SEE THIS SOUND: Supplementary Program

Thursday, 17.9.2009, 7:00 pm
The Sound of Your Eyes
Live performance by Elisabeth Grübl "f II" and [dy'na:mo] with Joachim Bock, Martin Moser & Martin Wagner "W.U.M."
Introduction: Ursula Maria Probst, curator, Vienna

The cultural resonance in response to sound art for developing new code systems is growing. Yet the magic of sound and image seems to be found beyond the sum of their single components. The intertwining of sound and image production reflects and produces social codes, triggering manifold relationships between sonic and visual cultures and the dynamics of direct experience. Films by: Anu Pennanen, Heidi Kilpelainen, Female Obsession and Sonia Leimer.
/// Film screening, Live performance

Thursday, 24.9.2009, 6:00 pm
Guided tour with the curator Cosima Rainer
/// Guided tour in German

Thursday, 24.9.2009, 8:00 pm
Austrian Abstracts
Barbara Pichler, Director diagonale, Graz

The label Austrian Abstracts was given in the late 1990s to a series of abstract videos that newly defined an area of experimental film in the charged field between film, digital media and electronic music - a development that also attracted major attention internationally as well. The program presents a selection of striking positions that allow for very different perspectives of this manifold production landscape, from analogies to avant-garde film and traditions of synaesthesia as well as to contemporary graphic design or pop culture. Films by: Jürgen Moritz, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Michaela Schwentner, Karø Goldt, reMi (Renate Oblak, Michael Pinter), Michaela Grill V: [n:ja] (Annja Krautgasser), Billy Roisz, Tina Frank, lia, Didi Bruckmayr, Manuel Knapp.
/// Lecture in German with film examples

Thursday, 1.10.2009, 7:00 pm
Raumlichtkunst to Vortex: Early Expanded Cinema Experiments of Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson (1926-1959)
Cindy Keefer, Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles

Cindy Keefer's illustrated presentation presents the pioneers of Expanded Cinema Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson. From Fischinger's multiple projections in the 1920s in Germany to Belson's vortex concerts in the 1950s in San Francisco, these film artists created new spaces of cinematographic experience that went far beyond what their contemporaries or predecessors realized. Throughout their entire oeuvre, they expanded the boundaries of cinema, projection and perception by combining film with other forms of artistic expression to produce a new art form.
/// Lecture in English with film examples

Thursday, 1.10.2009, 9:00 pm
Wolfgang Voigt - GAS LIVE

Wolfgang Voigt aka Gas fantasizes about a resonance body between Schoenberg and Kraftwerk, between French horn and bass drum. Gas is Wagner as glamrock, is Hansel and Gretel on acid. An endless march through the underbrush - into the disco - of an imaginary, nebulous forest. The intoxicatingly soft, partially amorphous structure of the elegiac music pieces without beginning or end seems to stream forth like a gas. Yet Voigt is never interested in the original musical reference or the forest as such. Instead he seeks to return the "material" to its basic aesthetic structure using zoom, loop and distortion techniques, in order to liberate it from its actual meaning.
/// Live performance

Thursday, 8.10.2009, 7:00 pm
Light Shows and Their Cinematic Representations
David E. James Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of California

Light shows as improvised performances from film, slide and light projections reached their climax accompanying rock concerts in the mid-1960s; unique and ephemeral in nature, they were still captured in a few film recordings. The evening presents some of the most important light shows, such as Single Wing Turquoise Bird (SWTB), and presents documentations of their performances with examples from The Baby Maker (James Bridges, 1970), Monterey Pop (D. A. Pennebaker, 1968), The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967) and Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Ronald Nameth, 1967).
/// Lecture in English with film examples

Thursday, 15.10.2009, 7:00 pm
Ultra-red

The art and activist collective Ultra-red has been developing sound-based investigations of the political conditions of the AIDS crisis since 1994. The six-channel video installation Untitled (for six voices) is based on a series of performances with the title Silent/Listen, which took place in various art institutions in North America and brought together social workers, researchers and activists living with HIV/AIDS. Each performance started with a performance of John Cage's 4'33''. Following this, the participants were invited to think about "silence" and the art institution's relationship to AIDS.
/// Lecture by the artists collective in English

Thursday, 22.10.2009, 8:00 pm
Augenclick - Pheromonic_Hungry Walking Blues
Station Rose, Frankfurt

The artist duo Station Rose - Elisa Rose (visuals) & Gary Danner (sound), who founded the first space for "media art" in Vienna in 1988, see their audiovisual net art as a new language that destroys letters. For their live performance they created a "pheronomic space". The samples and substances that Station Rose exudes to the audience during the performance are intended to steer behavior like fragrances. The complex communication system of nature is applied in their digital art performatively, and the pheromonic is produced as audiovisual liquid. Signals trigger behavior reactions.
/// Live performance, premiere

