Saturday 12.12.09 – Informe, Abstraction, Ecstasy II : Psychedelia

CONTENTS:
1. About this Saturday
2. Films to be screened
3. Texts
4. *
5. About the first event in this series

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1. About this Saturday

What: Site a specific film performance*
When: Saturday 12.12.09
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all

This evening as well as the others in this series are organized by Brian McCarthy

What follows is a short description from Brian:

This is the second in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performances and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last event, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, aleatory political activism.

Tonight’s show continues the investigation from night one of the series about informe and the nature of detail in the abstract image. Liberating the psychedelic from its historically specific context, works will be shown from the 20s (figured here as a kind of “psychedelic decade” in Kinusaga’s expressionistic masterpiece Page of Madness from 1927) through to contemporary video work in HD (Stom Sogo and Dani Leventhal).

Drawing upon the writings of Parker Tyler, French surrealist Roger Callois, and Mike Kelley, which will be used as performance elements, a conceptual series will be established:

legendary psychasthenia (Callois’s concept of mimetic behavior, related to Cronenberg’s film Stereo from 1969).
psychedelic anamorphosis (Tyler’s analysis of the anamorphic aesthetic in 60s experimental film).
psychic morphogenesis (employing a text from Mike Kelley’s Vaseline Muses prepared for the Jablonka Galerie in 1991).

A discussion of Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the decidability of the human from his book The Open will serve to establish a primary political idea.

Films will be interspersed with readings, lecture elements, and an overhead projector piece on portable holes by Carson Salter and Robert Snowden.

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2. Films to be screened

ira cohen invasion of thunderbolt pagoda
teinosuke kinusaga page of madness [edited excerpt]
salter and snowden portable hole piece
david cronenberg stereo [excerpt]
paul sharits ray gun virus
frans zwartjes living
stom sogo silver play
dani leventhal 54,36,18
brian mccarthy untitled
stom sogo jerk

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3. Texts

http://www.sduk.us/beaver/PDF/callois_legendary.pdf
soon more of the texts to be uploaded

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4. *

You may ask "what is a site specific film performance"? And it would be difficult to speculate upon a definition without having the experience of the last event. But in short, one could say it can be an event in which the production, projection, reception, analysis, and experience of film are not separate, but co-extensive. Rather than being combined, each element resides next to the other in the same time/space. And in this co-extensivity, this co-presence makes possible something absolutely singular: the potential for seeing the seeing, to thinking the thinking, and sensing the sensing of film. Unlike a screening of a similar set of canonical films, which may work under a historicizing logic or paradigms which are familiar or known, a film performance attempts to re-present these works as contemporary, a part of a process of a person's thought, and presented together as kind of politico-affective love letter or assemblage.

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5. About the first event in this series

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002969.php#more