Friday, May 27, 2011

donna k swiss

Being that it is only my second time traveling overseas I am already anxious about my trip to Switzerland for the Bildrausch Filmfest Basel! According to their website Gravity will be screening May 29th at 6pm and a special live shorts show will be presented on May 30th in conjunction with the festival!

Ok, now to make my foley kit the least conspicuous as possible...hmmm.....also, can anyone recommend a book or magazine articles for the plane ride? I am no good at sleeping on planes and have used up all the media I packed!

also, i have no idea how to post on a phone....did it work? can anyone read this? will update with pictures soon! is this post entering a void? hello?!

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

A Young Melville, Knee Deep, Cultivating Occasional, Brief, Clarity

After much miniature modeling of what the remainder of Brent's animation machine is going to look like we leave Troy NY and the loving machinery of EMPAC soon to head to Switzerland via NYC! Before going though, here is a bit about the beautiful sounds of experimental media I encountered while here....and something about ice cream! And whales!

The piece currently on display at EMPAC is a two part sound installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. The first part is made of two pianos that are wired to the computer network of the building, simultaneously playing scores that are created through the keystrokes of those typing within the space. The verdict is still out on whether you can tell what someone is typing based on the sounds but it is still an eerie thing to see as the keys jolt into music making action seemingly unprovoked in their own message making! The second part consists of three small pools of water filled with ceramic bowls and glasses. The water is slightly agitated making the bowls circle around the pool, hitting eachother as they pass. The sounds they make are intensely beautiful, like some kind of distant prayer bells calming you just by being in their presence. When my good friend Emily was visiting she seemed in complete awe upon seeing the piece, a soothing excitement in its simplicity, a sonic wave of fleeting song- awesome!


We ended our second to last night here in Troy with a trip to Snowman Ice Cream, yeah, it was beautiful in all it's throwback neon glory (above!)! As we ambled through the streets of Troy we ended up at the Hudson River where a shanty sign said "Herman Melville Park." My historical marker instincts kicked in turning around only to find Herman Melville's house! Where he wrote his first two novels! Like a magnet we were somehow drawn to this exact spot! All this is especially fitting being that Brent has a bit of a Melville obssession which you might have noticed in more than a few lines in Gravity....tomorrow is, sadly, our last day here and then we embark on our next adventure- full steam ahead!

Monday, May 23, 2011

Tra La La

Here is a preview of what Brent is working on up here in Troy! 



Before a live show of Gravity we performed here Brent was backstage ranting about building a live action, glass animating machine.  Taking the traditional method of staggering panes of glass to paint animated scenes on to create a feeling of depth and ease of frame change (this link has a really amazing tutorial on the history of glass animation/"under camera animating"), he was trying to envision a way see through screens could reveal images in real time and, much to our surprise, a phone call came a month or so later saying "Let's do it!"

The amazing brains of EMPAC have helped make Brent's insanity come to life and it is pretty amazing! The project is still in "beta testing" and the form is slowly taking shape but, as you can see here, the collaboration is both crazy and awesome! Will update more on the project as cels get painted and soundtracks recorded! Woohooo!

Sunday, May 22, 2011

That Swimming and Escaping, That Is The Rapture


Did I never talk about the music in the recorded version of Gravity?! What?! No?! As you might know, the film is really meant to be performed live with a band and an improvised musical score along with my live sound effects foley. Brent loves the immediacy, potential for disaster and the ever changing experience that can never be duplicated- all qualities inherent in live performance. But, when we first made the film, we knew how limiting live only screenings were going to be so we went about constructing a soundtrack. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what music sounded right. Me, Brent and Mike would, together and separately, try to listen to the religious hymns of Leonard and to other sacred music to try to get a feel for what Leonard's story sounded like but we rarely could get across the intensity of the actual faithful singers, which led to the addition of The Sacred Harp.



Developed as folk music that relied on shapes (referred to as shape notes) that symbolized a range of pitches as opposed to a more complex system of musical notation, it is probably one of the oldest forms of American music. I find it hard to explain but...I think the way it works is that a certain shape is placed on a single keyed clef, the relation to the spacing of the notes around it acts as a reference for what area of notes are to be sung resulting in the possibility for a changing interpretation of the music, a not so precise musicality. I still do not understand how the words then come in...the words sound like cut up syllables that are sometimes hard to distinguish but always full of syncopation and love. Brent uses this type of music as the basis for the Gravity soundtrack, splicing, looping and adding to certain songs to create the underlying feel of the film, a feel that he remembers his southern born family members singing as a small boy, adding to this long standing legacy.



There is definitley something primitive in these rythmic reverberations of early America, even the weird hand movements that singers keep the beat with makes me think of some kind of tribal artifact of a new land. I guess that's why I find it wonderful that a new Diplo produced M.I.A. song (an artist who always strives to cut her collage style music into something revolutionary) uses a sample of The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, acting as a new form of this American tradition. Here is the MIA song, the song the sample is from  (titled Last Words of Copernicus- what a great title!?!) and, above, a trailer for a documentary called Awake, My Soul about Sacred Heart singing and a sort of survey video of a meeting in the mid-west of a group of singers-all artifacts insuring, along with Gravity, that this rare American folk ritual will live on in sight and sound! Now, who is ready to go on a road trip to the south with me to learn how to sing like this?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The South is Only a Home

One of the strangest things about traveling to cities and sharing art with them is that it is a reciprocal experience. In every place we build Gravity we meet artists, musicians, filmmakers, art collectors etc. who are all working, as Brent says in the film, to "leave something wonderful behind." Going to personal art collections is a really amazing perk of traveling with this piece, seeing the sensibility of a person- not an art historian or curator or gallerist- who feels genuinely moved by the things they surround themselves with. I normally don't write about this because the collections are usually in people's homes, in their living spaces that are private, and I don't want to intrude but this past time in Louisville I found a very permeable collection out in the Kentucky fields that I felt the need to share (especially since a lot of the work is online to share already)!

 The collection of Al and Mary Shands was an experience: a contemplative, abstract environment urging you through the space with such highlights as a peaceful Anish Kapoor sculpture, entire rooms taken over by Sol LeWitt, a sound piece by Stephen Vitiello greeting you at the entrance (made by placing a guitar in an adjoining field and mixing the wind playing the instrument into a beautiful soundscape),  a metal Kiki Smith arm with veins extending into flowers, a wooden chainsaw sculpture soaking in light, radiating the smell of cedar and looking like an otherworldly artifact (I don't know the artists name- but you can see it in the video link below!).

Given his love of meditative work it makes sense that Mr. Shands was a former minister, his collection reflects the spirit of things we cannot grasp, of deep rooted bonds between the known and unknowns of culture. These pictures are of a Maya Lin commissioned work (Brent is seen descending a viewing ladder up top!), an earth piece etched into the landscape like a drawing, trying to capture a synthetic modern hand and it's balance with nature. I can only hope Mr. Shands goes to see our exhibit again under much less excitable circumstances as the opening and can feel the same sense that I think  the Gravity installation and his collection share- the beauty and wonder in a line, the complexity of faith, the truth in art.  This video and this video show more of the collection, take a look if you get a chance! I still can't believe the enormous scope of work in Louisville and I still can't believe that Gravity is allowed to be a part of it...actually a permanent part of it since a beautiful, hand carved chair from the film set  is going to reside in a collector's old Kentucky home! 

Monday, May 16, 2011

Lovely Louisville

The first time I went to 21c I was greeted by smokestacks blowing perfect smokey rings into the air, a large projection of a couple comfortably sleeping on a wooden lobby floor, a team of people hanging photographs by one of my favorite photographers (Loretta Lux) and a plate of fresh beet salad that was mouth watering perfection! Almost every time we've been to Louisville we've been lucky enough to stay in this magical land of 21c! Part museum, part hotel, part bar/fancy restaurant 21c has been around Louisville for a few years now and is the perfect synasthetic experience. The fact that it is a hotel lessens the pretention of it being a museum and I have sat in the lobby often watching scores of locals and tourists alike stream through the galleries, unafraid of speaking too loudly and unhurried by the stuffiness of most museum atmospheres. I really love the openess that this space has while still managing to remain an extremely decadent hotel/dining/art experience, it is unlike any place I have ever been and I really wish this kind of model of accessible art was more popular in other places!

This last time we were there an exhibit called "Cuba Now" was on display that featured the work of Cuban artists and artists dealing with Cuban issues- antique car art symbolizing the stasis of Cubas imports, a boat sculpture made of refridgerated pipe that is slowly gathering frost over time as ties with the country are as well, tiny wooden houses made from the remnants of torn shanty homes, the seasons portrayed by trees of fabric by Guerra de la paz (a duo of Cuban born American artists I have been following for years and whose sculptural use of recyled cloth and issues of political unrest and the future of industry/nature/history are both strong and poetic in a way I have never seen so intense in the craft culture of contemporary art) are just a few of the pieces that stuck out to me in this wide ranging exhibit.

We've been too busy to really revel in the scope of comfort at 21c but, after staying there through these installs, I must say I have become a conessuier of their perfect grits, luxurious soaps (which I love seeing in other artists houses as a sign of the 21c cult!) and pillow chocolates, yes, you heard me, chocolates on your pillow!  The only thing I regret not doing while here was have a julep!? Can you believe that!? I was in the best place to get a julep for days and did not have one?! Well obviously we have to go back..! (dreams of lovely lovely Louisville)

Swiss Miss

Switzerland!! Yay! Ok, for whatever reason I am finding it impossible to navigate Swiss websites? What gives? Here is what I can piece together about our Gravity/Nervousfilms trip there: 1. Brent, me, Jim White and Howe Gelb are playing a live shorts show at the Kunsthalle Basel  (Art Museum?) in conjunction with 2. Stadtkino Basel who will be screening Gravity (alongside a whole lot of movies I've seen recently and loved) and then Brent, Howe and Jim are doing some sort of show in Zurich at..is it a club? I don't know. I thought all my years of reading about Swiss design in English would somehow help me in thes situation but....wait, I need to know this, it is very important: how do you say chocolate in Swiss? Here is a picture of our blooming Pennsylvanian farm land (similar to the Alps?) which we probably won't see again until June being that our Swiss (Family Robinson?) adventures begin at the end of the month!

Fish and Film


It makes total sense that Brent Green would travel all the way to Portugal and only return with sand in his luggage and a few pictures of faulty streetlamp wiring (pictured)! Regardless, his time at Indie Lisboa seemed incredible! After perusing the catalog of films and listening to his tales of hotels with film themed rooms and the company of incredible film makers and journalists all with the festival theme being a big giant black bird, I realized I seriously should have gone to Lisbon! Brent was only there for a day or two so he only had time for one screening, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye  (trailer below) which he really loved and which I just read won best feature at this years fest! Congratulations!



He hung out a bit with the director of the film, Marie Losier, even sharing a seat next to her on a plane after a feisty woman tried punching at Marie's chair if it showed even an idea of reclining prompting her to switch seats next to Brent out of fear, and Brent's description of her wit and wonder makes me want to see all of her work! Especially since she specializes in films about other filmakers who have paved the way for today's independent cinema, including such a roster as George & Mike Kuchar, Guy Maddin and Tony Conrad! Can't wait to see her films! The collection of talent and strange programming choices of IndieLisboa all projecting on the beachside town makes me dream of  the sea while watching the finest in independent media...sigh...what a wonderful sounding fest! I know I can't re-create this experience but, fortunately, it seems a lot of the elements that made this fest so great will reconvene at The New Horizons International Film Festival in Poland this summer- a place Brent and, most assuredly I, will be making it to this July! A big hand again for Marie and for the expertly run film festival IndieLisboa! Applause applause!