Thursday, 5.11.2009, 7:00 pm
Slide Lecture and Film Screening by Michael Snow
New York Eye and Ear Control, 1964
16 mm, 34 min, b/w, sound
Michael Snow, artist and filmmaker, Toronto

Originally a professional jazz musician, in the 1960s Michael Snow turned to other artistic interests and became an important proponent of structural film. Since the 1970s he has increasingly devoted his attention to sound recordings and sound installations. He already gave special attention to the relationship between image and sound in his film New York Eye and Ear Control: the sound track is a free jazz session from 1964 with the best musicians of the time, including the saxophonist Albert Ayler and the trumpet player Don Cherry. The film was also known as "Walking Woman", because of the silhouette of a woman (the musician Carla Bley) that appeared in front of different backgrounds - a constant in Snow's work.
/// Lecture in English

Friday, 6.11.2009, 4:00 pm
Michael Snow, Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, 1972-74
16mm, 266 min, color, sound
Location: the cinema Moviemento, Dametzstraße 30
/// Film screening with the artist present

Thursday, 19.11.2009, 7:00 pm
How Sound Comes into the Pictures: Visual Music and Early Sound-Image Experiments in Film
Sandra Naumann academic staff member, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media. Art.Research., Linz

Even since the early days of cinematography, filmmakers have tried out very different concepts for not merely combining film and music, but for transferring musical principles to moving images and creating visual music with abstract forms, but also investigating the material characteristics of the medium in experimental couplings of image and sound. The program shows a selection of extraordinary pioneering works, the arrangement and form language of which have had an influence that is not to be underestimated on music videos, video art and VJing, including several rare gems from international film archives. With films by Germaine Dulac, Len Lye, Harry Smith, James & John Whitney, Norman McLaren, Shirley Clarke, Mary Ellen Bute and others.
/// Lecture in German with film examples

Sunday, 29.11.2009, 11:00 am
Guided tour with the curator Cosima Rainer
/// Guided tour in German

Thursday, 3.12.2009, 7:00 pm
Site and Sound in the 1960s
Liz Kotz, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside

In recent years terms like "sound art" and "sound installation" have become quite tedious and imprecise. They were used as initial terms for all kinds of works with an auditory component. With a comparison of important early projects by Max Neuhaus and La Monte Young, Liz Kotz will show that site-based works with sound come from two different directions: the investigation of locations in post-minimalist art since the late 1960s and the spatialization of art, a practice rooted in the western concert tradition, which reached its climax in the immediate post-war era, as new technologies of electronic sound generation and electronic sound mixing along with loudspeakers and amplifiers increasingly made it possible to control the distribution and modulation of sound in space.
/// Lecture in English

Thursday, 10.12.2009, 7:00 pm
Klemme Lasche Feder - Music Clips Before and After the Age of MTV
Christian Höller, springerin, Vienna

Long before music TV turned the "clip" into a paradigmatic format of pop culture, many different ways of filming music were tried. However, it was the age of MTV that first standardized and canonized the one-song video. Today, as music TV in its conventional form appears to be increasingly becoming an obsolete medium, new ways of visualizing sound are emerging. The evening draws a historical arch from the time before the music clip, through its heyday in the 1980s all the way to more recent offshoots that hardly have anything left in common with orthodox music videos. With examples from Bruce Conner, Pat O'Neill, Dara Birnbaum, Godley & Creme, Sadie Benning, Roman Coppola, Michel Gondry and others.
/// Lecture in German with film examples

Thursday, 17.12.2009, 7:00 pm
Inaudible Eloquence. On the Silent Voices of Art
Thomas Trummer, Project Director Visual Art for Siemens Art Program

Noisy gestures and talking loudly are considered hardly appropriate in the museum. Just as pictures are shrouded in silence, viewers are expected to exercise reserve and refrain from talking. Art seems to have unquestioningly taken over the religious dimension of silence for its cult spaces. Since the classical era that strove for noble simplicity and quiet greatness, peaceful and meaningful contemplation predominates in museums.
/// Lecture in German

Location: Lentos Art Museum Linz, unless otherwise indicated
/// EVENT TIP:
Challenging Music, Dance and Performance: the Electronic Media - Symposium and Dance Performance
31.8.-2.9.2009

Director: Peter Revers, Keynote Lectures: Helga de la Motte (Berlin), Norah Zuniga Shaw (Columbus, Ohio, USA)
Location: Anton Bruckner Private University, Wildbergstr. 18, 4040 Linz, www.bruckneruni.at
A Project for Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture