Skip to content


Her Ghost / In And Out Of Synch / Trypps

This evening features the UK premier of Kode9, MFO & Ms. Haptic’s Her Ghost – a powerful and provocative live performance, reworking the late Chris Marker’s La Jetée from the female character’s perspective, redressing its historical gender imbalance as they draw new narratives, a mounumental sound composition from Kode9, and MFO’s carefully reconfigured images, out of Marker’s originals. Also on the evening, a new filmic performance by Aura Satz encodes sound as light via synaesthetic experiments with the image and optical tracks of 16mm film, with live music and a voice over scripted in collaboration with Lis Rhodes, whose iconic work of expanded cinema, Light Music, was a response to the under-representation of women in the musical avant-garde. Ben Russell’s Trypps film series is an ongoing study in trance, travel and psychedelic ethnographies.

More info:

Her Ghost: An Homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée is an on-going collaborative film-sound performance project between DJ, Hyperdub label boss, and sound designer Kode9 (Steve Goodman) Berlin-based MFO visual artist collective Marcel Weber and Lucy Benson, and researcher/lecturer/performer, Ms.Haptic (Jessica Edwards), that significantly re-works, both aurally and visually, Marker’s science fiction film-photo-essay original (1962). 50 years from the premiere of Chris Marker’s science fiction anomaly, Her Ghost refracts the original script, so that it now sheds light onto the previously obscured figure of the woman. Drawing from the stills, narrative and soundscape of the original film, Her Ghost suggestively recasts, further complicates and asks difficult questions of its ‘parent’. It is performed live, but off-stage, amidst its audience. Each iteration of the project produces a fractionally different mutation of the film. Her Ghost was originally commissioned by Unsound Festival and first performed in Krakow, Poland in November 2011. This will be its UK premier.

Aura Satz’s In and Out of Synch is a new filmic performance which centres around the optical printing of soundtracks, committing to 16mm film a technology on the verge of extinction, entombing and encrypting its own language onto itself. Shot mostly at the post-production facilities of Pinewood studios (London), the close-up sequences feature abstract patterns of sound encoded as light, printed onto the soundtrack area of the filmstrip. The film features the quivering light of a 16mm mono optical sound camera, providing a seismic glimpse at a sound-wave in formation. Both mesmerizing and assaulting the senses, the visually hypnotic patterns are disrupted by the voiceover, scripted in dialogue with the artist Lis Rhodes, and the question of sound-image synchronicity and correlation are critically interrogated. The film is accompanied by a live musical performance which animates a Rubens’ tube, a device which similarly modulates light in response to sound creating spectacular waves of flames. Thus, in parallel to the film’s exploration of sound encoded as light, the event features sound encoded as fire; a more primal, dramatic, and almost pre-cinematic counterpart of the same principle of sound as light. In and Out of Synch will premier at the Tate Oil Tanks, and, in 2013, will tour to Oslo and Stockholm. Satz’s practice encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. In recent years she has completed a collection of films which look closely at sound visualisation through various technologies such as Chladni patterns, the theremin, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and drawn/optical sound, paying close attention to the materiality of such technologies, the resulting sound patterns and the modes of gestural engagement. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally. During 2009-2010 she was artist-in-residence at the Ear Institute, UCL. She is shortlisted for the 2012 Jarman award.

Ben Russell is an itinerant media artist and curator whose films and performances have been presented in spaces from 14th century Belgian monasteries to 17th century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and solo screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the MOMA. His Trypps series is an ongoing study in trance, travel and psychedelic ethnographies. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern seies in Providence, Rhode Island, and he currently teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Visionary Kingdom

Across four evenings, the Visionary Kingdom programme presents a spectrum of incisive contemporary live music, film and performance from established talent and fast-rising names from the underground.

#visionarykingdom

Season pass £20/£18 concs