Issue 3: Spring 2009
KILL YOUR TIMID NOTION
Metamkine, La Cellule d'intervention (2008) at Kill Your Timid Notion (Photo by Jennifer French)
One of the leading European avant-garde festivals of sound and image, Kill Your Timid Notion (annually hosted at Dundee Contemporary Arts of Scotland) has celebrated its 5th anniversary with a 'best of' the past years touring across the UK. What we witnessed in London, at the British Film Institute, Southbank on November 29 and 30, was a solid and dynamic series of film programmes, performances, installations and a public conversation with notorious American experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs.
What makes KYTN different from other festivals focusing on visual music (Sons et Lumières at Pompidou, Optronica at BFI, MUVI in Spain, the Visual Music Marathon in the States) is a thorough exploration of discrepancies between sound and image to the detriment of the hackneyed banner of 'synaesthesia'. Whilst synaesthesia has monopolized most attempts to challenge, in a modernist way, the crossovers between the sonic and the visual throughout international festivals, KYTN's understanding of the relationship between the two senses doesn't amount to a substitution of one sense for the other, or impose the predominance of either. KYTN is evidently more interested in stretching and negotiating the experimental possibilities of sound and vision interaction as a complex organization of perceptual impulses. Cinema is the privileged medium chosen to address this intersensorial conjunction, most specifically film on film, although in a variety of exhibition formats.
The performance programme included a number of international artists (many of them Americans): Ken Jacobs, Metamkine, Kjell Bjørgeengen, Andrew Lampert, Bruce McClure, and Paul Sharits among others. Paul Sharits' thrilling Shutter Interface (1975, 16mm), described by the artist as "a 3D metaphor of the space of the brain in an epileptic state brought under control and harmonized", is a quadruple projection piece originally designed as a locational film or installation. Its theatrical version for two projectors, was performed live with Andrew Lampert and Greg Pope handling projectors.
Lampert's own offering was one of the most refreshing performance pieces, breaking all expectations and activating the viewer in various ways. Lampert is an American filmmaker, artist and archivist working at Anthology Film Archives. His performances extend what seems to me elements of materialist filmmaking outside celluloid, integrating aspects of theatricality, the quotidian, chance, accident, humor and improvisation. In Comfortable Seats (2008) projectors and screens move, the artist talks aloud to the projectionist discussing aspects of the projection setting, planning the screening as if the audience hadn't arrived yet... All this generates a cinematic experience outside the pure specificity of the medium, while Lampert undoubtedly reveals and destroys the illusionist aspects of cinema proper.
Andrew Lampert, Comfortable Seats (2008), BFI, London (Photo by Bryony McIntire)
The performance piece by Ken Jacobs, one of the leading figures of the field, was presented at the IMAX cinema in collaboration with sound artist Eric La Casa. The remarkable Nervous Magic Lantern (2008), the latest development on/in Jacob's Nervous System series which started in the 60s, is a continuation of his investigation around the desubstantiation of perception and 4D intervallic motion. The experience was absolutely exceptional, casting the spectator's attention on the most exquisite temporal suspension. A series of spherical images of macro-matter changing almost imperceptibly, accompanied by the outstanding soundscapes of La Casa, made Nervous Magic Lantern a highly hypnotic and trancelike experience in which Jacobs and the audience collaborated in ‘fooling the senses'.
Jacobs has frequently explored in this direction, making the faulty substantiation of the senses evident by generating a type of perception that challenges solid matter. The functioning of perception with stereo images has been one of Jacobs' most recurrent methods of demonstrating this phenomenon. Stereo images generate a field of depth that forms between adjacent eyes, a sort of illusionary field produced by movement or time depth, as Jacobs himself put it, which challenges the logic of perception: "the body is so innocent! It's so easy to mislead its trusting mechanisms" .
Ken Jacobs and Eric La Casa, Nervous Magic Lantern (2007) at Kill Your Timid Notion '07 (Photo by Bryony McIntire)
The two film programmes integrated a collection of films focusing, on the one hand, around the theme of location or landscape and the ways these can be interpreted in sound and image, and, on the other, on notions of representation or associations between words and images or sounds. The first programme, titled 'Location Location', opened with a sound piece by Walter Ruttmann, recorded in Berlin and considered the first piece of musique concrète, Weekend (1930). The programme followed with Kurt Kren's 3/60 Baume im Herbst (1960), Guy Sherwin's Soundtrack (1977) and, among other titles, the magnificent Observando el Cielo (2007) by Jeanne Liotta, a film made from 7 years of celestial field recordings at various locations around the world. The programme 'Word Associations' included works by Volker Schreiner, Manuel Saiz, Józef Robakowski, Robert Nelson, Guy Sherwin, Peter Rose and John Smith.
All programmes and events in KYTN were warmly presented, and among the audience there were such notable figures as Michael Snow (who was showing works the following week at BFI), Peggy Gale, Malcolm Le Grice and Mark Webber. Coincidentally, Tate Modern held a series of expanded cinema works parallel to the KYTN's events at BFI. These works were conducted by pioneering British filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, and featured the debut of The Room, an on-going series of film and music collaborations with artists Luke Fowler, Keith Rowe and Peter Todd informed by Mark Rothko's iconic paintings.
-Esperanza Collado