Join Hamza Walker, Curator at Renaissance Society and co-curator of Made in L.A. 2016, for a free public program at The Lab. Presented by Artadia: The Fund for Art & Dialogue.

Hamza Walker is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Recent exhibitions at the Renaissance Society include “Teen Paranormal Romance” (2014), “Suicide Narcissus” (2013), and John Neff (2013). His important 2008 Renaissance Society exhibition, “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a moment where racial identity was being simultaneously rejected and retained. Walker is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, presented by the Menil Collection. In 2010 he was awarded the Ordway Prize; awarded by the New Museum and named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway. He has recently been announced as curator of the Hammer Museum’s forthcoming biennial, “Made in L.A. 2016.” Walker has contributed reviews and art criticism to New Art Examiner, Art Muscle, Dialogue, Parkett, and Artforum, in addition to numerous catalogue essays on artists ranging from Giovanni Anselmo and Darren Almond to Thomas Hirschhorn and Heimo Zobering. Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs.

For more information about Art & Dialogue, click here: http://artadia.org/programs/art-dialogue/

Bodyscape is a composition and a performance by Luca Forcucci exploring the body as a sonic landscape. Microphones and sensors collect and measure the data generated by a dancer’s touch, spatial perception, and biofeedback. This piece is a work in progress that will change during its three-day installation in the gallery at The Lab, where it is performed by Focucci alongside musician Cheryl Leonard and dancer Crystal Sepúlveda.

Bodyscape is coordinated by Swissnex.

Luca Forcucci, Switzerland and Berlin. Composer and media artist, writer and scholar. His works converge with dance, digital performance, poetry, architecture and neuroscience. He conducted his research at GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and at the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. His artworks have been exhibited at the Biennale of Sao Paulo, Akademie der Künste Berlin, MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts Rome, Rockbund Museum Shanghai, Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Présences Electroniques Festival Geneva. lucalyptus.com

Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments. Leonard holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College. Her music has been performed worldwide and she has been commissioned to create instruments and music for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor, and Michael Straus. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Meet the Composer, and the Eric Stokes Fund. Leonard has been awarded residencies at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Djerassi, the Arctic Circle, Villa Montalvo, the Paul Dresher Ensemble Studio, and Engine 27. Recordings of her music are available from NEXMAP, Unusual Animals, Ubuibi, Pax, Apraxia, 23 Five, and Great Hoary Marmot Music. allwaysnorth.com

Crystal Sepúlveda is a choreographer, performer, improviser. She holds an M.F.A. in Experimental Choreography from University of California, Riverside (UCR). She is a lecturer in the Dance Dept. at UCR and Mt. San Jacinto College. Her choreographies are adaptable environments that redirect the function, presence and possibilities of the moving body in performance. Her works have been presented at various venues and institutions including Music and Space Conference at CUNY Graduate Center Department of Music (New York City), Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica), Milkbar (Oakland), Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts (Riverside), FIELD STUDIES at Chez Buskwick Studio (Brooklyn), homeLA and The Bootleg Theater (Los Angeles), UC Irvine, University Art Gallery (Irvine), Studio1415 and Excello Dance Space (Miami) and at El Centro Cultural Tijuana,Mexico. crystalsepulveda.com

OHMn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5oyYjJH66g

Conscious Summary (L.A..)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-OOu2mbu8

Omnivorous Scencilium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BM230P0QcU

Marshall Dunkelpek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK0tDDUEu7Q

Mod Life Crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-OCj-pFCJY

Chrisitina Stanley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3_8EnrV274

Tujurikkuja
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4hVeAplDA

Visuals by A. O'Rourke, B. Thibcault, Warterbros

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Ariel Kalma will perform live together in support of their collaborative album, We Know Each Other Somehow, recently released on RVNG labels’ FRKWYS imprint. Screening before the performance, the documentary Sunshine Soup captures the meeting and musical exchange of these two artists as they record the album on location in Mullimimbimy, Australia.

In the 1970s, Ariel Kalma was a technician at Pierre Henry’s legendary Institut National Audiovisuel, Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM), a musique concréte studio that spawned masterpieces by members Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, and Bernard Parmegiani. Inspired by their sound as well his travels to India, Kalma began creating his own electro-acoustic music by looping saxophone melodies through a primitive delay unit. Layered with spoken word, modular synthesizers, and analogue drum machines, the resulting sound is both ambient and formal.

Kalma finds an ideal collaborator in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. Lowe is a Brooklyn-based musician and performer best known for his solo project Lichens. Utilizing his voice, a loop pedal, and sometimes little else, Lowe’s performances are spontaneous, highly physical, and trance inducing.

A pioneer of early industrial music in the late ‘70s, Z'EV was one of the first artists to take found-object percussion out of a fine art context and into clubs. Known for his “wild-style” performances at venues such as San Francisco's infamous Mabuhay Gardens, Z'EV has collaborated with Psychic TV, Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Merzbow and many more. His highly physical productions are key points in the histories of both performance art and modern composition.

