POCKET HOLIDAY: AN A/V PERFORMANCE BY ZONK VISION

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 8:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

CLICK HERE FOR THE FACEBOOK EVENT

POCKET HOLIDAY is a 1 hour audio visual performance presented by Danny Wild with Australian collective Zonk Vision. Using the pocket as a symbolic motif, Pocket Holiday explores the flux between intimacy and distance in relation to place. This playful event incorporates performance, film screening and live music into a hyperreal world of humor and color.

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Shorts by Greg Holden, Jason Galea, Danny Wild, Ben Jones, Kat Martin, Grace Blake, Kate Geck, Luke Penders, Kiah Reading, Sarah Bryne, Rachel Archibald, Sarah Nathan-Truesdale, Oscar Capezio, Timothy D, Elliot Schultz, Riley Post, Caitlin Franzmann, Raw Nature Films and more.

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/THE_CEIBAS_CYCLE: CYCLES AND VOIDS WITH EVAN MEANEY

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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 8:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

CYCLES AND VOIDS, a short lecture on the computational value of zero as it applies to art-making and communication, is followed by a screening of Evan Meaney’s recent work /THE_CEIBAS_CYCLE.


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“While our bodies decay, while our data erodes, while our attempts to stem this tide ultimately fail, no-matter how redundant or healthy; we will find ourselves together again. All together. Beneath the shade of the trees. Finally ready to address that horizon.”

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The Mayans believed the ceibas trees to be points of connection, setting up protocols to connect this world to the next. This series contains variations on that theme, perhaps even instructions; finding the echoing liminality of the tree in each new, failing, interface and allowing for a personal recognition by archival proxy.

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Evan Meaney is an assistant professor of new media and gaming at the University of South Carolina. His work concerns ghosts, glitches, and the computationally undead. He has been an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts, a founding member of GLI.TC/H, and a contributor to the Atlantic.

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PLANET REVENGE LIVE SCORE

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SATURDAY, JULY 19 – 7:30 PM & 10:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

On July 19th, Spectacle invites you for a ONE NIGHT ONLY collaboration: Planet Revenge! But rather than the lunging sci-fi epic suggested by the title, please join us instead for a languorous and lush tribute to everybody’s favorite orb, scored by Benjamin Felton’s Blood Revenge. Felton plays long form songs on electric guitar, inspired by equal parts finger-picked guitar playing, Indian classical music, the outdoors, and synthesizers; through loops and improvisation, an attempt is made at briefly changing how the performer and the audience experience a space and interact with each other.

Felton’s music can be considered as a blissed-out soundtrack for your commute to work, or as a sonic landscape of your favorite vacation spot – in this case, Mother Earth! Against a cornea-copia of cascading waterfalls, frozen ice, trickles of dew jogging down-leaf and swooping canvases of lakes, rivers, gullies and countrysides, Felton will use his guitar-power to interpret an already-established story told exclusively through visual images and field sounds, echoing unforgettable onscreen textures off of Spectacle’s four walls in a feast of sight and sound. Planet Revenge: so breathtaking, it’ll turn you into an environmentalist.

A Monday Evening with The Saturday Giant

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MONDAY, JULY 14 – 8:00PM & 10:00PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

On Monday, July 14th, Spectacle welcomes Phil Cogley (aka: The Saturday Giant) for an evening stop off on his latest tour.

The Saturday Giant is a one-man art-rock band from Columbus, Ohio, established in 2010. Since then, The Saturday Giant has produced three releases, played dozens of shows across the U.S., collaborated with technology conferences and performing arts groups, and become one of the most respected acts in his hometown—all while crafting an innovative and compelling live show in which he sculpts layers of guitars, drums, bass lines, beat boxing, keyboards and vocals into towering walls of sound, without the aid of prerecorded samples. Even while maintaining his rigorous touring schedule, The Saturday Giant is preparing his full-length debut for 2014.

Cogley will be performing to a selection of short films from the early age of cinema including Thomas Edison’s FRANKENSTEIN (1910), DW Griffith’s THE LONEDALE OPERATOR (1911) – later remade as THE GIRL & HER TRUST – and finally the haunting, melancholic, and beautiful THE LAND BEYOND THE SUNSET (1912).

