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Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, courtesy of the artists
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"Often people don’t have anything to say, because you need a breather," says Luis Recoder, describing a typical audience reaction to Untitled, which he performs with fellow artist-fillmaker Sandra Gibson and musician Olivia Block. "You can’t just start introducing language after being exposed to a purely visual experience for an hour. But we like that kind of awkwardness. People come to the cinema to kind of hide, because they’re shy, or whatever. It’s not like walking into a gallery where everything’s illuminated and exposed, and very porous. We’re coming into the cinema space to almost crack it open, or maybe like the camera obscura metaphor, to make a light leak, and expose certain things like the cinematic apparatus which is normally tucked in."
To help you better picture Untitled: Gibson and Recoder use 16mm projectors that project not film, but pure light; they affect that light with custom-made electronic vaporizers. As the mist rises, they manipulate it with their hands to create patterns on the screen.
"It’s basically these two Minimalist white squares on top of each other, and then we use the humidifiers," Gibson says. "The two pieces of glass in front of the projectors is to mimic, in a way, the booth—the projector booth on-site."
That 20-minute segment is followed by looped black leader that's been scarred and bleached. "That is introduced in one projector while the other one has no film," Rocoder explains. "It’s kind of a crossover fade between no film and then film. So it has this arc, the prehistory of, before there was film, it was just sort of a magic lantern light on the wall."
This is all performed to Block's score; she mixes it out of her laptop, and places speakers in the four corners of the room. "I’ll build up these layers, and process them live and send them to different speakers," she says. "So it’s much more about the perception of the audience in terms of when they hear a sound...where the sound is coming from, like if it’s coming from the back or the front, or from the side, or whatever. It’s much more about that physical kind of element to sound. Their work is very much about light, and in their work, the light often escapes out of the frame of the screen. My sounds kind of escape out of the frame of the room; it’s calling attention to the room itself, in a way."
On Friday night, New Music Circle, the St. Louis International Film Festival, and Contemporary Art Museum host Gibson, Recoder and Block for a performance of Untitled. Though they always stick to the parameters of the performance sketched out above, Gibson says the piece will change, as it always does in a new space.
"I think we kind of know the arc of the piece, we know this should be happening at 10 minutes, this should be happening at 20 minutes," Gibson says, "so it’s a loose, choreographed piece. We know what should happen at certain points, and she’s doing the same thing we are, which is responding to each moment and what’s happening on the screen, as well as what she’s hearing in the room. It’s basically in the space, working in that moment."
Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, Olivia Block from 25 FPS on Vimeo.
The filmmakers and the composer first crossed paths at a festival in Belgium in 2007, and after attending each others' performances, felt a lot of kinship; so when the opportunity to collaborate presented itself, they jumped at it. Untitled was their first project together, and began, interestingly enough, not as a live project but as a DVD (though it's been projected several times in museums, art galleries and the Sundance Film Festival; the first performance was last year).
"Luis and I are so against the idea of making fixed objects, because everything we do is so ephemeral and when we have these performances, we rarely have documentation of them," Gibson says. "So we knew that we had to make this DVD, and approached Olivia about doing sound for us. We were teaching in Boulder, Colo., and we basically did a correspondence, while she was in Chicago. We sent her images, and then she sent sound. We’d go back and forth, just through the post. She’d send us a DVD or some sound to listen to, we’d listen to it in our car and then we’d write back to her and send her our thoughts. But we knew what she sounded like, so I think we knew it would be really wonderful. We kind of gave her carte blanche, we’ll just let you do what you want, and then finally the DVD came out in 2008."
"It was supposed to stop there, but we put it out there and then people wanted us to perform it live," Recoder adds. "So then we had to kind of deconstruct the DVD, kind of treating it as a score. And so in a sense, it’s original, in the sense that every time we perform it, it’s kind of a site-specific piece...every venue will have a different projector, a different space orientation, with respect to the audience."
Friday's concert will open with Block's solo piece, Dissolution, a work inspired by the difficulty of human communication. (It was also recently reviewed in the New York Times; you can read that here.) In contrast with Untitled, which is all controlled by laptop, Dissolution is profoundly analog, and uses a series of pick-up mics and an old-fashioned mixer. The sounds are created by lo-fi technologies like microcassette recorders and Walkie Talkies, many of which Block bought on Ebay.
"There is a microcassette player that's from the '70s or the '60s, and someone left some old microcassette tape in there," she says. "It sounds like a camping trip. So it’s like someone’s memory is on there. They also recorded their favorite songs of that time, just like in the room, onto the microcassette player...who knows what channels it had to travel through to get to me." She incorporated those sounds into the piece; she also uses an autoharp that's rigged with a pickup mic, on which she places the microcassette players, which then resonate the strings. "I'll pluck the strings, too," she says. "I also have this white cathode light that is triggered by sound, and that goes through the mixer as well." It creates "this other weird interference," she says, where the sounds trigger the light to flash, but the flashing interrupts other sounds. "I’m really interested in white noise sounds of various kinds, like wind and whispery kinds of sounds, so any sound that has a noisy aspect to it," she says. "So I’m using a lot of these bad walkie talkies for their noise and their interference...then I use recordings of voices, and process those live so that you can’t really understand them. Words come out every so often, but you can barely understand them, so it’s just like I’m in the moment just deciding how much of the language to let through to the audience. And that’s part of the performance for me, deciding that and making a meaning out of the words that do come though."
If you find yourself, like many people do, happily stupefied and unable to speak after the performance, and want to know more about the artists and their work, there is a free workshop at CAM on Saturday, November 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. And if you want to sit down on Friday with an extra measure of understanding, get to CAM early and check out Anthony McCall's "You and I, Horizontal (II)."
"We really love his work," Recoder says. "Our work kind of comes from the generation of the '60s where the projectors were being taken out of the theater, and they were literally disemboweling the cinema of the '60s with what they called expanded cinema, in order to expose the spectacle, and to fragment it. So if you look at his work, you might see it as a predecessor to the kind of work we do."
Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder and Oliva Block perform Friday, November 15 at 8 p.m. Admssion is $20, $10 for NMC members, and students with ID. Tickets may be purchased online, or at the door. For more information, go to newmusiccircle.org/concerts or camstl.org.
