Blur + Sharpen

The 1966 animation It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown had everything a Peanuts cartoon should have: cheery music, kid's humor, philosophy, the angst of Linus, the exploits of Snoopy and the officiousness of Lucy. According to LA-based animator Justin Hilden and his essay "Color Design in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, however, it also made terrific use of color. In the images here, for example, we move from day to night, from cheerful pumpkin-picking to the moody hues of evening. "While we have been busy watching Linus wrestle his pumpkin homeward," Hilden writes, "the very air around the characters has changed and we can feel the coolness of night and a hint of the excitement that darkness will bring to Halloween." Hilden's essay gives readers a new way to enjoy the film and understand how it achieved its particular kind of emotional power. Thanks to Motionographer for the tip, and happy Halloween!

The city is growing ever more sentient, snapping photos of our misbehavior at intersections and tracking our movement past banks and federal buildings. Our phones let us connect with that sensing data, pointing us to the nearest Thai restaurant and illuminating the freeways in rivers of red, yellow, or, on occasion, green. As we grow accustomed to the data-driven, real-time city, though, what do we lose? That question forms the foundation for LA-based designer and research Julian Bleecker and researcher Nicolas Nova's intriguing essay, "A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing," a Situated Technologies Pamphlet recently published by the Architectural League of New York. The essay asserts a provocation, namely to rethink the fetishization of the real-time data-enabled city in order to "stretch out the space of possibility and the space of possible imaginings." What does this mean? In short, the pair is less interested in how data delivered immediately and orchestrated bureaucratically in a top-down approach may "help" city-dwellers, and instead ponder the potential for more speculative and poetic layers of information, and for a notion of the city that's not static and fixed but rather in process. In the later part of the conversation, Bleecker describes a series of objects that were designed to provoke different ways of interacting with the city, moving beyond the expected and the screen-based. "We're in the realm of epistemological monkey-wrenching broadly conceived," he explains. "Creating objects that shift meanings and provide new, unexpected points of view. Or, they may just show you the obvious, but do so in a more legible way..." Check out the essay to read about these objects, and to get a glimpse of alternative ways of considering the sentient, asynchronous city.

"It's about ritual," says Finnish live cinema artist Mia Makela (aka Solu) talking about why she chooses to perform live with moving images and sound rather than simply create a linear film or video project to screen in theaters. "It's about sharing an experience with an audience." The artist performed Kaamos Trilogy last Saturday night in LA, and as a surprise, invited the group DuoDenum, comprised of Carmina Escobar and Scott Collins, to perform along with her. The effect of their collaboration was nothing less than riveting, mainly because it was indeed live and very much improvised. Makela, Collins and Escobar met only hours before the performance, and had to hope that their sensibilities would mesh onstage. They did. The musicians brought an array of objects with which to make sound, the most powerful being a large dish of water that sloshed and dripped as the story's heroine waded through waves. Escobar's clear, haunting voice also captivated, and while you'd think that watching the musicians in tandem with the mix of video imagery would catapult you right out of the story, it instead created a sense of greater acuity. But why?

That question will get asked again tonight when the group known as Cloud Eye Control performs its own mix of live performance and multimedia. The LA-based group is made up of Chi-wang Yang, Miwa Matreyek and Anna Oxygen, and tonight (and through Sunday) they will present Under Polaris, described as "an epic journey into an Arctic wonderland," mixing projected animation, electronic music and theater. While I haven't yet seen the performance, I think the same tension will exist between a story unfolding in front of you alongside an awareness of the artists creating that experience. There's something so powerful about sliding back and forth between the story and the awareness of its telling. Read more about the group and the performance here, and buy tickets here. Image: from Under Polaris.

"It's very hallucinatory," says avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs, frankly describing the effects of viewing one of his Nervous Magic Lantern performances. He continues, "It sounds very slow, but there is endless, uncanny and unusual amounts of motion and depth taking place. People inevitably Rorschach. They're absolutely convinced that they've seen things, but it's really a combination of what I'm projecting and what they're projecting." Jacobs, who came of age as a filmmaker in the 1960s in New York (where he and his wife, Flo, founded the Millennium Film Workshops) and participated in the wild East coast film scene alongside radical filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Hollis Frampton, returns to LA next week for one of his incomparable performances and several screening events. On Monday, October 12, Jacobs will present the Nervous Magic Lantern performance Towards the Depths of the Even Greater Depression at REDCAT in which he manipulates projectors to create intense optical events. He has described the experience for his audience as one of group hallucination, and having seen one of his performances many years ago, I can verify that it is indeed unlike any other visual or cinematic happening I've witnessed. At once ritualistic with regard to the sense of shared experience, riveting in being totally unpredictable, and wonderfully psychedelic, Jacobs' live events reimagine cinema in honor of its key elements, namely image, time, space, motion and light. Jacobs will also screen several digital shorts at the UCLA Film & Television Archive on Thursday, October 15; on Saturday, October 17, Jacobs will co-present two shorts, one of which was made by his son, Azazel Jacobs, at LA Filmforum, and his new 3-D digital feature Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) will screen at LA Filmforum on October 18.

