of
Lenny Bruce, Ernie Kovacs, Marshall McLuhan. James Joyce and many more.
Date: Friday, May 23, 2008 at 8:30PM Venue: Oddball Film+Video, 275 Capp
Street, San Francisco. Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating, RSVP Only.
RSVP: email suppressed or phone the archive at 415.558.8117 Jam Z
Jammerz: See, Reappear +Breathe Interactive Screening Live at Oddball
Films Los Angeles Curator Gerry Fialka in Person! On Friday, May 23,
2008 at 8:30PM media ecologist Gerry Fialka presents an interactive
screening of films by subversive artists and pranksters who "inflict
brand damage" to expose corporate manipulation of America's mediascape.
"See, Reappear+Breathe" probes critical forward thinking, entertaining
and subversive looks at media pranksters and their hidden effects amidst
the electronic landscape. Screening will be rare clips of Lenny Bruce,
Ernie Kovacs, Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce and more. The program takes
place at Oddball Films, 275 Capp St, San Francisco. Admission is $10,
seating is limited RSVP only to: email suppressed or 415-558-8117.
Fialka probes Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media in correlation with
revolutionary artists (Craig Baldwin, the Barbie Liberation
Organization, Rev. Billy's Church of Stop Shopping, Billboard Liberation
Front and Bob Dobbs) providing new critical perspectives with surprise,
humor and the thrill of transgression. Join this agitprop examination of
the motives and consequences of the jammer's collaboration with the
jammee. When Sputnik went up fifty years ago, McLuhan upgraded the
global village to the global theater, and we all became actors. "Jam Z
Jammerz: See, Reappear & Breathe" (14 minutes, 2008) - As agitprop
archaeologists, Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka's provocative video probes
how the 50's music/comedy icons John Cage (noise as music, side effects
in silence), Korla Pandit (the Hammond Organ as drum, fake identity),
Lenny Bruce (speech as jazz, grievance), Ernie Kovacs (visual effects as
Surrealism, Menippean tactic of the "fourth wall") and Lord Buckley
(narrative as living organism, elevation not put-down) laid the
groundwork for contemporary culture jammers. They reinvented Beckett's
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," and Steve Allen's "Behind every
joke there's a grievance." Their reappearance offers new questions: -
Did the electric environment kill or save humanity? - Did television
renew the art museum? - Why did James Joyce make TV the hidden ground in
his 1939 book "Finnegans Wake" ? - Can the banality of
satellite-speed-up cause epiphanies? - What have we forgotten about
social amnesia? - Who is jamming the jammers? Rechanneling George Melies
and Marcel Duchamp, "Jam Z Jammerz" reinvigorates and mirrors how these
visionaries elevated self-irony to uncover the ambiguity and complexity
of ecstasy and numbness. "The audience is the employer." - Marshall
McLuhan. "I find TV very educational. Every time someone turns on a set
I go in the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx. "When you are
laughing, you're learning." - Bob Dobbs. "Satire is tragedy plus time" -
Lenny Bruce. Mark X Farina is a Los Angeles based painter, filmmaker and
biker, whose work has appeared in group shows with David Hockney and Ed
Rushca. He received his BFA from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania,
and now heads the Video Department at Otis College of Art and Design in
LA. He is a practitioner of POP, Pro Punk, Neo Goo, and Reverse
Engineering in Mixed Media Visual Arts. About Gerry Fialka Gerry Fialka
is an artist, film curator, writer, lecturer, and paramedia ecologist
who has conducted interactive workshops from UCLA to MIT, from the Ann
Arbor Film Festival to Culver City High School. Fialka gave two major
lectures at The 2001 North America James Joyce Conference at UC
Berkeley. The public interview series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Sessions)
has featured Fialka in engaging conversations with the likes of Mike
Kelley, Alexis Smith, Abraham Polonsky, Mary Woronov, Paul Krassner, Ann
Magnuson, Heather Woodbury, Norman Klein, Chris Kraus, P. Adams Sitney,
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Kristine McKenna, John Sinclair, Grace Lee
Boggs, and Firesign Theatre's Phil Proctor. Fialka's interviews have
been published in books by Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. He
graduated from The University of Michigan. "Gerry Fialka creates forums
that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one
multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of Marshal
McLuhan: Cosmic Media. For more info:
http://oddballfilm.com/resources/events_parent.html
5/23
Seattle WA: Potter-Belmar Labs
http://potterbelmar.org/now
7:30 & 9pm, Central Cinema
FORTUNE
What does the future hold? What follows us from the past? What do we
need to know about the present? Live cinema performers, Potter-Belmar
Labs, will answer these questions and more, on tour stops throughout the
U.S. Southwest and West Coast in May 2008. Traveling by train, this pair
of itinerant fortune-tellers will probe the collective subconscious of
audiences from Albuquerque to Seattle, and on many stops in between.
