Thursday, March 15, 2007

March 15-18: Visualists at Play in Seattle and London

Pixelflip Performs at the 911 Media Arts Center March 15

The 911 VJ series continues with Pixelflip. Pixelflip was schooled at the Vancouver Film School, another datapoint for cinema's expansion.

911 Media Arts Center http://www.911media.org/ 402 9th Ave N. 7:30-10:30


Addictive TV and Peter Greenway Perform on the BFI IMAX March 16

Addictive TV performs live visuals. While their dissing Voila is massively disingenuous, they are one of the leaders in the genre, which has stronger and deeper roots in the UK. Joining Addictive will be Peter Greenway. Greenway is known for a series of spectacularly self indulgent art films, presaging Mathew Barney, who expanded the concept. In neither case this is not necessarily a bad thing. Born 1942, in Wales, Greenway, director of 59 films, has been awarded Commander of the British Empire by the Queen. Tonight he will perform live samples from the 92 Tulse Luper series, accompanied by DJ Radar. Greenway performs on a purpose built touch screen video server presaging future tools for live performance.

Both artists perform on the British Film Institute IMAX.

The Optronica Festival runs through Sunday. Pioneers EBN, who mixed visuals on VHS tape in the wayback, will be represented by Gardiner Port and Brian Kane. Ryoichi Kurokawa also performs.

All this is happening in London.

See the website for locations, times, particulars.

Note all the links here from the site http://www.optronica.org annoyingly trash the browser address bar. Poor form gents!


Artist Viola Provides Visuals for NIN

Video artist Bill Viola created visuals for 3 songs in a recent US tour by Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. The visuals are front projected on a transparent scrim between the band and the audience. In a previous tour, NIN commissioned visuals by artist and designer David Carson. Carson tapped friends in the surf community to develop visuals from surf footage, especially the blue crush outtakes as the camera people were dragged beneath the wave. Carson's visuals are documented in the Fragility tour DVD; Viola on the Beside You in Time [Halo22]DVD, also available in HD.