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Night of Sights and Sounds: the iotaSalon Resumes Exhibition of Contemporary Works for Los Angeles Visual Music Community
Victoria Meng
The iotaSalon was auspiciously re-inaugurated on April 26, 2006: over forty art lovers attended this forum for experiencing and discussing outstanding short works in visual music by contemporary media artists. With UCLA’s Design and Media Arts Department’s support in providing a versatile exhibition space, the evening featured nine film, video, digital, and performance pieces. The program’s variety in format and theme, as well as its incorporation of audience feedback immediately after each work, doubly distinguished the iota Salon as a dynamic and participatory event.
To jump to read about a specific work in the Salon’s program, please click on its title:
Even before Larry Cuba, iotaCenter’s founder, introduced the evening’s program, the audience encountered visual music in the form of Jeffers Egan’s Motion Paintings. These wall-sized looped projections present exquisite examples of Egan’s ambition to literally imbue the tradition of abstract painting with the dimension of time. The two paintings shown, colourperblob and Untitled #1, both employed harmonious palettes and languid movements. In the former, serpentine highlights undulated across a dense bronze-on-black crochet, calling disparate, seductive, and vaguely threatening associations to mind. Untitled #1 entailed both a much longer loop and more nebulous forms that together diverted attention away from the painting’s cyclical structure toward its Kandinsky-esque luminosity and vigor. As the screening room filled and settled, Egan’s mesmerizing paintings set the tone for the works to follow.
Mary Beth Reed’s Moon Streams, handcrafted through direct-on-film techniques and projected in 16mm, provided an interesting counterpoint to Egan’s digital polish. Reed had studied and collaborated with experimental filmmaking master Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Moon Streams, completed in 2000, represented a heartfelt homage. The film’s textures could best be characterized as crystalline. Brief exposures of icy facets, glimmers, and cracks evoked a sense of immobility within constant change. However, as flicker built upon flicker, the accreted layers seemed to acquire a transformative momentum – the craggy patterns achieved a molten intensity supported by the half-glimpsed image of a live-action waterfall. Solid shattered into liquid: a transubstantiation of earth into water through fire. When questioned about her structuring principle, Reed replied that while the film’s passages hold very specific narrative meanings for her, freer associations might enhance its viewing experience. Reed also responded to a question about the film’s lack of soundtrack by noting that she tends to conceive of her films more visually than aurally. Thus while she finds working with music and sound stimulating, the fact that Moon Streams is silent reflected an important aspect of her approach to filmmaking. Reed is currently completing her MFA at CalArts.
“Bati Dominance” was the fourth section of the five-part work, Slither, by Jeffers Egan and Jake Mandell. Like his Motion Paintings, Egan’s video art triggered primordial reveries – words like slither, slide, slick, slip, slink, and possibly, sinister – connections Egan fully exploited in his evocative track names and descriptions. This uncanny conjunction between high technology and primal reactions perhaps recall the anxiety and revelations of one’s first attempts to plumb the focus of a microscope or to fix the significance of an x-ray image: did these alien fissures and forms truly derive from a scraping of my cheek, a flash through my organs? The fluidity of Egan’s compositions rubbed disconcertingly against Mandell’s vertiginous score. Both embodied the curious quality of being simultaneously finely articulated and yet somehow out of focus. Even as one began to grasp a shape or a pitch, it has inexorably morphed or vibrated into something else. Although the Wisconsin-based Egan and Mandell were not present at the Salon, they had shared some information about how they executed the video with iota that Salon participants discussed.
The evening’s third film demonstrated yet another strain of cinematic lyricism. Mecanismo, by Kino (also known as Joaquin Gil), was startlingly and enchantingly simple, a dance of straight-edged black and white areas to an upbeat collage of sound samples. Like Moon Streams, Mecanismo displayed a linear escalation. The initial figures were bold, broad, and stripe-like; successive iterations introduced increasingly complex orthogonal weaves and impressions of grayscale until a series of perfectly circular shockwaves burst through the surface in synchrony with audio accents. Kino spoke about his technical and aesthetic impetuses for designing such a deceptively simple film: having explored a variety of colors and forms in his previous work, he wished to challenge himself by using basic rules and elements to generate complex compositions. Kino’s latest feature-length production, Zipacna, was screened at the Egyptian theater on May 9th, 2006.
If Chris Casady’s Rice Song weren’t so delectably impertinent, it could be too cute. The audience could not help but bop a bit in their seats as tiny Miro-esque figures blinked and whirled across a black expanse, cued to a peppy pop tune. The pleasure was immediate: Casady’s bright and stylish designs, their precise and somehow sassy movements, and the song’s infectious cheer seemed to play out the best features of some as yet uncreated video arcade game. However, even as the piece coerced the audience into a lighthearted trance, Casady introduced Korean subtitles that inevitably prompted reconsiderations. Salon participants had the opportunity to put their questions directly to Casady: What did the song say, and how important was it for me to know? The answer surprised the majority of participants. Casady’s song choice serendipitously resulted from his friendship with the band, the Fibonaccis. In fact, although Casady knew the song was about rice, he had no word-for-word knowledge of the lyrics, and he generated a set of random subtitles by searching for “Korean characters” on the internet! At this point Doo-Yul Park, another Salon artist and apparently the only Korean speaker in the audience, volunteered his translation. The song was a humorously childish demand for more rice to eat, while the printed text was actually a melodramatic declaration of undying love. Casady was delighted by how his “misuse” of new media tools including Flash and Google created this Dadaist juxtaposition, and will be keeping it in mind as he completes final revisions of Rice Song.