Louavul, Kentucky

(Blogger has been doing it's own thing recently so please bare with me through formatting weirdness, broken posts/links and whatever other fun is on the virtual horizon! Sorry!) So, we trucked our film set town to Louisville, rebuilt it and then celebrated! That is the easy sounding/less painful version of events of course! The set had been in storage at L.O.T. in downtown Louisville Kentucky for a few months, packed into the slightly creepy basement of a former Y.M.C.A. We re-assembled most of it (space constraints left two poor larger house facades in pieces in the underworld) in about a week prior to Derby mayhem and returned during the towns post-Derby hangover to officially open the doors of Leonard Wood's fictional Kentucky town in an epic event of art openings!


I'd heard L.O.T. could throw a good opening and Art Without Walls seemed like their party planning skills were on point but the Gravity event really was spectacular mostly due to incredible food by Amber & Matt of Red Clover (truffle oil popcorn! homemade brautwurst cart! tasty little southern biscuits- which, I am told, were actually inspired by the set itself!)  and spirits, both of the alcoholic & disposition kind, which made everybody feel at home as they wandered in and out of the surreal film set depicting the story of their fellow neighbor Leonard.

The other artists exhibiting in the space shared the opening with us as well including Brian Harper's ceramic sculptures which are lovely, delicate beauties whose dramatic feel complimented the feel of our own show quite well (also, he is probably the nicest artist I have ever met). Another show on display loosely used David Foster Wallace as a point of entry for some pretty esoteric video & mixed media work and another piece by an artist named Joel Feldman categorized images into eleven subsets that he found patterns of around Ai WeiWei's artist compound in rural China (the images flashed across eleven screens in almost a new vision of documentary or a new journalistic medium that I found realy intrigueing). I also met a ton of other local artists, musicians, and art lovers including the lovely Monica Mahoney whose red limo piece is almost a symbol of Louisville art and can be seen throughout the streets of the town at all hours and Al Shands whose farmland contains a collection of contemporary sculpture and painting that probably rivals most institutions (and that I was lucky enough to take a tour of during our most recent trip! It was incredible! Maybe I will elaborate in a separate post?).


The night receded into the mythical bar Freddie's across the street from L.O.T. and then even further into a beautiful house on the outskirts of town with friendly company and (of course it being the home of bourbon and all) drinks, slowly pushing us into our hotel beds in the wee hours of the morning! I cannot imagine a better experience and more love from a town than what I felt as we opened the doors for eveyone to share in Leonard's local story. I don't know how to thank everyone for their help in bringing Gravity to Louisville and borrowing Gravity, the inspiration for the story, from Louisville! I really hope to spend more time there which we might do in the near future- in the form of a live performance of the film! Now, after an unexpected flight delay which ended in a sleepover in Detroit, we have arrived in the thunderstorms of upstate New York at another beautiful place I am so lucky to be a part of!

Sunday, May 15, 2011

As Someone Who Has Hit A Barn Door With a Car

The only moment of rest I got last weekend (blogger was broken recently so I apologize for the lack in posting/post disappearance) was when I made it out to the far reaches of Queens, across from "Food Dimensions" Supermarket to my pal Kevin's gallery, Famous Accountants. Named after a Warhol quote about how famous artists are like famous accountants, no one knows who they are, Kevin's space (which he runs with the wondrous Ellen who surpassed the awesome niceness I had heard rumor of!) has had some pretty great shows from "Untitled (The Jetway)" that recreated the pathway from airport to jet stretched through the length of the gallery which I can almost feel the eerie, tense rickety-ness of to the  Genesis P. Orridge Tag Sale selling off the wares of the industrial music genius (a movie about the legendary P. Orridge was actually the only movie Brent was able to see at IndieLisboa last week which he loved, "both weird and great"-more later!). I've been to F.A. before but descending into the dark, cool space and being confronted with the current show is a really wonderful feeling, much like entering the stone studio basement of our own rural barn. Which, of course, is fitting given that the show is titled the magic black of an open barn door on a really sunny summer day, when you just cannot see into it and features a series of self portraits by the painter Matthew Miller, born and raised a Mennonite in nearby Lancaster PA. 