Co-presented by Stranded and The Lab, this performance will be the SF premiere of Z'EV's CINE-CUSSION audiovisual project. Opening the evening will be local electronic artists Moe! Staiano and Madalyn Merkey. In conjunction with the Heart Beat Ear Drum screening at Roxie Theatre on Sunday, July 19th.

Image of Z'EV by Catarina M. Guerreiro

Since the mid-1960s, Jon Gibson has played a key role in the development of American avant-garde music. His expertise on woodwind instruments made Gibson a go-to collaborator in Steve Reich's, Philip Glass', and La Monte Young's ensembles, but less known are his remarkable contributions as a composer and visual artist. In support of the recent reissue of his 1973 debut album Visitations (on Superior Viaduct), Gibson performs the title piece along with percussionist William Winant.

Drawing on a deep knowledge of classical mythology and a wide variety of esoteric philosophies and traditions, yet propelled by his own personalized form of practicing mysticism - the work of filmmaker, collagist, master gardener and alchemist Lawrence Jordan spans over six decades of producing more than 80 films and a multitude of works on paper and assemblage sculpture, and shows no sign of slowing down yet. Jordan has been a ground breaking and influential figure in the avant-garde filmmaking and underground arts communities of the Bay Area since his arrival in the early 1950's: from his founding of the Camera Obscura Film Society (with Bruce Conner), and The Movie (the first film theatre in San Francisco to explicitly focus on avant-garde/experimental film) to his work in helping establish such important and long running institutions as Canyon Cinema and the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Jordan's films seem to occupy a realm that hinges on an intuitive attention (in both filmmaker and film viewer) to the collision of chance elements and their potential to unlock deeper currents in the intersecting spheres of the external natural world and the immaterial inner worlds of the mind and what some have called the spirit. With a deep understanding of the literal and metaphorical applications of the collage theory as outlined by Max Ernst (whose books of engraving collages originally inspired the form of animation Jordan has become perhaps most known for) who stated his technique as: "the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two or more foreign realities on a seemingly incongruous level - and the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together.” 

The Lab and Black Hole Cinematheque are pleased to present a program that seeks to give a brief sampling of the vast and varied scope of filmmaking styles Jordan has worked in throughout his career. Ranging from two of his newest collage animations, Entr' Acte and Entr' Acte II, to the formation of what he terms his "personal poetic documentaries", in oceanic odyssey of the 1957 film Waterlight, to the inner and outer journeys and portraits of Triptych in Four Parts (1958) and Postcards from San Miguel (1997), to an oscillation between two drastically different forms of collage animation in The Soccer Game (1959) and Finds of the Fortenight (1980), the latter made in collaboration with the artist Jess (Collins). We are also honored to have the night conclude with a live expanded cinema performance from Lawrence Jordan himself and frequent collaborator John Davis.

“This is an expansion and re-visioning of audio/video noise performances that I made between 1995-1999, many of which were presented at the Lab. The political/cultural context of current San Francisco feels hauntingly similar to the period when these were made. At that time, the Dot Com boom was in full swing, carrying with it in equal parts, a dystopian dread and a techno-utopian optimism. Google was just one of many competing search engines, a generation of tech workers were making their first fortunes, emerging technologies promised to empower us as individuals. At the same time, artist warehouses and art spaces were struggling to survive - many lost their leases to skyrocketing rents and venture capital funded startups. Long-standing communities suffered, and small businesses were forced out.  The emotions and struggles from this period are being replayed now in a frighteningly similar fashion, the sites of this struggle are the same. This work comes from that uncertain moment.

For me, the work is particularly important because it expands upon an experiment that was never truly completed. Flickering and strobing linear analog video, radio noise and TV static…. I don’t know what to call it, but it was raw and unfiltered.  Searing but beautiful, like staring at the sun.  With the technological revolution, video and audio became digital, non-linear. Resolutions expanded, screens flattened, effects became slicker, and the cathode ray tube disappeared. Everything became, well… focused.  And with that a particular type of expression vanished.  I want to bring this work to a new generation of San Franciscans, struggling with moral, ethical, financial, and practical decisions that affect our city, its future, and the technological narratives now being written.”

- Scott Arford

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel (Baltimore) Since 1995 Matmos have made recordings and performed live using the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5. 00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal, and the vagina, uterus, and reproductive tract of a cow.
 

Kristin Erickson is a girl named Kevin — Kevin Blechdom to be precise, the avenging angel of pop music. Armed with a laptop, top notch programming skills, keyboard and a banjo, Ms. Blechdom has brought much needed life into electronic music with her one woman show filled with Song, Dance, Blood and Guts. She received her B.A. And M.F.A. Degrees in electronic music from Mills College, and in 2013 she received her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Now she works as the Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The MEGAPOLIS Festival is a multi-day series of events for people to create, experiment with, and experience sound. Artists including documentarians, technologists, musicians, educators, urban planners, scientists, and radio producers come together to celebrate the audio medium and to encourage each other to push the boundaries of sound, art, and thought

Lecture and performance.