INFINITY MARACAS: 75 DOLLAR BILL SCORES “MUSICA ETNICA VIVA”

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SUNDAY, JULY 20 – 7:30 – 10:00 PM

ONE NIGHT ONLY! BRING YOUR OWN BOWL FOR HOMEMADE GAZPACHO!
**75 Dollar Bill will be joined by Sue Garner and Andrew Lafkas on bull fiddle!**

75 Dollar Bill, which is percussionist Rick Brown and electric guitarist Che Chen, will perform with MUSICA ETNICA VIVA, an “expanded film work” composed by Chen. M.E.V. is “an amateur nature film which also attempts to posit connections between the development of capitalist, industrialized societies and the loss of both cultural and biological diversity. The film finds much of it’s philosophical basis in Jacques Attali’s Noise, a book in which he wrote that the mass production of music ‘is a powerful factor in consumer integration, interclass leveling, cultural homogenization…and the disappearance of distinct cultures.’ The sound and image [will] function as two distinct structures that are super-imposed.”

M.E.V. will be projected on Super-8 and digital video. 75 Dollar Bill will play throughout the evening, and audience members are encouraged to join or leave the room at their leisure. 75 Dollar Bill will be providing home-made gazpacho! Please bring a bowl if you want some.

About 75 Dollar Bill:

Rick Brown was born in San Francisco, CA and is a clerical worker at a law school in NYC. Che Chen was born in New Haven, CT and works for a cancer diagnostics company in Stonybrook, NY. They met via myspace and started playing together as 75 Dollar Bill approximately eight years later. Brown plays percussion and homemade horns and Chen plays electric guitar. Music from two self-released cassettes may be found here: http://75dollarbill.bandcamp.com/

ANNA BILLER (VIVA & SHORTS)

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For over twenty years, Anna Biller has been casting herself in candy-colored films, borrowing from various genres and translating the aesthetic into her world view. As not only the writer, director and star, but also the costume designer and set decorator, she concocts scenarios that seem cut right out of Hollywood films then recreated at a ten year old girls’ slumber party.


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VIVA
Dir. Anna Biller, 2007
USA, 120 min.
Digital projection.

TUESDAY, JULY 1 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 25 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 28 – 10:00 PM

Anna Biller’s take on 60s/70s sexploitation is so spot on – the film’s texture, clothing and natural nude bodies aren’t things you find laying around in the 2000s. Here she plays Barbi, a naive housewife abandoned by her husband, venturing out into the modern world of the 70s only to find one perversion after another. Biller’s abilities are in top form – the set decoration is so intricately thought through, you’ll be able to feel the shag carpet between your toes.


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SHORTS PROGRAM

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23 – 8:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! All titles on 16mm

THREE EXAMPLES OF MYSELF AS QUEEN
16mm, 1994, 26 min.

A DIY fairytale musical! With elaborate sets and costumes, Three Examples of Myself as Queen finds Anna Biller playing out three scenarios of female domination – as head of an Arabian Nights harem, queen bee and disco dancer.

THE HYPNOTIST
16mm, 2001, 45 min.

A twist on the “you get a huge inheritance, but here’s the catch” story, The Hypnotist (the only film to not star Biller) sets three mean-hearted siblings at each other’s throats as they are forced to live together to collect their father’s money. A humorous spin on Technicolor melodramas, it sends up the genre while also displaying full love for its tropes.

A VISIT FROM THE INCUBUS
16mm, 2001, 27 min.

In this horror western musical hybrid, Biller plays Lucy, a woman who is victim to nightly assaults from an incubus. She seeks to boost her confidence by taking a job in a saloon singing and dancing for a bunch of rowdy cowboys, only to find her demonic tormentor also has a stage act! All of this should sound weird enough to have you sufficiently intrigued.

PETER GREENAWAY: THE FALLS

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THE FALLS
Dir. Peter Greenaway, 1980
UK, 195 min.

SUNDAY, JULY 13 – 8 PM
MONDAY, JULY 21 – 8 PM

A sprawling science fiction microbudget epic, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls is one of the more successful experimental features in accessibility and one that lasts 3 plus hours to boot. Known as Peter Greenaway’s favorite film of his own work, The Falls goes through a catalog of 92 individuals whose last name starts with the word “Fall” that were victimized by an event known as the VUE or the Violent Unknown Event. It’s told in a deadpan mock documentary style with numerous narrators, has a strange narrative current that somehow ties these characters together, can be seen as a mutated sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and boasts a playful score from Michael Nyman to wrap it all together.

Manic and mechanical, The Falls keeps you in focus with its absurdities and allows you to to solve the encyclopedic mystery with comic redundancies and run-ons. Indulgent in the best way possible, It’s truly mad in execution and in thought.

VISUAL MUSIC: AN iotaSALON COLLECTION 1960-2014

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VISUAL MUSIC: AN iotaSALON COLLECTION 1960-2014

SATURDAY, JULY 12 – 8:00 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY
16mm Titles Shown from Film!

“All of a sudden it hit me—if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can’t there be figures of motion?” -Len Lye

The iotaCenter is the premiere source for the presentation, preservation, and research of visual music, a language of abstract experimental film pioneered by figures like Mary Ellen Bute and Len Lye and continued through to the present day.

In conjunction with the New York City premiere of newly restored works by Robert Darroll, Spectacle is pleased to also partner with the iotaCenter on a retrospective of works ranging from the 1960s to present day: an evening of visual music, color rhythm, colour music, rhythmic light, lumia, digital harmony, liquid light, absolute film, visual harmony, abstract animation, abstract expressionist cinema, and kinetica.

Special thanks to Huckleberry Lain.

SCRATCH PAD
Hy Hirsh, 1960. 8 min.
16mm print!

HEAVY LIGHT
Adam K. Beckett, 1973. 7 min.
16mm print!

FURIES
Sara Petty, 1977. 3 min.
16mm print!

CALCULATED MOVEMENT
Larry Cuba, 1985. 7 min.
16mm print!

BLOOMY GIRLS
Takagi Masakatsu, 2005. 5 min.

JOSHUA HIS TREE
Michael Robinson, 2006. 6 min.

SON OF PUDDLE JUMPER
Chris Casady, 2009. 2 min.

APRES LE FEU
Jacques Perconte, 2010. 7 min.

THE DEEP DARK
Laura Heit, 2011. 7 min.

FIELDS
Dr. Strangeloop, 2012. 7 min.

ANTIQUITIES FOR THE QUEEN OF ANGELS
Huckleberry Lain, 2013. 10 min.

OCEAN
Stephanie Maxwell, 2014. 12 min.

About the iotaCenter

The iotaCenter is a non-profit arts organization, founded in 1994, devoted to the preservation and promotion of experimental animation and abstract visual music. Through our online discussion group and The Visual Music Village social network, we foster a worldwide community of artists, scholars and fans of this art form. iota has received numerous grants for its programs in film preservation and archiving and maintains a video study center for students, scholars and curators doing research in the genre.

CRITICAL PARANOIA: CONSPIRATORIAL MEMES, ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, AND DISINFORMATION

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CRITICAL PARANOIA: CONSPIRATORIAL MEMES, ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, AND DISINFORMATION
Curated by Ernest J. Ramon
USA, 80 min, 2014

THURSDAY, JULY 10 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16 – 7:30 PM

A sampling of some of the strangest and most thought provoking conspiracy videos to found on youtube including:

  • Listed for viewing in TV Guide Magazine Conspiracy of Silence, exposes a network of religious leaders and politicians involved in child sex orgies at the White House. It was to be aired on the Discovery Channel on May 3 1994 but was mysteriously pulled just prior to being aired. The rights to the documentary have been purchased by unknown persons who have ordered all copies destroyed.
  • Merck Vaccine Chief Brings HIV/AIDS to America, This censored interview conducted for public television was cut due to its huge liability–the admission that Merck drug company vaccines have systematically been injecting cancer viruses in people worldwide.
  • This segment of In Lies We Trust: The CIA, Hollywood & Bioterrorism features one of the world’s leading vaccine experts who explains why Merck’s vaccines have spread AIDS, leukemia, and other horrific plagues worldwide.
  • The Mena Connection, Eyewitness testimony paints an incredibly detailed and paradigm shifting view into the secret world of high-level politicians, the CIA, Iran Contra, cocaine, and the funding of a secret government. Hollywood Insider
  • Freemasonic and Occult Movies & Symbolism. Be assured the Illuminati and the Necronomicon are very real. Other topics include multi-dimensional beings feeding off humans, parallel universes, ghosts, sex magick, and Brad Pitt.
  • Hell’s Bell’s The Dangers of Rock ‘N’ Roll 1989 journey into the dark side of rock music and its negative effect on society (from a Christian perspective).
  • The Assassination of Jimi Hendrix, In the last twenty four hours only two things are certain it was no accident, and it was not a suicide.
  • The Borg Agenda, in its entirety is a marathon reaching over 14 hours in length, an intense exploration into critical issues of modernity. Is the Star Trek franchise and perhaps the whole of pop science fiction insidious propaganda aimed at coaxing all humanity into a steely robotic cage?
  • Is Jeff Ganon Really Johnny Gosch? connect the dots missing children milk cartons politicians black op tax funded pedophile sex rings.
  • Project Blue Beam, Fake alien invasion rapture jesus hologram physiological warfare ufos.
  • Kubrick’s Odyssey Secrets Hidden In The Film of Stanley Kubrick Part One Kubrick and Apollo. First in a series of documentaries revealing the secret knowledge embedded in the works of the greatest filmmaker of all time. In Part One, Jay Weidner, presents compelling evidence of Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo moon landings. Was 2001: A Space Odyssey not only a retelling of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s novel, but also a research and development project that assisted Kubrick in the creation of the Apollo moon footage?
  • Operation Trojan Horse, One persons story of waking up to reality.

FROM THE CLOUD

FROM THE CLOUD

FROM THE CLOUD
Dir. Various
Approx. 80 min.

TUESDAY, JULY 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 18 – 7:30 PM

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.

FEATURING:

“Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 – I – Cute Kittens,” Cory Arcangel, 2009, digital video, color, sound, 4:21
Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11-I played by cats on pianos.

“Only Girl,” Hilary Basing, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 3:53 min.
My performances on camera aim to equalize identities through the adoption of their different characteristics and gestures. Only Girl explores the gestures of femininity and the breakdown of information through mimicry as I imitate drag queen Raja’s imitation of Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World).

“Electric Sweat,” John Michael Boling, 2007, digital video, color, sound, 54 sec.
This video is a valentine to hardware that raises technolust to the level of technoromance.

“A Total Jizzfest,” Jennifer Chan, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 3:22 min.
A sample of the richest and sexiest men in computer and Internet history.

“New American Classic,” Jennifer Chan, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 1:44 min.
Is it sculpture or furniture?

“Am I Evil?,” Jacob Ciocci, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:14 min.
In her essay, “Mirror Horror”, Trinie Dalton describes, “In early times, since mirrors were rare commodities, only qualified shamans had mirrors. But in 1438, when Guttenberg started a mirror-making business, anyone untrained in magic could use and be tempted by one. This proliferation of mirrors perpetuated myths of witchcraft, since some theorized that mirrors were being used for maleficence by those corruptible, vain and immoral enough to admire their own reflections.”

The good witch (Harry Potter?) tries to understand his reflection but the mirror shatters as soon as he touches it. The evil witch (Wicked Witch of the West?) tries the same thing but the mirror again shatters. The mirror always shatters just before a fixed identity can be sustained. A mirror is magic in much the same way many newer image-making tools are magic: for a brief moment you are put under a spell, you believe in it. But the longer and the closer you look, everything begins to fall apart. That is the real magic. This is the 3rd piece in Ciocci’s ongoing series “Trapped and Frozen Forever,” an investigation into the relationships between online and off-line images: images trapped (not tangible) on-screen and images frozen (not moving) in the physical world. In this iteration Ciocci has scanned section by section each of the 2 large collages on the wall, using them as the basis for the animated projection.

“Apocalypse Now,” Jesse Darling, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 1:06 min.
A roundup of the year 2012, made especially for the end of the world.