The portraits are just spectacular: the perspective is jarring with strong soft lines making flat images that almost seem to levitate away from the stark black backgrounds, all of the artist in different stages of a non-existing self. Matt was saying that he feels painting self portraits is almost like a disconnect. By painting yourself you are abstracting yourself to just a picture, shapes, and that the soulful ideas some project onto them, and that critics like to project onto them, are not necessarily real- a very fitting take from an artist with an intense religious upbringing. After sitting in lawn chairs on the concrete stoop in the perfect summer breeze outside the gallery, I realized that things might be shapes and people might talk about these shapes and criticize these shapes but there is a simple yet deep connection that people can feel to art- a connection that is at the heart of sipping warm coffee in the cool basement of Famous Accountants. I wish them all the luck in keeping their vision alive for years to come! Next up for our own vision....official opening in Kentucky this Friday (poor broken blogger, the opening just happened- update soon).

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Memories Go However You Want Them To Be

At one point in Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then an image of Leonard drawing flickers into the frame and Brent, as the narrator of the film, announces the flood scene. He says, unassumingly, "You add embellishments and those embellishments become the center of the story. There's Leonard drawing the blueprints on cardboard. And this is the flood scene. Memories go however you want them to be." For me, this has always been a giant turning point in the film, a stated point of separation between Leonard's own story and the story that Brent as an artist wants to tell. This statement also greatly considers history as a whole responding to the things we remember, however inaccurate or embellished, as a collective conscious. Every story is serving a purpose, the reality of a moment will never be again (which can even extend to the nature of film as a medium too, existing in moments, literally in Gravity's animated case, that fade into and out of existance as quickly as they are [re]produced).

Since the film has been in a lot of documentary film festivals and the set currently resides in Louisville Kentucky, the actual home of Leonard Wood who was the inspiration for the framework of this story, a lot of talk about the reality of Gravity seems to be humming. So, when I heard about this symposium at NYU called Second Thoughts On the Memory Industry, I knew I had to see some part of it. Dealing with different ideas of memory, whether it be journalists and their concern with the easily forgotten stories of evil or architects who have helped establish memorials to tragic past events, each lecture focused on our ability to remember the forgettable or forget the memorable.


I was only able to make it to one event (pictured directly below) and it was probably the most fitting of all! Ben Katchor, a social critic/comic strip artist/wonder presented a piece called Memorial City. It was a sort of slide show of his drawings with perfect live musical accompaniment by the pop/jazz Mark Mulcahy Trio (Mark Mulcahy, oddly, being the sound behind Pete & Pete a formative tv show from my memorable childhood!) that told the tale of a town where physical memorials were ruling, where even the place someone choked on a pretzel was worth chiseling into stone and erecting a statue. At one point he satirized (loosely quoting) "our loss must take physical form to forget" this really struck a chord with me after having just finished rebuilding Gravity, creating a physical form to sort of remember a person but moreso a time- our current time that is focused on the spiritual, a thing far from the physical.

Gravity is (partly) a story about the confusion of religion and faith in a time when very real wars are being fought over them and, like in themes of Memorial City, a time when we are urged to support form and abstraction (and the economy) at a point of monumental loss. To add to this, I spent my birthday at Gettysburg National Park (pictured) a place where monuments obstruct every landscape as memorials to a time when people were also fighting for ideals too but, unlike some current battles, the ideals of the American Civil War were as humanely concrete as every plaque that stands in remembrance. I guess what I have taken away from all of these recent events is that history is a fluid thing and it is not so much the facts and statues that remain as the way we choose to manifest these facts and statues in our current society. I really hope watching Gravity is a filmic memory that audience members will form into what it is they feel is worth remembering.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Some Days My Brain Does Not Want to Float

Been too busy reconstructing the set in Kentucky to really have time to write about Gravity! Let's see...today we had not one but 2 screenings in Canada, one at Hotdocs and one at Plastic Paper! Hopefully the audiences will be a bit more happy than the other recent Canadian responses...actually we did get a nice write up on Cinemascope from a HotDocs reviewer who also included reviews for Dragonslayer (a secretly screened film about skateboarding counter culture I sadly missed at the True/False Documentary Film Festival) and a review of El Bulli (which I saw at True/False and loved every morsel of)- go True/False! (This just in: apparently True/False  is going to launch an online magazine May 15th? Is this true? Or false? I really hope it is true, I cannot tell you how amazing this fest is! Maybe they can capture some of the magic online for everybody who can't make it out to magical Columbia Missouri!)


Next up for Gravity is IndieLisboa which begins tomorrow. Brent is headed out there (and I mean waaaay out there, over an entire ocean in fact) this weekend to introduce Gravity at the 8th edition of this fest. I don't know much about it but I did read that The Tindersticks will be playing film scores to a montage of Claire Denis films! What?! Had I known this I would have definitely tried to make my way out to Portugal too! As a kid I remember seeing Denis' film Nenette et Boni and suddenly having a whole new understanding of what a film could be- a simplistic yet deeply portrayed capsule of a life with its complications, confusions and even mundanity being beautiful events. Even the opening of the film with a slowly fading in screen over an audible, indistinguishable hissing creature that turns out to be a mechanical coffeepot (a symbol of a changing modern France) grew my perception of sound in film, a thing that I have a feeling effected my own use of sound in film. And I have fond memories of The Tindersticks too, listening to their sweet soundtrack driven songs, driving in the rain after film class in college with good friends...sigh...speaking of rain, we made it back to Pennsylvania very late last night through torrential downpours where we found an entire, huge maple tree uprooted in the yard! That tree was in Gravity! Stately standing in the background of the flood scene! I guess  it couldn't survive the real flood...so sad! Here are a few pictures of the set as it sits now in Kentucky, the original place Leonard's story first came alive.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Rise and Fall

As I've mentioned before, the organization that has brought us down here to Louisville is Art Without Walls, a project under the art direction of Alice Gray Stites. After plans to build a new Museum Plaza on the waterfront in downtown Louisville were put on hold for a bit Alice didn't let that stop her. She literally has taken to the streets and begun transforming them with art she loves. She is a wonderful, innovative curator and I'm not just saying that since she brought Gravity down here, another new show that Art Without Walls just, very literally,  hung here in Louisville is downright breathtaking!

It is by none other than the fabulous E.V. Day whose work is sharp, brilliant and unforgettable in a way I think all artists strive to be! Her work is constantly examining the feminine, the ethereal, the real- at times appearing almost like a live, paused special effect or a surreal artifact of a complex instance- the end result consistently poignant and memorable. I remember reading about a piece she did that was mounted in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Met gave Ms. Day access to their costume archives and commissioned a piece to be made from the stage outfits of legendary operatic performances.

The result was "Divas Ascending," In her trademark way of literally suspending disbelief, Day used mono filment/fishing line and tiny metal clips attached to huge suspended hoops to make the dresses come to life in dramatic poses worthy of any aria. The presence of these pieces is unbelievable and the artistry, care and ingenuity with which they were made is incredible. The show, which flew over New York for a (very) short while, is currently hanging in the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville until October. Everyone who lives even remotely near this town should come see this wonderful show that I can't speak more highly of... o yeah, and our show too! Which is open to the public May 4th with a grand opening May 13th! So happy to be in such grand artistic company in this Kentucky town!