Philip Jeck

Artist Bio

Project

Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck studied visual arts at Dartington College of Arts in the 1970's and has been creating sound with record-players since the early 80's. He has worked with many dance and theatre companies and played with muscians/composers such as Jah Wobble, Steve Lacy, Gavin Bryars, Jaki Liebezeit, David Sylvian, Sidsel Endresen and Bernhard Lang. He has released 11 solo albums, the most recent "Cardinal", a double vinyl release on the Touch label. "Suite", another vinyl only release, won a Distinction at The Prix Ars Electronica, His CD "Sand" (2008) was 2nd in The Wire's top 50 of the year. His largest work made with Lol Sargent, "Vinyl Requiem" was for 180 record-players, 9 slide-projectors and 2 16mm movie-projectors. It received a Time Out Performance Award.

Kuroshio

Kuroshio is the collaboration between musician Philip Jeck and filmmakers Karl Lemieux and Michaela Grill. Together they create atmospherically dense worlds for the perceiver to get lost in. Using analogue and digital means in producing their work, they build layered currents of images and sounds.

Karl Lemieux

Artist Bio

Project

Karl Lemieux

Karl Lemieux’s (CA) films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues and film festivals. He is more commonly known as the ninth member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Montreal music collective for which he does live 16mm film projections. His collaborations include works with sound artists such as BJ Nilsen, Philip Jeck, Francisco Lopez, Hyena Hive, Roger Tellier-Craig and Alexandre St-Onges. Together with Daïchi Saïto he founded Double Négatif, a Montreal-based collective, dedicated to the production and dissemination of experimental films.

Kuroshio

Kuroshio is the collaboration between musician Philip Jeck and filmmakers Karl Lemieux and Michaela Grill. Together they create atmospherically dense worlds for the perceiver to get lost in. Using analogue and digital means in producing their work, they build layered currents of images and sounds.

People Like Us

Artist Bio

Project

People Like Us

Under the name “People Like Us,” artist Vicki Bennett has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, concert appearances, gallery exhibits and online streaming and distribution for 25 years. She sees collage and appropriation as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant.

GONE, GONE BEYOND

"Hey, hey, have you ever tried... reaching out to the other side?"

"Gone, Gone Beyond" is a 40-minute immersive a/v spatial cinema work by People Like Us, which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what's behind.

Makino Takashi

Artist Bio

Project

Makino Takashi

Among Japan’s most prolific, active and adventurous filmmakers, Makino Takashi is known for hallucinatory, non-linear films that harness techniques from the twin media of film and video, treating both image and sound with equal importance. “Makino Takashi’s immersive live media experiences are a transcendence into ‘physical unconsciousness.’ Hallucinatory and experiential, Takashi creates abstract cinematic worlds immersing the viewer like a grain of emulsion free falling in the corporeality of image forming materials” (Unconscious Archives, London). Often described as being at the forefront of Japanese experimental filmmaking, Takashi himself generally shies from the term “experimental.” Rather, his influences include the multiple exposure techniques of 1920s French Surrealist films and a near-death experience at the age of five during which he envisioned “a place filled with lights more brilliant than any image I had ever seen.” Takashi’s work evolves as he attempts to find the ideal film, “an unshaped, organic, lump-like film that links with the consciousness and mental state of the viewers…and never ceases to change.”

Makino Takashi says:

"The history of cinema has been considered a separate entity to that of other art forms, primarily due to its connections with commerce. My approach to film counters this for I consider film to have a place amongst the other arts. Nevertheless, film does have qualities unique to itself, particularly in regard to its treatment of time and its relationship with an audience. The time a gallery visitor spends looking at a painting or sculpture is up to them; a cinema audience, on the other hand, is bound by the film’s own duration. While the audience experiences the film’s visual and sonic display, nonetheless, they are free to dwell into their own imagination. What fascinates me most about film expression is the potential for what is presented on the screen to collide with each individual viewer’s emotional landscape, and the new ‘image’ created inside the viewer’s mind resulting from this collision.

Like news reports of wartime Japan, films with stories or a precise structure throw images at an audience with their meanings already intact. Rather than making films with my own imposed structure, my method is to abandon structure altogether or, in other words, layer images that once embodied meaning on top of one another until they become unintelligible. I aim for the resulting composite ‘image’ to be like a nameless animate being with a limitless capacity for meanings, so that my films become triggers for an audience to venture into their own imagination.

In commercial films, the techniques of superimposition and multiple exposure are tired signifiers to indicate a transition between scenes or a departure into a dream state. However, I see new potentials in these techniques. . I believe people do not come up with things out of the blue but, instead, combine different things in their own ways to arrive at something new – collages and multiple exposure as techniques, for me, artistically deal with this very notion. In the layering of existing matter, my filmmaking method is to take images into territory even I cannot foresee and allow for them to flourish in their newfound environment.

