some performances

some performances at Artefact festival (9>14 Feb 2010):

Long String Instrument performance
Ellen Fullman | Konrad Sprenger

Tuesday 9th of Feb 2010

Ellen Fullman’s work resides between the fields of sound art and music. Her primary activity has been the development of the Long String Instrument, in which her rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. At STUK the strings will be more than 18 metres long. Fullman will be joined by the incredible Konrad Sprenger to perform with her. Biba Kopf, in The Wire, wrote of the Long String Instrument: “Listening to it, you feel like you are inside some cyclopean subterranean grotto… its bejewelled walls glistening with an alien lustre (and) sounding like something that shimmers, iridescent shapes bend conventional pulse-based time and impose their own paradoxical temporality, where constant movement teems within a vast stasis.”

Entanglements for Four Projectors
Luis Recoder | Sandra Gibson | Ben Owen

Wednesday the 10th of Feb 2010

“Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection “noise” engineer. The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform. Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating not only the light but the film itself. For it expresses the outburst of its violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and fragile emulsion of time.” – Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder

“As sound engineer, I follow two mono audio signals from two separate projectors. The marks and patterns being seen are as well being received into the software (ppooll) where subtle modulating filters are applied to the sound and then amplified into the space. The play between simply sending what is being received and subtle shifts through filters and/or synthesis follow in an improvisatory motion in parallel to the visual projections of light and smudge around the room. Through these systems the sound follows paths in oscillating flux, one that parallels directly the information being seen, one that contains suggested loops and one that is most important - is the degrading rhythms of the film makers marks. The hand of the sound engineer only occasionally guides the multiple layers of sound oscillating in and out of aural focus, these light holes determining the point of entry, the machines grace of precision, into some scope of mass exploration.” – Ben Owen

The Symbol of the Unconquered
William Hooker

Saturday the 13th of Feb 2010

The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend William Hooker has been exploring the adventurous borders of avant garde music with kindred spirits like David Murray, David Ware, Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, Elliot Sharp, Christian Marclay and many others.

In this performance he will improvise a live soundtrack to pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film classic The Symbol of the Unconquered, originally advertised as a chance to come see “the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan.” Some of Micheaux’s earliest and most significant films were responses to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), portraying the African-American struggle against white racism and the KKK.

Some of these films were lost for decades and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him. Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to discover their shared racial identity.