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Curated by Artists Television Access, this program explores the interactions of sound and images through works by Paul Clipson and collaborative expanded cinema performances from Bay Area artists Lisa Mezzacappa & Anjali Sundaram, Amma Ateria & Linda Scobie, Joshua Churchill & Konrad Steiner. Each performance sees the sound and visual practices of the individual artists resonate and refract as they integrate improvisational processes and cross analog and digital media.
Program
Light Year; Paul Clipson, 2013, 10 minutes, color, optical sound,16mm film, 24 fps, USA
Lisa Mezzacappa & Anjali Sundaram (Cory Wright, woodwinds; Robert Lopez, percussion; Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass)
Amma Ateria & Linda Scobie
Joshua Churchill & Konrad Steiner
About the Porgram
Light Year; Paul Clipson, 2013, 10 minutes, color, optical sound,16mm film, 24 fps, USA
In 2013 the Exploratorium commissioned San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson to create an abstract 16mm film study of the area surrounding its downtown waterfront site at Pier 15. “The film showcases Clipson’s extraordinary treatment of the complex natural and cultural systems in the urban landscape, from the ephemeral rhythms of light and water to the rigid order of crosswalks and skyscrapers. Clipson’s work generally involves live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians”. For the film, an original soundtrack was written and performed by composer Tashi Wada.
Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborated with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aimed to bring to light visual preoccupations that revealed themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encouraged unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound and film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Française.
Performance: Lisa Mezzacappa & Anjali Sundaram
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer. Called “one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene” by The Mercury News and “a Bay Area treasure” by KQED public radio, she has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for nearly 20 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance and visual art.
Anjali Sundaram is a media artist interested in memory, identity, imagined futures and pseudo-science. Her multimedia collaborations with the collective I, Daughter of Kong Center for Research have appeared in San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Zagreb, Croatia. Her film and video work has screened at micro cinemas and film festivals nationally and abroad.
performance: Amma Ateria & Linda Scobie
Amma Ateria derived from ‘flammable material’, is a philosophy held through her work, — to give strength to disintegration and fragility, to rebuild from the aftermath of destruction, of dust. An electroacoustic composer / sound artist, her work examines psychoacoustics in binaural beats, brainwave entrainment, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension / release, she navigates between oppositions in search of transcending moments, transforming deafening noise into self hypnosis and metamorphosis. Compositions developed during her concussion recovery, utilizes brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and lost speech. ammaateria.com
Linda Izcali Scobie is a filmmaker, programmer and projectionist living in San Francisco. Her 16mm film work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Pacific Film Archive, LA Film Forum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and XCÈNTRIC – de Barcelona. She is a projectionist at the Roxie Theater and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
performance: Joshua Churchill & Konrad Steiner
Joshua Churchill and Konrad Steiner’s collaborative performances are rendered from a wide palette of influences including musique concrète, metal, kosmische, film noir, found footage and personal film as each artist improvises the construction, layering, and movement of sound and image, respectively. Konrad’s samples clips from self-shot and hand-processed 16mm film transferred to video and, along with other sampled media. These clips are manipulated live loops using digital triggering, layering and mixing. Similarly, Joshua builds ever-shifting layers of meditative drones, ghostly melodies, and walls of distorted noise live from electric guitar, tape loops, electronics, and field recordings.
Their improvised cinema weaves a rich and ever-changing tapestry of color, mood, movement, and saturation, where the various elements drift in and out of the forefront, creating a series of cinematic events ranging from evanescent to thunderous.
Joshua Churchill is an Oakland-based cross-disciplinary artist whose sound and light work takes the form of both performance and installation, often blurring the line between the two. In addition to expanded cinema collaborations with filmmakers such as Paul Clipson and John Davis, he has performed as a member of multiple experimental metal and drone projects, and performs solo under the moniker Plumes. Churchill has performed and exhibited his work extensively throughout the United States and abroad. https://vimeo.com/joshuachurchill
Konrad Steiner makes single channel videos and performs both scripted live narration and live improvised montage. His work is sourced from self-shot and hand-processed 16mm film, video and media samples. His presentation of live cinema in the theater is a loose arrangement of images and sounds loose and evocative enough to bring forth associations for the audience like a shared dream. https://vimeo.com/hugoballroom