Sound & Vision: A screening of digital animation and music visualisation
Curated by Adam Procter & Jason Wilson.
Hat Factory Basement, Bute Street, Luton, UK.26th October 2006. 7PM.Entry by donation (Suggested: £3)
Treating of artistic practices that visualize the previously invisible, Lev Manovich writes "I often find myself moved by these projects emotionally. Why? Is it because they carry the promise of rendering the phenomena of the human senses into something that is within our reach, something visible and tangible?... Data visualization art is concerned with the anti-sublime". Thus Manovich raises the spectre of the category traditionally posed as the 'anti-sublime', the Beautiful...
Sound and Vision will screen a number of short works that use a range of techniques to integrate and transform music within digitally animated works. Whether or not these works are abstract or generative, all of them possess the unsettling affective power that many recent works of visualization share.
Though many of the screened artists have taken advantage of the possibilities online distribution and exhibition, on the night the works will be featured on a large projection screen with PA, in comfortable surrounds, and with a reasonably-priced bar in operation!
Programme Notes Screening 01
::Sound & Vision Screening 01::
What is a short film? Few of the works on tonight's programme contain any photographic material, and none of them are 'films' in the sense of being celluloid prints prepared for mechanical projection. Few of them have been made with cinematic exhibition in mind, and a number are receiving this kind of screening, this kind of viewing, for the first time. The contexts in which they will most often have been seen are web browsers, media players, video iPods, televisions, or projection screens in bars, clubs or galleries rather than cinema screens. More viewers will have downloaded them than bought a ticket to watch them over hot-buttered popcorn. The filmmakers come from a variety of backgrounds (few would describe themselves as filmmakers pure and simple) and the films are made for a variety of purposes (as club visuals, music videos, software experiments or internet art) which do not meet our immediate expectations of what film, even what short film, might be. Though many are severe in their abstraction, and most not narrative in any conventional sense, they do not proclaim the 'revolutionary', anti-illusionist ambitions, nor radiate the self-importance of earlier generations of avant-garde filmmaking. And yet they come alive, reveal new secrets, occasionally overwhelm us when they are projected on a cinematic scale and accorded the attention spectators habitually bring to film. For all their differences, and all their novelty, most can be seen to embody film's perennial concerns. How is it that works made in edit windows on LCD monitors can be unfolded to fill the big screen and still claim our attention? What new flexibilities do digital production, distribution and exhibition bring to film? What kinds of flexibility have been there all along?
What is a soundtrack? What is vision, as distinct from the other cinematic elements? Which is the primary element in film? Many of the films on show this evening set up generative relationships between sound and vision where, after certain parameters are set in place, what we see has been generated algorithmically from what we hear. These are works in which sound is prior to vision - temporally, formally, practically and logically. Others generate figuration - often grotesque or rudimentary - from 'found' sound or field recordings. Others create animations which attempt to match the mood of sound recordings, but in a ways that are outside the usual practices of music video. The capacity of digital filmmakers to construct new kinds of relationships between sound and vision using code, new editing tools, and new visual techniques has led to a complete reorganisation of film's possibilities which, though far quieter in its reception, is as significant as the arrival of sound pictures. What are the possibilities of such techniques in relation to narrative film, or do we need to rethink our ideas about what narrative can be?
What is cinema, as a medium? What is a cinema, as a site of exhibition? We hope tonight's films will show that, despite the proliferating screens of contemporary media culture, the spaces and practices of cinematic exhibition still offer unique opportunities for us to understand and enjoy the arts of the moving image. We hope to make these non-profit screenings, focussed on the relationship between digital visual culture and music, as regular as we can, so if you enjoy it, tell your friends!
Adam Procter [1] meanwhile
Jason Wilson [2] Jason's myspace
Screening Order
List of Films screened at the event
Travelling to Luton from London
- By train (Best):45 minutes on the Thameslink service from King's Cross to Luton station, or 20 minutes from St. Pancras on Midland Mainline to Luton station.
- By Bus:56 Mins on National Express coach from London Victoria Coach terminal.
- By Car:M1 North, Junction 10 for A505, the follow the signposts to Town centre. Approximately 1hr 10mins.
The Hat Factory gallery is immediately adjacent to Luton Station.
Upon leaving the station walkway in the direction of the Town Centre,
the Gallery is on your right.
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