Artist Jacqueline Gordon teams up with acoustic designer Zackery Belanger to map the unique sonic properties of 2626 Bancroft Way, original home of the Berkeley Art Museum. Designed in the Brutalist style by architect Mario Ciampi and opened in 1970, the Museum’s galleries were stark and strong, constructed of massive, nonresonant concrete balconies cantilevered over a cavernous atrium—all of these components tend to retain and mix sound. Throughout its 45-year tenure, celebrated musicians like Terry Riley, Ellen Fullman, and Pauline Oliveros were invited to perform in the building, distinctly exposing the underlying relationships between sound and architecture.

Recognizing a rare opportunity, Gordon and Belanger sought to document the building’s exceptional acoustic properties before the building’s closure. At The Lab, invited composers will interpret acoustic data gathered from the original home of the Berkeley Art Museum live on a custom array of 45 loudspeakers.

LECTURE, 5:00pm
Zackery Belanger – "Acoustic Concrete: What Brutalist Architecture Can Teach Us About Sound"
All materials are acoustic, and concrete’s mass and form make it an ideal material for designing to sonic limits. Few architectural styles will likely champion concrete materials in the totalizing manner of Brutalism. So, as one of its last remaining edifices, 2626 Bancroft Way provides us with a trove of information about acoustic design.
 
PERFORMANCE, Doors at 8:00pm, Performances 8:30pm
Matt Ingalls, Maggi Payne, David Dunn with David Kant, and Jon Leidecker with Willie Winant were all given access to the acoustic data collected from 2626 Bancroft Way. Ingalls created a new piece combining an improvised clarinet recording captured in the museum alongside a virtual reproduction of the Museum’s acoustics. Payne will perform a new 8-channel recording using the impulse responses. Leidecker and Winant will sonically blend 2626 Bancroft Way with the natural acoustics of The Lab, performing Max Neuhaus' realizations of John Cage's score "Fontana Mix" for percussion and feedback.

This project is supported by the generous donations of 185 backers on Kickstarter, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and equipment donations by Meyer Sound.

For further information about this project please visit acousticdeconstruction.org

John Wiese works primarily in recorded and performed sound with a focus on installation and multi-channel diffusions, as well as scoring for large ensembles. Recently, he has explored how video can envisage sound. Wiese is involved in multiple ongoing projects including the concrète grindcore band Sissy Spacek, and collaborations with Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Aaron Dilloway, Kevin Drumm, Lasse Marhaug, and others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Screening:
1: Joseph Hammer • 2013—Color—9:01
2: Leather Bath • 2013—Color—6:19
3: Untitled • 2014—Color—6:19
4: New Books • 2015—Color—1:00
5: Portrait of GX Jupitter-Larsen • 2011—B/W—2:30
6: Sissy Spacek—Stacking • 2014—B/W—1:13
7: The Tenses with John Wiese • 2014—Color—12:18
8: Three Glass Bottles • 2014—B/W—Super 8—0:29
9: A Specific Point in a Continuous Whole • 2014—Color—19:27

7-8pm: Radio Free Pocha Bus Tour #1
8pm: Brian Catling Performance
8:30-9:30pm: Radio Free Pocha Bus Tour #2

Join us this Friday, April 24th as we infect our current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year with the first West Coast performance by celebrated UK artist Brian Catling and a roving bus tour featuring the radio archive of SF performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. 

"Bringing Brian Catling…is like importing a high-grade virus. The city will never recover." (Iain Sinclair)

"Brian Catling's performances, writings and curations offer sardonic poignancy, vivid melodrama and shocking discomforts. He is straight-faced, enigmatic and twinkling, projecting a presence somewhere between hilarity, menace and madness.” (Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound)

Since the 1970’s, Brian Catling has crafted a fierce oeuvre of black comedy, fantasy, and visceral performance that, in the words of the critic Ian Hunt, mount a collective "tirade against the ossification of practices and actions into roles and careers." Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and V For Vendetta, hailed Catling's recently published novel The Vorrh as a "phosphorescent masterpiece."

Students from the San Francisco Art Institute bring us Mexican Bus 2.0. The radio-archive of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña will be broadcast in the spirit of the original Mexican Bus Tour, El Corazon de la Mission. All tours will begin and end at The Lab. Please RSVP here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/mexican-bus-audio-tour-20-tickets-16603525592

Brian Catling (b.1948, London) is Professor of Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford. In 2001 he founded the international performance group The Wolf In The Winter. Recent solo performances include Cyclops at the Liverpool Biennial 2010, The Art of the Living Experiment, Liverpool & Grand Rapids 2015, and the alarming Mr. Rapehead at the ICA, London, 2010, which toured to Germany, Holland and Spain. Recent larger solo shows include Antix, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2006, and Brian Catling & the head of ‘Bobby Awl’, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2008, and Quill Two at Dilston Grove, London, 2011.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña (b. 1978, Mexico City) resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, “extreme culture” and new technologies. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Ratio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). For twenty-five years, Gómez-Peña has contributed to the cultural debates of our times staging legendary performance pieces such as, “Border Brujo” (1998), “The Couple in the Cage” (1992), “The Crucifiction Project” (1994), “Temple of Confessions” (1995), “The Mexterminator Project” (1994), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002) and the Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2007).