Resonant Objects: Samantha Rebello / Jennifer Nightingale / Simon Payne / Peter Gidal and Alvin Lucier's Opera With Objects performed by Tim Parkinson

8pm, Monday 3rd November, 2014 at the Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road.
 
 
Samantha Rebello
Samantha Rebello’s films have been shown at the New York, London, Edinburgh and Rotterdam film festivals, the Serpentine Gallery and the Centre of Contemporary Culture, Barcelona. The Object Which Thinks Us won the award for Best Film at the Aurora Film Festival (2008). A subsequent film Forms Are Not Self Subsistent Substances won the Grand Prize at Media City, Windsor, Ontario (2011). She is also an improvising musician.
 
The Object Which Thinks Us: Object 1 (2007, 16mm, colour, 7’)
The work begins, not with a concept, but with one or more mental images and sounds, which are then composed and constructed through recording and editing. The relationship between the object (to be filmed) and the camera irretrievably alters the mental image with which the film began, through becoming something unimagined. (SR)
 
 
Jennifer Nightingale
Besides pinhole films, Jennifer Nightingale has also made a series of knitting films, which are shot frame-by-frame, translating regional knitting patterns by way of woven film structures. Her films have been screened at venues including the Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern and in conjunction with the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusion at the Hayward Gallery in 2005. She teaches at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and the RCA.
 
Rectangle Window / Arch Window (2013, 16mm, 5’, silent)
 
West Window / East Window (2013, 16mm, 10’, silent)
Both of these films were made with a pinhole lens covering the aperture of a 16mm film magazine. The rooms in which they were shot, and the windows they depict, refer back to cameras in two respects: the camera as ‘room’ (and the camera obscura); and the camera that the filmmaker has put to one side. Having hand-cranked the film to expose it, the traces of light, dark and fleeting imagery are a direct, abstract translation of the filmmaker’s gestures.
 
Opera With Objects (1997) by Alvin Lucier, performed by Tim Parkinson
Opera with Objects is one of a series of pieces by the American composer Alvin Lucier, which explores the resonant properties of everyday objects. The score involves the following instructions for the performer:

Collect several small resonant objects, including candy jars, small cardboard boxes or plastic coffee cups.
Lay them out on a table. Holding a pencil in each hand start tapping one against the other.
Your task is to make vivid for listeners the natural amplification inherent in physical things. 
 
Tim Parkinson is an independent composer, based in London. He has written music for various groups and ensembles including Apartment House, [rout], Incidental Music, Dedalus, Basel Sinfonietta and London Sinfonietta. His music has been performed in UK, Europe, USA, Armenia, New Zealand and Japan. In 2005 he launched the concert series Music We’d Like to Hear with composers John Lely and Markus Trunk.
 
 
Peter Gidal
‘As a particularly bold practitioner of experimental film and a highly influential, charismatic theorist, Peter Gidal has had a significant impact on independent and artists’ cinema in the UK’ (BFI). His ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,’ published in 1975, immediately defined the terms of reference for avant-garde film in the UK. Its claims and aspirations have echoed ever since.
 
not far at all (2014, 16mm, colour, 15’)
‘not far at all's soundtrack, just for the record, is concrete/abstract without language.’‘first film in 5 years, tempted to say different yet the same, but not.’ (PG)
Curiously, two codas to Gidal’s not far at all were finished first, and they’ve also been seen more widely. The starting point for Coda I and Coda II was a recording of William Burroughs reading a short story written by Gidal. The repeated phrase ‘not far at all’ in Coda II recurs as the title of the film featured here.
 
 
Simon Payne
Simon Payne's digital video works are characterised by their hard-edged intensity, with charged colour and often a close correlation between sound and image. His work has screened at the London, Media City, Osnabrück, Rotterdam festivals, plus Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the Serpentine. He also writes on experimental film and video and is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
 
Cut Out (2013, HD, 3’33”)
In comparison to my most recent videos Cut Out is largely hand made, involving different coloured cards, with apertures cut out of them, superimposed in combinations starting from opposite ends of a simple spectrum.
 
NOT AND OR (2014, HD, 18’, silent)
NOT AND OR involves black and white quadrilaterals spinning in virtual space that alternate with the same static shapes re-filmed from a screen in real space. The second half of the piece is the same as the first, but flipped, reversed and re-filmed again through successive generations - adding while taking away.