Oerd van Cuijlenborg’s Djizzazzy exuded classic panache. Whenever a work matches designs to a pre-existing, popular, and highly structured musical recording, there is a risk that the visual track would be judged as being merely illustrative of or even subordinate to the soundtrack. Not so Djizzazzy. Like Norman McLaren’s Be Gone Dull Care, Cuijlenborg’s film poised itself between the twin senses of hearing and sight, enhancing our sensitivity to both through mimicry and counterpoint. To Dizzy Gillespie Big Band’s Birks Works, black zags zigged across a field of saturated mustard while schools of periwinkle stars jived through lipstick red streaks. Djizzazzy’s dapper palette and elegant transitions heightened the score’s casual cosmopolitanism; the film felt as intoxicating as a perfect gin and tonic. Indeed, there was something nostalgic to the splendor of this tightly synchronized rhapsody in color and form – a kind of sophistication that evoked modernist ideals that are no less potent for being dated.
The room grew palpably charged as Doo-Yul Park, also known as Doox, rose to perform Wind and 10 Fingered Wings. A single, soft, chord struck – and a delicate helix unfurled from the heart of the white screen. With each melancholic melodic phrase the spiny spiral throbbed and bloomed, often trading one color for another to highlight changes in the music’s mood. Dramatic musical transitions prompted the helix to swell and engulf the screen or to regenerate entirely. As the parameters for Doox’s musical-visual engine grew manifest, his diatonically romantic piano piece drew to a close. A storm of percussion followed, its intensity multiplied as new and starker lattices slammed onto the screen. The second movement’s exhilarating blitz gave way to the third movement’s meditative calm as the juts completely filled the screen then swiped to a black, rather than white, background, from which new promontories continued to emerge. The roughly symmetrical helix at the center of Doox’s three-movement piece appeared at once organic and metallic, as shocking yet intuitive as a sea urchin’s spikes or a bicycle’s spokes. Doox attributed his love for live visual music work as a facet of his overall investment in interactivity: the Salon performance represented, from his perspective, a unique and precious collective effort. The form that the piece ultimately took was derived from the evening’s previous presentations as well as the audience’s spontaneous reactions, conditions in time and space that can neither be fully controlled nor repeated. A recording of the Salon rendition of Wind and 10 Fingered Wings is available on Doox’s blog. Doox is currently pursuing an MFA degree at USC’s Interactive Media Program.
All That Remains, like much of Stephanie Maxwell’s works, defies verbal description. Words that did come to mind included quilt, mosaic, and collage – objects that are greater than the sum of their parts. Indeed, Maxwell’s piece executed in time the regulated variety that these objects create in space. Every few seconds the film introduced a texture that we had almost seen before: patches of speckles and squiggles, swathes of fuzzy strands, inset prisms and bands. The film’s mercurial palette matched its freewheeling density in design: by turns monochromatic and fluorescent, All That Remains looked hyperactive even when its forms’ movements were relatively sedate. Rather than engendering anxiety, as such frenzy is wont to do, Maxwell’s film instead felt simply busy with its own concerns. The soundtrack’s vaguely electronic tintinnabulations added to the overall impression of endearing preoccupation – this, one felt, was a film of great momentum that would carry along anything that happened on the way. Maxwell had recently visited Los Angeles to lead workshops at CalArts and UCLA. Iota will be releasing a compilation of Maxwell’s works as part of its KINETICA Video Library.
As we drew to the conclusion of the posted Salon program, Larry Cuba opened the possibility of an encore screening – he had brought several classics of visual music including films by Hy Hirsh and Norman McLaren. By enthusiastic demand Cuba’s own Two Space, a pioneering computer-generated film that is often cited but rarely shown, capped the evening. Two Space began demurely: small white dots formed tile-like linear figures over the black background, entering a similar but mathematically transformed trajectory at regular intervals. For example, a figure that consisted of an upper-right-to-lower-left diagonal might appear as an upper-left-to-lower-right diagonal during its next reprisal. Each rendition comprised part of a larger cycle, and successive cycles explored increasingly complex originating figures. The repeating array was just large enough to give the impression of an infinite plane of dancing dots extending beyond the screen’s limits, and just small enough so that each delicate pattern may be recognized and appreciated as and by itself. To the riveting chime of gamelan music the figures continued their geometrically exacting traceries with a strange ascetic beauty: how could such basic elements converge to inspire such rich satisfaction? It was as though one had been transported to Athenian days, when the coincidence of art, symmetry, and piety was inevitable and inviolate. Indeed, the film’s pure abstraction invited far-flung associations from the primal flourish of Southeast Asian batik to the boundless intricacies of Byzantine tiles. Two Space thus approached a state of virtually infinite aesthetic and psychical resonance through the very exactitude of its limitations.
Given its success and popularity on April 26th, it is to be hoped that the iota Salon will become a regular highlight in the Los Angeles art and visual music community. Information about how to submit a work for
consideration can be found here.
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