UNCONSCIOUS ARCHIVES #3 | London | Tuesday 15th November 2011

If you're in London... oko recommends this!

A rare chance to catch Australian/UK experimental film, noise and performance.

Rare flickering audiovisual treats from afar and corporeal noise shifters

UNCONSCIOUS ARCHIVES #3

DIRK DE BRUYN (AU), " "[sic]™ TIM GOLDIE (UK), MANDELBROT (UK), RICHARD TUOHY (AU) TOMORROW - Tuesday 15th November Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London, E2 9EG 8pm-10.30pm, £4 donation, b.y.o Unconscious Archives transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar. Dirk de Bruyn | Australia Retina reflux - expanded cinema + concrete noise performances. Richard Tuohy | Australia | Nano Lab Films which explode the chemical, physical and metabolic processes that define the film laboratory. Mandelbrot | London "10 fingers, 6 strings and a plethora of pedals creating a massive pulsing noise that resonates between harmony and discord." " "[sic]™ Tim Goldie | London | Abject Bloc Drummer and scathing noise artist, unafraid of fairly perilous behaviour.

See you there!
Unconscious Archives - Sally & James

UA is a collaboration between OtherFilm, no.w.here, and Netaudio London. Supported by the Apiary.

Images: Dirk de Bruyn / Richard Tuohy

New look blog!

We thought it was time for a change, and are currently in the process of updating and adding new info and pictures to the blog.  We've added to our About section, including a potted history of DIY film fun with EXP24.

The Workshops section has been updated, and we have a few new features including an automatic mailing list signup (to the right of the page) and a Search function to help you find what you're looking for!

An OKO Filmmakers page, with stills and descriptions of our films/performances will be coming soon... plus a (hopefully) easy to navigate contents list for different happenings and events.

We'll also be posting more about our own ideas/films/performances and experimental film events and screenings  in Leeds and beyond...

The Illuminated Room: FILMS BY ROBERT FENZ & BRUCE BAILLIE [Thursday 10/11/11]

The Illuminated Room is curated by Will Rose [Olsen, Evolution, Nowhere], and is a programme of avant-garde film/video screenings at Leeds College of Art and Design.  Screenings start at 5pm and are free.

This week he's showing films by two of Mark's favourite experimental documentary filmmakers - Bruce Baillie and Robert Fenz...

The Illuminated Room
FILMS BY ROBERT FENZ & BRUCE BAILLIE

Leeds College of Art, Vernon Street Lecture Theatre, LS2 8PH
Thursday 10 November 2011, at 5pm
FREE and open to all

The Illuminated Room is a series of free screenings that survey the field of artists’ film and video. Contemporary moving image work is screened alongside films and videos from the histories of experimental/avant-garde film, video art and underground cinema.
. . .

Robert Fenz's 16mm films are at once lyrical, ethnographic and acutely personal. His starting point is often a person or place, and from there he works intuitively to ‘reflect a deeper understanding of the human condition.’ To make CORRESPONDENCE he travelled to the locations of three influential films made by the pioneering ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner: West Papua, Ethiopia and Benares (India). "CORRESPONDENCE is not a straightforward commentary on Gardners’s films; it is an elegy for a kind of image-making that is in the process of disappearing." (Fenz)

Correspondence [Robert Fenz, 2011] Image credit: www.markwebber.org.uk

Bruce Baillie was a key figure in the independent filmmaking scene of the '60s and '70s, and his film MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX, is one of the canonical works to emerge from that period. The film is both a requiem conceived on the occasion of the murder of President Kennedy, and a tribute to the Lakota Sioux, the native people of Dakota, USA. "The film a celebration of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!" (Baille)

Mass for the Dakota Sioux [Bruce Baillie, 1964] Image credit: blipmagazine.net

 . .

Films:
CORRESPONDENCE, Robert Fenz, USA/Germany, 2011, 30min, 16mm
MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX, Bruce Baillie, USA, 1964, 20min, 16mm
. . .

Further 2011/12 screening dates for The Illuminated Room:
10 November, 17 November, 1 December, 19 January, 23 February, 15 March, 26 April, 17 May, 7 June

Drawing on Film at National Media Museum (6 & 7 October)

We had a great two days at the National Media Museum, Bradford.  As part of the Co-operative Film Festival (now celebrating it's 45th anniversary), The Drawing on Film workshop ran from 11-2.30pm each day on the 1st floor of the museum.  The workshop attracted over 200 people across the two days, who collaborated on creating in total around 700ft of hand-drawn film.

Although we were upstaged slightly (!) by the Weasley twins of Harry Potter fame on day one, school groups from Manchester,  York and Bradford  as well as families and young people who were visiting the museum got stuck in; producing some really nice frame-by-frame and abstract animation directly onto the surface of the film.

The two days concluded with a screening of both films in the Cubby Broccoli Theatre.  The films will be made available for online viewing, as yet to be arranged, and will also be added to the ever-expanding Unravel project, to become part of the longest hand-painted film in Britain.

