LIVE sound & image :: July 18, 2008; 8:00 pm :: East Coast Aliens Salon, 216 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY.

An evening of innovative approaches to sound and image, featuring three duos that each take distinctive approaches with roots in past practices. DRAW creates immersive live sets of video and sound collage, LoVid links sound and image synthesis, and Cinemage draws on Chris Marker’s La Jetée as inspiration. With a live set by Amsterdam based turntablist dj sniff and Keir Neuringer.

DRAW is the live video and sound project of Nisi Jacobs and Michael Schumacher. They create compositions that form the basis for improvisations involving multi-screen video, algorithmically generated sound and live musicians. They make work that retains the spontaneity of improvisation while exploring in depth the relation between sound and image. Their practice involves a number of strategies to achieve this end, such as coupling specific sound and image sequences, using multi-channel setups for both video and sound, role-switching, and exploring notational techniques.

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) believes in the instrumental autonomy of the turntable and the musicianship of the DJ. He is a turntable musician working in the field of improvised and experimental music. His music focuses on the live reconstruction and narratization of the phonographically amplified – the music, the sound, the technology and the past. To achieve this, he uses a unique setup consisting of hand-made hardware interfaces and a custom Max/MSP software along with one turntable and DJ mixer. He is also a concert/event curator for electronic music and a researcher of music technology.

Keir Neuringer was born in New York in 1976 and has lived in Europe since 1999. He is active as an improvising saxophonist and a composer of electronic and acoustic music. He also writes texts and makes videos and installations critical of the destructive behavior exhibited and accepted by the dominant culture. He studied in the US, UK, Poland and The Netherlands.

Cinemage is Aki Onda’s audio-visual project, which performances are composed of slide projections of still photographs and guitar improvisation. Cinemage means “images for cinema,” or “homage for cinema.” The visual images in Cinemage are snapshots taken from Onda’s daily life. By documenting fragments of his personal life, something is revealed in their accumulation–the particulars within lose significance. What emerges is the architecture, and the essence, of memory. The sensibility of Cinemage is essentially filmic. The photos are more like moving images than stills and the style is similar to Chris Marker’s La Jetee. Projected on a screen, the images have the eerie familiarity of an out-of-focus memory and evoke a feeling of déjà vu. On this occasion, Alan Licht plays guitar along with Onda’s visual images.

Fred Worden, filmmaker, has been involved in experimental cinema since the 1970s. His work has been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, in Paris, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, and The Hong Kong International Film Festival. He was an editor for Criss-Cross Art Communications form the 70’s through the 80’s and his writings have appeared in Cinematograph. His work is included in in the Stan Brakhage Collection and the collection of the Centre Pompidou and others. Worden’s interest in intermittent projection: how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector resonates with a viewer on a level beyond representation. Fred teaches film and video production classes as well as film history and theory courses at the University of Maryland.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform.