Re: looping images

[improv@peak.org (Dave Trenkel)]

At 4:23 AM 8/27/97, T.W. Hartnett wrote:
>>I'm really interested in the idea of performance video. It seems 
>possible,
>>but I never see anyone really doing it. I saw a band a few years ago 
>with a
>>video artist as a band member. The music was a fascinating sort of 
>punkish
>>art/prog rock with this amazing video background. All performed right 
>along
>>with the music. It was fascinating. Naturally it was too good to be true,
>>so they broke up. I really thought I'd see a lot more of that sort of mix
>>since, but I've never seen anything like it again. video alongside the
>>music, sure, but never created as an actual part of the performance.
>>Anybody doing that?
>
>There's a guy in town (Austin, noted home of retarded blues guitarists)
>who has put together a neat setup using super-8 projectors and slide
>machines.  Usually there will be two slide projectors and three film
>projectors, set up on a platform in the middle of the club.  He's got a
>large library of film loops that he's scavanged from garage sales over
>the years that he'll feed in and superimpose as the mood strikes him,
>while more experimental bands play.  The coolest effect I saw was when Ed
>Hall (a local art-punk trio) came out on stage, wearing only shorts,
>painted in day-glo body paint.  There were black lights next to their
>monitors, so they looked really unearthly.  Luke (the film guy) had found
>some footage of an oilwell fire, and had projected this three times, in
>slow motion, aimed so that each of the band members appeared to be on
>fire.  Breathtaking, and on the cheap.
>
There's a guy in Olympia, Washington that does this also. We played a show
there about a year and a half ago, and this guy was doing projection stuff
with one of the other bands on the bill, and asked us if we minded if he
did it for us as well. We said yeah, and fortunately we had brought a video
camera, because what he did was extremely cool. He had 6 projectors shining
on screens set up in an arc behind us. The films were educational films he
bought at a school auction, 50's to 70's vintage. He'd run them forward and
backwards, sometimes upside down. One bit he used a lot was a home-ec film
about preparing meat, he'd play this loop of a raw meat getting chopped up
over and over. Great stuff, we hope to play with him again sometime.

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Dave Trenkel : improv@peak.org  : www.peak.org/~improv/

"...there will come a day when you won't have to use
gasoline. You'd simply take a cassette and put it in
your car, let it run. You'd have to have the proper
type of music. Like you take two sticks, put 'em
together, make fire. You take some notes and rub 'em
together - dum, dum, dum, dum - fire, cosmic fire."
                                            -Sun Ra
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