presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
anticipated artists in person: Brent Coughenour, Kris Force, and Michael A. Morris
pictured above: A Chorus of Black Voids Sings In Rays of Unseeable Light (2017) by Michael A. Morris
Join our Facebook event.
Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code.
Advance tickets available here.
CROSSROADS 10 opens with an entirely live program featuring a sensuously intense trio of immersive film/video performances that blur the lines between media. Kris Force’s Diamond Body presents a macroscopic video score for an electroacoustically activated string quintet. Michael A. Morris’s A Chorus of Black Voids Sings In Rays of Unseeable Light fuses 16mm film projection, analog video synthesis, and digital video re-projection. Brent Coughenour’s The Sick Sense 2 delivers a hallucinatory, flickering otoacoustic sine wave performance that pushes the perceptual system to its limits.
SCREENING:
The Sick Sense 2 (2019) by Brent Coughenour (US); video/sound performance, color, sound, 25 minutes bay area premiere
Building on research by Diana Deutsch, Alfred Bregman, Maryanne Amacher, and others, The Sick Sense 2 is an ongoing project exploring the limits of the perceptual system. These projects stimulate otoacoustic and flicker phenomena and auditory and visual hallucinations while searching for stimulus patterns that turn off the brain’s default mode network, switching the brain into the role of ecstatic perceiver. The Sick Sense 2 is an audio-visual system comprising banks of sine waves, each of which corresponds to a grid displayed on the screen. Various parameters of the sine wave, such as pitch, amplitude, and harmonicity control the size, position and color of the grid. As the sine waves evolve through different structural patterns, the grids phase and overlap in patterns that push the perceptual system to its limits. (Brent Coughenour)
A Chorus of Black Voids Sings In Rays of Unseeable Light (2017) by Michael A. Morris (US); 16mm/video/sound performance, color, sound, 15 minutes bay area premiere
A Chorus of Black Voids Sings In Rays of Unseeable Light is an expanded cinema performance using 16mm film projection, analog video synthesis, digital video projection and custom software for live video manipulation and interactive audio synthesis. The piece makes use of the artifacts of interaction between 16mm projection and digital manipulation. By burning frames of film and remediating the resulting image through both analog electronics and software manipulated video, Chorus… examines the ontological differences and congruencies between different media, creating a ritualistic experience of light and darkness born of what is lost and what is created through film, video, and software interpreting one another. (Michael A. Morris)
Diamond Body (2018) by Kris Force (US); digital video with musical performance, color, sound, 19 minutes world premiere
Diamond Body features live performance by Sally Decker (electronics), Kris Force (cello), Antonio Gennaro (percussion), Lee Hodel (contrabass) and Golnaz Shariatzadeh (violin)
Diamond Body is a musical composition arranged for quintet and video score. Diamond Body is a meditative reflection on the psycho-spiritual subtle body—also called the body of light—defined as various intangible layers of vibrating energy that make up all living beings within and beyond the corporeal layers of flesh and bone. As musicians, we temporarily borrow and shape these same vibrating energies as our medium of expression. The imagery for Diamond Body was created by combining a custom dynamic particle system with macro videography of light reflections, refractions and shadows cast through naturally occurring crystal gems with its sounds created with granular synthesis originating from bowed and struck metals. (Kris Force)
.
CROSSROADS 10 is generously supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, the Willow Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cinematheque’s Members and Donors.