My approach to sound similarly rejects synchronisation in favour of inserting audio and music seemingly unrelated to the images. My collaborations with musicians from overseas have been, in one sense, a way to stage such unforeseeable encounters."

The experience of watching Takashi Makino’s work is perhaps best expressed by the title of one of his films: "still in cosmos". On the one hand, the filmmaker attempts to create a pure frenzy through the use of multiple exposure and superimposition, but there always remains a notion that abstract chaos exists within some sort of greater order. This paradoxical tension has persisted in all aspects of his filmmaking. At times his films confront you with the visual equivalent of a shriek; in other moments, they feel completely tranquil.

Makino’s cinema is steeped in the avant-garde traditions of abstract animation and artisanal practice represented by the likes of Jordan Belson and Stan Brakhage, but the techniques that he employs involving digital transfers, increased frame rates, and multiple layering also push digital technology forward to the edge of its current abilities. While his films may appear transcendent and otherworldly, they are mostly composed of images or renders from this world, These moments illuminate with blinding intensity but are always full of shadows. Such tensions are the foundation of his practice.

Although Makino’s aesthetic continues to eschew story, character, and dialogue, his recent films have marked several turning points that have taken his artistic practice in a new direction. In 2012, Makino shoots with a digital camera and employs the Pulfrich 3-D effect to portray images of ripples spreading on a river surface; Phantom Nebula (2014) is his first foray into found-footage filmmaking where human shadows emerge from the dust and scratches accumulated on the filmstrip; and with Space Noise (2013-14), in addition to performing haunting ambient noise himself, he has turned it into an amorphous multi-projection work that changes with every presentation.

Memento Stella

World Premiere at Recombinant Festival 2017

  

On Generation and Corruption

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilization. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.



Cinéma Concret

Music, Machinefabriek

After the research of history of Concrete Music which started by Pierre Schaeffer in 1940's I found the process of making Concrete Music is completely same with my style of filmmaking. The process of "concrete music" is not making concrete music from abstract sounds. but making abstract music from concrete sounds (already existing sounds). I can say this film "cinéma concret" is one of the answer from 21 century's filmmaker for Pierre Schaeffer and Concrete Music, and also one of the ironical interpretation for the history of the abstract cinema.



2012



still in cosmos

music by Jim O'Rourke, Chris Corsano, Darin Gray



Grouper

Artist Bio

Project

Grouper

Liz Harris lives and works on the Oregon Coast. She has been recording, performing, and releasing music under the name Grouper since 2005 on various imprints including Kranky and her own YELLOWELECTRIC. Her work is characterized by a fascination with paradox, literal and impressionistic experience of environment and human behavior. Her compositions have been commissioned and shown across Europe and the United States, with participation in residencies and projects supported by organizations including PICA (US), Ucross (US), Berkeley Art Museum (US), Ballroom Marfa (US), Room40 (AUS), Galeria ZDB (Portugal), and Leeds Opera North (UK).

HYPNOSIS DISPLAY

Paul Clipson: Visuals, Grouper: Sound.

For Cinechamber, Liz Harris and Paul Clipson premiere a 360"experiential incarnation of HYPNOSIS DISPLAY, their acclaimed sound/film performance collaboration. This screening short is 7.5 minutes long that features a fresh studio soundtrack arrangement by Grouper.

Liz and Paul have been working together for over 5 years on various films and live performances, including the 75 minute 16mm work HYPNOSIS DISPLAY commissioned by Leeds Opera North, which has been presented in the US, CAN, EU, UK, and AUS.

Craig Baldwin

Artist Bio

Projects

Craig Baldwin

Craig Baldwin is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that targets subjects from intellectual property rights to rampant consumerism. He personally considers his work to be “underground” rather than “experimental" or 'avant-garde’. Whereas the avant -garde is primarily  concerned with formal  exercise  and “experimental” implies some experiment (i.e. that something new is being tried for the purpose of determining whether or not it can expand the limits of Cinematic language)”underground” would encompass not only formal plasticity but a political dimension; that of an oppositional subculture.

As such Craig Badwin’s films have formal concerns as well as some kind of political commentary,  usually concerning the exploitation of countries and people under imperialism, capitalist or otherwise. Even when he is inventing the oppression it is either a metaphor for a real -world situation or it is combined with verifiable history . The science fiction and the fact are intertwined.

Baldwin’s work is most easy categorized by his use of recontextualized film elements primarily drawn from his vast library of “ephemeral films “ - educational and industrial films chiefly made in between 1945 and 1975 . These along with a healthy dose of science fiction and period dramas , comprise the pool from which Baldwin draws.

Nth Dimension (2017)

multiple formats, 25-30 mins

16 mm maker / curator Craig Baldwin from OTHER CINEMA joins the 2017 Recombinant Fest with an Idiosyncratic, mostly 3D live opening set of 16mm expanded cinema, hand-scratching his way through a double-projector program entitled Nth Dimension.