Potter-Belmar Labs brings the ancient tradition of the magic lantern
show to the 21st Century, inviting the audience to participate in a
collective fortune-telling experience, and presenting the results in
music, sound and moving image. The Fortune tour is made possible in part
through Meet the Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.
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SATURDAY, MAY 24, 2008
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5/24
San Francisco, California: Other Cinema
http://www.othercinema.com/
8:30, 992 Valencia Street
GERRY FIALKA'S PXL THIS FEST
As is our wont, we are welcoming SoCal cousin Gerry Fialka with the
much-anticipated iteration of his annual toy-camera extravaganza. In
case you didn't know, Fisher-Price's PXL 2000, now 20 years old, is a
children's video camera that records on audiocassette, producing b/w
images at such a low resolution as to border on the abstract. The
lightweight ease and funky charm of this now-cult device has encouraged
an idiosyncratic aesthetic favoring personal confession and miniature
commentary. Highlights of this year's line-up include Gerry's own
Remember to Forget, Robert Sexton's Disassembly Line (on CIA
mind-control!), Theresa Hulmes' Soulgasm, Freya's They Were Only
Numbers, L.M. Sabo's Cataclysm, and 4-yr-old Donovan Selinger's Gear
Story. Doors open at 8pm for Doug Katelus on the retro-tech Optigan,
Gerry's McLuhan-esque insights into Korla Pandit, and black-and-white
finger food!
5/24
Seattle WA: Potter-Belmar Labs
http://potterbelmar.org/now
7:30 and 9pm, Central Cinema
FORTUNE
What does the future hold? What follows us from the past? What do we
need to know about the present? Live cinema performers, Potter-Belmar
Labs, will answer these questions and more, on tour stops throughout the
U.S. Southwest and West Coast in May 2008. Traveling by train, this pair
of itinerant fortune-tellers will probe the collective subconscious of
audiences from Albuquerque to Seattle, and on many stops in between.
Potter-Belmar Labs brings the ancient tradition of the magic lantern
show to the 21st Century, inviting the audience to participate in a
collective fortune-telling experience, and presenting the results in
music, sound and moving image. The Fortune tour is made possible in part
through Meet the Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.
5/24
Silver Springs, MD: Pyramid Atlantic Center
http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org/
7:30 pm, 8230 Georgia Avenue
THE FREE TRANSLATORS
Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself approach of the Riot Grrrl movement,
this Spring two feminist provocateurs are taking their multimedia show
on the road. Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat are hailing from Brooklyn,
NY and Madison, WI to present "The Free Translators" touring east coast
cities and towns with a program of radical videos and performances. As
the title suggests, The Free Translators' video program is inspired by
widely accessible texts. The artists perform in many of their own
videos, sometimes enacting the news, dictating words written by the
Marquis de Sade, or excerpting from Virginia Woolf's anti-war essays. By
re-interpreting the texts for the audience, the videos explore notions
of identity and communication, re-imagining issues raised by feminist
consciousness, the quality of attention today in the midst of multiple
authorial references, and the diminished space of citizenship around the
monologue of mass media. In between video screenings, The Free
Translators present two "Live Tactical Translations," or, live
multimedia experiments inspired by 1970s feminist art and Soviet
avant-garde news troupes. Culling from their library of text, sound, and
image, alter egos Miss Reading and Miss Recognition communicate through
matching headsets and manipulate analog recordings as they educate
audiences in their unique methods of reading and comprehension.
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SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2008
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5/25
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Small Change Screenings
http://www.smallchangescreenings.com
8 pm, 1026 arch street
THE FREE TRANSLATORS
Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself approach of the Riot Grrrl movement,
this Spring two feminist provocateurs are taking their multimedia show
on the road. Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat are hailing from Brooklyn,
NY and Madison, WI to present "The Free Translators" touring east coast
cities and towns with a program of radical videos and performances. As
the title suggests, The Free Translators' video program is inspired by
widely accessible texts. The artists perform in many of their own
videos, sometimes enacting the news, dictating words written by the
Marquis de Sade, or excerpting from Virginia Woolf's anti-war essays. By
re-interpreting the texts for the audience, the videos explore notions
of identity and communication, re-imagining issues raised by feminist
consciousness, the quality of attention today in the midst of multiple
authorial references, and the diminished space of citizenship around the
monologue of mass media. In between video screenings, The Free
Translators present two "Live Tactical Translations," or, live
multimedia experiments inspired by 1970s feminist art and Soviet
avant-garde news troupes. Culling from their library of text, sound, and
image, alter egos Miss Reading and Miss Recognition communicate through
matching headsets and manipulate analog recordings as they educate
audiences in their unique methods of reading and comprehension.
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The weekly listing is also available online at Flicker:
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.