02: Gibson / Conrad / Paik

2 April, 2015 - 20:30
SPHINX 3

 

 

SELECTION 2015

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.

 

From abstract capitalism to aleatory compositional strategies and performative experimentation, this screening brings together Beatrice Gibson’s latest work F for Fibonacci with video works from the 1970s by Tony Conrad and Nam June Paik.

F for Fibonacci

Beatrice Gibson
,
UK
,
2014
,
HD
,
colour
,
16'

In her latest film Beatrice Gibson takes William Gaddis’ epic modernist novel JR (1975) as its departure point. An eerily prescient, biting social satire, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who, with the unwitting help of his school’s resident composer, inadvertently creates the single greatest virtual empire the world has seen, spun largely from the anonymity of the school’s pay phone. F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of ‘market noise’. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass.

Cycles of 3s and 7s

Tony Conrad
,
US
,
1976
,
video
,
b&w
,
12'

Cycles of 3’s and 7’s is a performance in which the harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be performed by a musical instrument are represented through the computation of their arithmetic relationships or frequency ratios. Conrad and the other members of the Theater of Eternal Music-LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, and Angus MacLise – composed and performed “dream music” in the early ‘60s. This seminal group was a major influence on what became known as minimalist music. Conrad’s tape points to an important intersection of conceptual and performative experimentation in which the theoretical basis of sound and visual imagine tools were explored by musicians, filmmakers, videomakers, and electronic instrument designers.

A Tribute to John Cage

Nam June Paik
,
US
,
1976
,
video
,
colour
,
29'

In this multifaceted portrait, Paik creates a pastiche of John Cage’s performances and anecdotes, interviews with friends and colleagues, and examples of Paik’s participatory music and television works that parallel Cage’s strategies and concerns. The methodology and philosophies that inform Cage’s radical musical aesthetic — chance, random- ness, the democratization of sounds — are evident as he performs such seminal pieces as 4’33” of complete silence in Harvard Square, or throws the I Ching to determine performance sites. Among the collage of elements included in this work are segments from Paik’s Zen for TV; Paik and Charlotte Moorman in early performances, including the TV Bra; and anecdotes from composer Alvin Lucier.