The feature attraction conjures up 3-D views with the help of ChromaDepth glasses, lab lasers, Kodak lenses and a free fall through holographic space! Then Baldwin “re-tracks” 'Milk of Amnesia' and 'Dimensions of Change' with audio oddities from the OTHER CINEMA archive based repertoire which visits the dark side of mid century TV commercials while "Hot Pickled Capers" hybridizes Italian B movies with Canadian ‘Isotopes’ for some sexy fission - I mean frission! This opening medley also boasts some bad ass Rotostroboscope action, and stereoscopic cat porn.

Alaric Burns

Alaric Burns - RML Associate and Technical Assistant

Alaric is a composer, audio engineer, and project manager.

Participating in Recombinant Media Labs enterprises for decades, Alaric was a member of Rhythm and Noise, contributed to Asphodel Records, and managed the RML production and performance facility the Compound.

Alaric performs live sound engineering for RML and Gray Area Foundation For The Arts.

His primary creative project is Insect Funeral, otherworldly ambient noir.

Lillevan

Artist Bio

LILLEVAN

Lillevan

Lillevan is an animation, video and media artist.

Parallel to his work in Rechenzentrum, he has performed and collaborated with many artists from a wide array of genres, from opera to installation, from minimal electronic experimentalism to dance and classical music.Lillevan has performed and exhibited all over the globe, and has performed at all the major media festivals. 

Lillevan recontextualizes, combines and politicizes existing film images and fragments. The aesthetics of the image are not to be found in its beauty, density and completeness, but in its transparencies and potentials. The images are a communicative medium interacting with the music. The selection of the images can either support the sound, or work against it, the aim being to achieve a dialogue. Interference and broken imagery is a central dramaturgical element in the creation and performance.

www.lillevan.com

Paul Clipson

Artist Bio

Project

PAUL CLIPSON

Paul Clipson

Paul Clipson makes films in Super8 and 16mm. Many of his films are the result of collaborations with sound artists such as Grouper, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Joshua Churchill, all of whose methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, have greatly influenced his work. His films have screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française.

HYPNOSIS DISPLAY

Paul Clipson: Visuals, Grouper: Sound.

For Cinechamber, Liz Harris and Paul Clipson premiere a 360"experiential incarnation of HYPNOSIS DISPLAY, their acclaimed sound/film performance collaboration. This screening short is 7.5 minutes long that features a fresh studio soundtrack arrangement by Grouper.

Liz and Paul have been working together for over 5 years on various films and live performances, including the 75 minute 16mm work HYPNOSIS DISPLAY commissioned by Leeds Opera North, which has been presented in the US, CAN, EU, UK, and AUS.

Egbert Mittelstadt

Artist Bio

Projects

Egbert Mittelstadt

ELSEWHERE anywhere +

Egbert Mittelstadt

Egbert Mittelstadt's videos, photographs, and installations investigate the principle of time as mangled by both subtle and extreme digital distortions. His image processing propels and warps movement through a series of slowly sliding, continuous beacons of elusive patterns and shifting structures . Acclaimed for his "Slit-Scan" meditations, he stretches the constants of space: by pulling motion out of shape while still remaining recognisable and time crawls forward in almost a pendulous, shimmering displacement.

Elsewhere, Anywhere / People are Friends

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

Opening with the weightless dreamful drift of ”Elsewhere Anywhere", Egbert Mittelstadt reveals a Tokyo subway interior where the passengers are captured in a catatonic still life as their frozen images float quietly around a discerning CineChamber Station. Trapped on a haunted metro train to nowhere are the animated apparitions that emerge out of these photographic figures which for brief moments re-imagine the former preoccupation and lost voices of these restless commuter "ghosts".  The spectral twilight audio commentary from Biosphere's Geir Jenssen suggest that these "People are Friends" - activated spirit’s of a human presence long since suspended.

RML bio 26

Path Leading to The High Grass

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

The mercurial widescreen sonic cinematic syntax of Biosphere & Egbert Mittelstädt has graced the CineChamber screens for many seasons now after their live milestone residencies in 2007. Their timeless program that remains is a signature memory capsule that introduces RML's surround canvas in the most spatially sublime sector of the Recombinant archives.

Shika export 2 +

Shika

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

The mercurial widescreen sonic cinematic syntax of Biosphere & Egbert Mittelstädt has graced the CineChamber screens for many seasons now after their live milestone residencies in 2007. Their timeless program that remains is a signature memory capsule that introduces RML's surround canvas in the most spatially sublime sector of the Recombinant archives.

PATH LEADING BiosphereV2

Urban Horizon

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals and Sound

A turbulent ride through different metropolitan environments like Moscow, Tokyo, Cologne, and San Francisco. The deconstruction of the footage is followed by a new spatial and temporal arrangment for the CineChamber.