Media Arts

Night Vision. An evening on... illuminating darkness

2010-03-18T09:06:03+01:00

Night Vision presents a series of performances, films and an installation which attempt to capture the night in all its obscurity, somewhere between light and darkness, visible and invisible. The night is not a black mass that blinds our sight. It’s not a substance, but an event, pure depth that surrounds and swallows us, infiltrating us through our senses. In the dark hours when we must sharpen our eyes and ears, when night comes to life, nothing seems what it is.

PROGRAMME

20:00 CONCERT / PERFORMANCE

Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia – In Celebration of Knowing all the Blues of the Evening

Behind this tongue-twister of a name are Jaime Fennelly and Shawn Hansen, a duo of multi-instrumentalists whose many projects (among which Phantom Limb and Peeesseye) explore the borders of drone, noise and improvisation. With their joint project In Celebration of Knowing all the Blues of the Evening, they examine, both with sound and image, the ephemeral dynamics of twilight, the moments between light and dark, “entre Chien et Loup”. For their performance at Courtisane they’ll use two Hammond organs and a series of images made in collaboration with visual artist Nate Miner.

20:45 FILM

Jeanne Liotta – Observando El Cielo (2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 19’)

According to Paul Virilio, “it is no longer only the night sky that is threatened but indeed the night itself, the great night of interstellar space; that other unknown quantity that, nonetheless, constitutes our only window on the cosmos.” What is left to us of the nightly celestial roof after years of light contamination is made clear in this film, the result of seven years of field recordings. The soundtrack, a composition of VLF (Very Low Frequency) radio recordings, is the work of Peggy Ahwesh.

Deborah Stratman – In Order Not To Be Here (2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 33’)

A nocturnal study of the suburban and corporate landscapes of the Unites States, revealing how much the collective trust in surveillance and security determines our living environments. An everyday horror film, which mercilessly addresses the feelings of moral failure, spiritual emptiness and isolation-based paranoia which are proper to our post-industrial consumption society. The night has become the perpetual twilight; it no longer reflects the fear of the unknown, but of ourselves.

21:45 PERFORMANCE

Pieter Geenen – nightscape (3) (2005, binaural sound, 15’10”)

The work of Pieter Geenen focuses on uncanny landscapes that without calling for analysis, emotion or transparence, slowly find their place in the imagination of the viewer. The attention is sharpened, the experience slows down. In nightscape, a series of nocturnal soundscapes, we become – devoid of the usual visual intellectual framework – completely dependent on our hearing. “It is no coincidence that the night seems to be the favorite time of this anti-reporter: in the dark hours, when we have to focus eyes and ears, nothing seems what it is. ‘Believe that anything is real you can imagine’”. (Herman Asselberghs)

22:00 – BREAK

22:45 – CONCERT / PERFORMANCE

Paul Clipson & William Fowler Collins – Lightmaze

The ravishing super 8 films of Paul Clipson are lyrical explorations of light and movement. His images, mostly edited in-camera, reveal the energy and sensuality of the everyday that we often fail to see. At the invitation of the Courtisane festival, he has assembled a selection of night shots which will be accompanied live by William Fowler Collins and his pitch black guitar drones. His recent mind-blowing album Perdition Hill Radio was released by the renowned Type label.

OPEN THROUGHOUT THE EVENING - INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
FREE ENTRANCE BETWEEN 7 PM AND 11.30 PM
WANT TO SEE MORE OF COURTISANE’S ‘NIGHT VISION’? GET A TICKET!

Disinformation – The Origin of Painting (2000, optokinetic / autodestructive, luminous graffiti, shadow & electromagnetic sound installation)

This project of Joe Banks goes back to 1995, when it was still a vehicle for his experiments with electromagnetic and radio phonic sounds. In the meantime, his research into electronic, sonic and optokinetic phenomena has found itself a place in the contemporary art world. The Origin of Painting is a key work in his oeuvre, a literally impressive sound and light installation which allows visitors to make an impression of their silhouette. This work not only refers to the myths associated to the creation of painting, but also to the atomic shadows on the walls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “A dark writing was born. A secret writing, written in the dark, with darkness itself. In the atomic night and on the human surface, a dark, corporeal surface appeared.” (Akira Mizuta Lippit)

Surface Tension. An evening on... frictions

2010-03-09T00:04:36+01:00

What happens when, before our eyes and ears, an event unfolds in time without simple representation, causality or possibility of identification ? We are thrown back upon ourselves, upon the power of our imagination to create mental images. The real is brought back to the possible. In this series of works, most points of reference and information have been reduced to the minimum, as if the outside was folded inside. It’s up to us to break through the surface, to put our imagination to work, to search for connections, to discover what it all can mean…

PROGRAMME

20:00 – PERFORMANCE

Dominique Petitgand – Séance d’écoute

Voice is central to Dominique Petitgand’s compositions and installations. Sentences are fragmented, words and other articulations are isolated and assembled into “mental landscapes”. The listener is immersed into micro universes that bounce back and forth between an assumption of reality – the recordings in which people speak of their own lives – and a projected and timeless fiction. “For me, the search for form takes place at the level of perception, at the level of what is going on inside the head of the listener. I don’t have the impression of creating an object; rather, I set in motion mental perceptions, acts of reflection, of thinking, memory and imagination.” At the request of Courtisane, he will present a listening session in the dark, structured around silences.
(From 1992 – 2009: pièces sonores, parlées, musicales et silencieuses)

20:45 – PERFORMANCE

Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, David Cunningham – The Space Between

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler make film and video installations and performances that question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. The Space Between brings together a formal approach with an overtly social subject matter. The images of an anonymous housing block in India are the basis for an exploration of a number of “spaces between”, suggested by the motif and its distance from the Western viewer. The complexity of the visual structure, a two-screen projection, will be reflected in the live soundtrack by David Cunningham, who has made a name for himself as an installation artist and musician, often in collaboration with This Heat, David Toop, Martin Creed and Sam Taylor-Wood.

21:30 – INSTALLATIE / PERFORMANCE

Lis Rhodes – Light Music (1975, 16mm 2 screen, b&w, optical sound, 25’)

The work of Lis Rhodes is pivotal in the history of British avant-garde film, but in the past decades has also moved on to photography, performance and political analysis. Light Music is one of her earlier explorations in the field of “expanded cinema”. Two 16mm projectors project a varied configuration of straight lines, in which the spacing (frequency), thickness (amplitude), colour and density (tonality) also determine the soundtrack. “It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music, It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship.”

22:00 – CONCERT / PERFORMANCE

Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright, Ross Lambert (alto-saxophone, guitar/devices, electronics/light/projections)

An encounter between three participants of the weekly workshop led by musician and theorist Eddie Prévost, which during the past decade has left an undeniable mark on the London improvisation scene. The emphasis that Prévost places on the heuristic aspect of free improvisation – as a process of discovery, learning and dialogue – lies close to the heart of these musicians. Both saxophonist Seymour Wright and guitarist Ross Lambert are known for their inter-musical dynamics and exploratory drive. On this occasion, they team up with Paul Abbott, who will focus on working with light and video projections.

Electrified 02 - tentoonstelling

2010-03-17T11:24:37+01:00

English text coming soon.

Rondleiding op de Elecrified-tentoonstelling

2010-03-15T19:04:31+01:00

Vooruit’s Eva Degroote and Thibaut Verhoeven of the S.M.A.K., curators of Electrified 2.0, will guide you through the exhibition and will tell you all about the artists and their work.

Roberta Gigante – OrganOOn

2010-03-17T11:15:01+01:00

English text coming soon.