"The unifying theme is artistic vision, especially from an experimental end of the cinematic spectrum," explains REDCAT Film and Video co-curator Steve Anker describing the fall season's wonderful line-up of Monday-night screenings at the REDCAT theater. REDCAT, now in its sixth year and described as a "vibrant laboratory where innovating artists from throughout Los Angeles and around the world gather to push the boundaries of creative expression," has become a key aspect of LA's art scene, and the film and video screenings extend the emphasis on avant-garde film and video at CalArts, bringing many of the school's visiting artists into downtown LA. The line-up for the fall includes several live cinema events, including an upcoming performance October 12 by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who uses two projectors to create unique 3-D effects. "We also have a fine artist/animator form China - Sun Xun - whose work critiques Chinese culture and politics, a program curated by Cindy Keefer of recent animations from around the world that explore abstraction and continue in the footsteps of such pioneers as Oskar Fischinger, a screening and exploration of the historical importance of Jack Smith's seminal underground classic Flaming Creatures with noted critic J. Hoberman, and a screening of documentary portraits by Mexican artists that explore contemporary rural life and artistic responses." Anker notes that this theme has been central to the curatorial vision he shares with co-curator Berenice Reynaud, noting, "In every case the artist is expressing his/her own vision and personal absorption into both the medium and the subjects at hand." LA's film culture is lucky to have REDCAT! Download a PDF of the Fall 2009 schedule here.

A dark delirium of images, a disintegrated vision of a complex world - a digital version of William Blake's poetry...

This is how the work of media artist Solu (aka Mia Makela) has been described. Makela is an internationally acclaimed leader and innovator in the field of live cinema, by which I mean the live, real-time mixing of images and sound for an audience, where the sounds and images no longer exist in a fixed and finished form but evolve as they occur, and the artist's role becomes performative and the audience's role becomes participatory. The Finnish artist is fascinated by editing and argues boldly in her essay, "The Practice of Live Cinema," that "live cinema is not cinema" at all. Her assertion rests on the idea that cinema privileges storytelling, but for Makela, live cinema thrives in the exploration of the transitions between bits of storytelling sequences. Referencing the haunting shots of the dark asphalt that stretches through parts of David Lynch's Lost Highway, she writes that these kinds of shots "are the basic material for live cinema performances: the transitions, the movements, the pure visual beauty and intrigue, the atmosphere." Makela's work is rich with lush, stuttering imagery flecked with information and graphics rendered live, in real time, and in response to the audience.

I'm delighted to say that Makela will present Real Time Live, which is both a two-part, hands-on workshop at USC starting Friday, October 9, as well as a live performance on Saturday night! Get the full details after the jump...

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If you want a glimpse of brilliance, take a look at the six-minute Hand Movie, a short film made by Yvonne Rainer in 1966. The image? A somewhat gangly hand against a white background. The action? The fingers wiggle and touch each other, they furl and unfurl, they line up tall, they stretch outward, they dance a bit... The result? Delicious! I can feel the hand in my hand. The angular line of the thumb asserts strength. The hand then becomes contorted and entirely unfamiliar. Minimal, conceptual, beautiful. Rainer began making longer films in 1972 after having already established a vibrant career in modern dance in New York. She went on to become one of the most prominent experimental and feminist filmmakers, with a slate of complex and intriguing features that altered the history of the avant-garde in the U.S. Over its coming season, Filmforum will present a full retrospective of Rainer's work, starting this Sunday, October 4, 2009, with a screening that includes Hand Movie, as well as four other shorts and the 2002 video titled After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid. Rainer will be in attendance, and will discuss her work with Lynette Kessler, Executive Director of Dance Camera West.

Flyp "is a proof-of-concept experiment in digital storytelling," says Jim Gaines, editor-in-chief of the Web-based publication that is trying to reinvent journalism online. "What we're trying to do is show how all the media that the Web can accommodate can be used at the same time in the service of one story," he continues. "It's about using video, audio and information graphics and Flash animation in service to a storytelling experience that's much like a magazine storytelling experience but uses more than paper, ink and still photographer." The wonderful new project resembles a magazine in gathering timely information and offering it in multiple formats, with short- and long-form reporting. However, the publication is rich with media, incorporating photography, video, sound, graphics and music in a compelling design very attentive to what works - and what doesn't - in an online forum. Thanks to its focus on an emerging form of journalism, Flyp will join nine other projects (including KCET's own Web Stories) this Friday, October 2, 2009, as part of the National Arts Journalism Summit, dedicated to interrogating the future of arts writing. I'll be presenting a new software application called Sophie, and my colleagues Ana Shepherd and Gabe Peters-Lazaro created the 10 videos that will showcase each entry. The event will take place at the Annenberg School at USC, and will stream live starting at 9:00 a.m. Please join us to see the future of journalism!

An algorithm is "a machine for the motion of parts," says Alexander Galloway very elegantly in his book Gaming: On Algorithmic Culture. He writes extensively about video games, arguing that they offer us insight into the structures of today's information culture. I wonder, though, if the rise in video projects that call attention to their structure isn't also a reflection of that information culture... Why? Because these projects overtly invite us to think about how information is organized...

Anyway, these thoughts are sparked by the upcoming screening of LA-based artist Cindy Bernard's film Year Long Loop, which screens at USC Thursday night (September 17, 2009). The film compiles a series of video recordings collected by Bernard, whose work includes photographs and projections that explore the relationship among cinema, memory and landscape. Captured between October 2004 and September 2005 from a ridge in Mt. Washington, the video in its full length version is made up of 12 two-hour segments in a continuous 24-hour loop. Each five-minute shot captures a day; you'll be relieved to know that the shorter, two-hour version of the film will screen at USC; in this version, the five-minute shots are reduced to 24 seconds. Find out why Bernard felt compelled to make the video, and why it can be so neatly shortened...

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