“Too Many Dicks,” Feminist Frequency/Anita Sarkeesian, 2010, digital video, color, sound, 1:19 min.
It is no secret that the majority of video games these days star overly muscular men often carrying big swords, guns, baseball bats, chainsaws or other phallic weaponry. Many games normalize this extremely macho form of masculinity while uncritically glorifying war or military intervention. Sadly too many games tend to celebrate grotesque displays of violence instead of providing opportunities for creative, less violent, innovative forms of conflict resolution. Today with the growing dominance of the first person shooter genre players are encouraged to really participate in the destruction, testosterone and gore up close and personal. Not only are these games dominated by male characters but even the few women characters who do get staring roles are often made to replicate overly patriarchal, violent, macho behavior (but inside of a hyper sexualized female body). Not surprisingly the vast majority of game producers, designers and writers in the industry are still men.

“Erased de Kooning,” Mike Goldby, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 2:58 min.
In this video, Goldby brings an image of a de Kooning drawing into Photoshop and, as Robert Rauschenberg did 60 years ago, erases all the markings. But what is at stake when this is just a digital file, with another exact copy of the image available again to download or one can simply undo using ⌘Z?

“Analog Internet,” Faith Holland, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:12 min.
“Analog Internet” is a video-sculpture that reveals a pyramid of three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video appropriated from YouTube playing. This is the core of the Internet: an Egyptian site of worship for cats. Considering the Internet’s obsession with cats, Analog Internet re-imagines having the same relationship to cat videos in physical, not digital, space.

“Bieber Fever” Daniel Johnson, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:10 min.
Excerpted and looped from Justin Bieber’s music video “Baby,” in “Bieber Fever,” Bieber encircles us in all his glory while a symphonic slowed-down version of his song plays. As he spins, more and more about his gestures, posturing, and the environment emerges.

“No Fun,” Eva and Franco Mattes, 2010, online performance, color, sound, 15:46 min.
For No Fun Franco Mattes simulated committing suicide in a public webcam-based chat room. Thousands of random people, unwillingly recorded, watched while he was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours. The video documentation of the performance is an unpredictable, at times disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their mobiles.

“#Postmodem,” Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 14:37
#PostModem is a comedic, satirical sci-fi musical based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It’s the story of two Miami girls and how they deal with the technological singularity, as told through a series of cinematic tweets.

“Money2,” Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 1:16 min.
“Money2″ by Lorna Mills and Yoshi Sodeoka is a brief, merciless video assembled from Lorna Mills’s found and altered animated gif collages. These looping animations play against a soundtrack by Plink Flojd, a super audiovideo collective started by David Quiles Guillo with co-founders Yoshi Sodeoka and Eric Mast. The video is the cacophonous, dysfunctional, absurd, idiotic sequel to Pink Floyd’s classic “Money.” The band’s original version from the 70’s exhorted their audience to reject wealth and conspicuous consumption, while at the same time launching them into the stratosphere of commercial success. Pink Floyd’s “Money” remains an enormously popular song, despite the fact that all of the ideas about capitalism embedded in the song are now four decades out of date. “Money2” expands the original imagery to include the darkness, desperation, folly and anxiety that surrounds wealth and the lack of it. By pairing a mashed, mangled musical version with found, then re-arranged, animated gifs, Pink Floyd’s “Money” is revived and buried alive at the same time.

“All Y’all,” Gracie Nesin, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 4:51 min.
“All Y’all” is one of a cycle of nine commemorative ‘songs’ called White Witch/Bluff City. The brief (song length), breathy sound and image collage is essentially a diaristic narrative about codeine, boarding school, the Athenian courtesan Phryne—dreams, shreds, parts. It’s impressionistic, creepy-trill, a drunk/dull/sleepy recollection of prostitution both low and sublime, sweet and cruel, a punchy Southern Gothic poem about After Empire sung somewhat underwater, smoked and muffled by a blue, New Age cloud, all collapsed and hilarious—yesterday today and tomorrow.

“Search by Image, Recursively Starting with a Transparent PNG,” Sebastian Schmieg, 2011, digital video, color, silent, 4:04 min.
With near-scientific method, Schmieg begins with a transparent PNG image file and allows Google’s Search by Image to visually free associate. The result is an insight into how Google’s algorithm “sees.”

“On Beauty,” Hennessy Youngman, 2011, digital video, color, sound, 5:11 min.
Is beauty still relevant in our future age where information is mad valuable and neoliberalism is the number one pop tune that seems like it will always be playing every time you turn on the radio forever into infinity? Well I don’t got answers to these questions, but that don’t stop me from enwisening y’all to this shit!

Special thanks to Faith Holland and the artists.