Many thanks to Rachel Preston and all the staff at NMM for your help and support.

GHOSTS: A tribute to Albert Ayler... this Friday 7th October 2011

PAUL HESSION + DEREK HORTON + LEON THOMAS JOHNSON + EOIN SHEA
7 October 2011 – from 7pm - at Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds.

GHOSTS, a tribute to Albert Ayler

[The following write up is from http://www.ayler.co.uk...]

Ghosts is a collaborative work by the artists Derek Horton and Eoin Shea, and the musicians Paul Hession (percussion) and Leon Thomas Johnson (tenor saxophone). Hession and Johnson improvise to two twin-screen film projections by Horton and Shea. The project is a tribute to the legendary musician Albert Ayler, 41 years after his death in New York at the age of 34. After falling from the Staten Island ferry in mysterious circumstances, Ayler’s body was found on 25 November 1970.

Ghosts has its origins in an earlier collaboration between Derek Horton and Leon Johnson several years ago: an animated sequence of Horton’s photographs of three significant locations in New York - Sonny Rollins’ practice spot on the Williamsburg Bridge, 48 East 3rd where Sun Ra and his Arkestra lived, and Congress Street Pier, where Albert Ayler’s body was washed up after he drowned in the East River. This was sound-tracked with a recording of a Johnson saxophone improvisation multi-tracked in post-production by Horton. 

This work can still be seen at http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/002/articles/dhortonljohnson/index.php.

For the current project, Eoin Shea has re-worked the original footage in one film, and also made an entirely new film, in collaboration with Horton and in response to recordings of Albert Ayler’s music. This utilises video footage shot for the project in the vicinity of Congress Street Pier by New York-based artist Les Joynes, together with especially commissioned typography by Andrew Wilson Lambeth. The resulting twin-screen black-and-white projection is focused on textural and rhythmic image qualities and will provide the starting-point as well as the backdrop for Hession and Johnson’s improvisation.

Ghosts is the second collaborative production between Eoin Shea and Derek Horton. The first, The Man Who Saved The World, took place in the abandoned shell of a former shopping space in Leeds city centre on 23 Sept 2010. Within 22,000 square feet of reclaimed space, Home of the Brave sound-tracked Shea’s ten screen circular cinema of re-cut science fiction imagery with free jazz inflected renditions of classic western film tunes. Documentation can be seen at http://www.themanwhosavedtheworld.co.uk/ and http://vimeo.com/19129342

The first performance of Ghosts will take place in the landmark 18th century Holy Trinity Church in Leeds city centre on Friday 7th October from 7pm. It is a self-funded project and attendance is free. Subsequent touring dates are planned and should be announced shortly.

Paul Hession, born in Leeds, is one of the major free-jazz drummers in the world. He took up the drums in his teens and has played in many European & Scandinavian countries as well as Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, USA and Canada, performing with many world-renowned improvising musicians including Peter Brotzmann, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, Sunny Murray, Marshall Allen, Frode Gjerstad, Peter Kowald, Joe McPhee and Borah Bergman. Other collaborators include Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher), Otomo Yoshihide, Alan Wilkinson, Simon Fell, Mick Beck & Hans-Peter Hiby and Paul Woolford.

Leon Thomas Johnson is a member of The Ariya Astrobeat Arkestra, a Leeds-based afro-beat band influenced by Fela Kuti and others. In 2009 the band were signed to independent record label First Word Records and released their self-titled debut album in 2010. As an improviser Leon has worked with Paul Dunmall and others, and regularly with Paul Hession in their duo Gunboat Diplomacy.

Derek Horton is an artist, writer and teacher. After working in community arts, adventure playgrounds and alternative education in the 1970’s, he spent many years as a university-based art school academic. He now works independently on art projects, writing and publishiing, including the online magazine Soanyway.

Eoin Shea is an artist working with film, video, painting, collage and installation, often collaborating with musicians to produce large-scale live events. These include work with Vibracathedral Orchestra co-founder Michael Flower, Richard Ormrod's Home of the Brave, The Telescopes, and Ashtray Navigations, making film and video for live improvised sound-tracking and working with the textural and sensorial impact of film in a live performance environment.

Albert Ayler - playing with a wild, atonal sound in his hometown of Cleveland in the 1950s, an era in which a good deal of jazz was getting quieter and smoother, the other-worldly Ayler focussed obsessively on a contemporary vision of the long-gone ragged polyphonies, street-marches, gospel songs and spirituals of the earliest African-American music. He once said of his music: “If people don't like it now, they will.” He didn’t live to see that happen, but history was on his side. The Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek was a devoted Ayler disciple in the late-1960s, as was Coltrane acolyte and subsequent acid-jazz star, Pharoah Sanders. The unique British improv original Evan Parker still has Ayler inflections, and even Sonny Rollins and the late Michael Brecker, despite greater acceptance in a more conventional contemporary jazz world, appreciated the intensity of Ayler's extraordinary sound.