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UNSEEN series | Spring 2017

Gray Area’s quarterly UNSEEN Series presents site-specific, collaborative performances by Bay Area artists and explores current practices in immersive media, including expanded cinema, video and sound art, experimental music and technology. The UNSEEN series is curated by Oakland artist Matt Fisher, and presented in 8 channel surround sound with audio engineering and equipment by Recombinant Media Labs. Learn more about the series and apply to participate here.

Tickets: $8 Presale / $13 Day of Show / $15 Door.
Cash bar available to those 21 years and older.

Schedule:
8:00 Doors
9:00 Show

Ainsley Wagoner + Jordan Presnick, "Immersion"

Jordan and Ainsley are interested in the intersection of music and visuals, most recently with their projects Immersion (an interactive audio/visual installation on view at the Lexington Art League as a part of the CURRENTS: Expanding Fields exhibition starting February 24 in Lexington, Kentucky) and Babetable, a browser-based wavetable synthesizer currently in development.

Their work contrasts organic sounds–vocals and field recordings from open spaces in Northern California–with modified analog synths and interactive video projection. The video projection responds to changes in timbre, velocity, and harmonics, layering a rich visual landscape that responds to the soundtrack. They explore color, nature, expanse, pulse, atmospheres, accumulation and erosion.

Danny Clay and Jon Fischer, "Turntable Drawing No. 13"

Composer Danny Clay and printmaker/engineer Jon Fischer will present an immersive sound installation consisting of a set of interactive turntable stations alongside live instrumental musicians. Visitors are invited to manipulate the record players or simply explore the space as the sounds unfold. Adapting a central inquiry of printmaking, the project invites the public to investigate the properties of sound as a physical imprint using custom-made records.

Jim Haynes, "18 Films About Ted Serios, Chapters 8 & 9"

As Ted Serios manifest his pictures in a disruptive wink between the physical and the psychic, 18 Films erupts as an effluvia of debris -- the aftermath of corroded photography, malfunctioning surveillance camera, torn / destroyed negatives, electro-acoustic crucibles, etc. The obsessive suturing of these components -- both sound and moving image -- evoke ghosts in the machine, the conditions of psychological trauma, and the erratic slippages between states of being. Thoughtographic dislocation.

Sound is constructed in situ through electro-acoustic means -- shortwave radio, transducers, rough-hewn guitar pickups, wiretapping microphones, motors, controlled feedback etc. -- and is choreographed into the video feed collected from three surveillance camera sources and DVD in various states of precision. The images, while mostly fixed, do have the capacity for malleability through the disruption and interruption of the surveillance cameras.

Chapter Eight manifests image and sound through a cross-section of closed circuit claustrophobia of electrical disruption and the fetid exuberance of jungle rot. Chapter Nine ruminates on oblique, occluded, and overlapped geometries.

Artists

Ainsley Wagoner

Ainsley is a Designer / Artist / Musician living & working in San Francisco. Before moving to the Bay Area she performed in Lexington, Kentucky in the band Silverware and was a member of the Resonant Hole Artist Collective.

Jordan Presnick

Jordan is a Designer / Artist / Musician living & working in San Francisco who has drummed, DJed, and performed live electronics for the last 10 years and currently releases music as Atlas of Nothing.

Danny Clay

Danny Clay is a composer and teaching artist from Ohio, currently based in San Francisco. His work is deeply rooted in curiosity, collaboration, and the sheer joy of making things. His projects often incorporate musical games, open forms, found objects, archival media, toy instruments, classrooms of elementary schoolers, graphic notation, digital errata, cross-disciplinary research, and the everything-in-between. Recent collaborators include Kronos Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Phyllis Chen, Third Coast Percussion, Post:Ballet, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Thingamajigs, Areon Flutes, Mobius Trio, the Living Earth Show, Friction Quartet, and Greg Gorlen. His work has been released on Parlour Tapes+, Patient Sounds, Hibernate Recordings, IIKKI Editions, Unknown Tone Records, Eilean Records, Rural Colours, Phinery Recordings, Heat Death Records, Futuresequence, Tessellate Recordings, and Turmeric Magnitudes.

Jon Fischer

Jon Fischer was raised in Pennsylvania by Israeli parents from Morocco and France. He earned degrees in bio-engineering and philosophy of science before learning to screen print with a garden hose and a 60 Watt light bulb at CELLspace, the legendary San Francisco arts collective. Fischer’s current screen print studio focuses on large works on canvas, interactive screen print-based installations, and limited edition series. Recent projects include a solo show at Vanderbilt University, and juried exhibitions at the Florida State University Museum of Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and White Stone Gallery in Philadelphia. This year he will debut a new screen print subscription project and begin a collaboration with composer Danny Clay, funded by an Individual Artist Grant from the SF Arts Commission. Fischer currently holds an appointment as Associate Professor of Engineering Technology at the California State University Maritime Academy, where he was one of two faculty members selected for the 2014 Award for Outstanding Teaching. Fischer currently lives and works in San Francisco, his studio is based in the heart of the Mission district.

Jim Haynes

Jim Haynes is an artist defining his work through the phrase, "I rust things." The statement embraces a multiplicity of meanings across various media. There are three major approaches in the work at large: the mangled surfaces of corroded photographs, the cryptic tension of the video / expanded cinema pieces, and the caustic field disturbances in sound composition. Blight. Dislocation. Subcutaneousness. Toxicity. Brackishness. Psychic unease. These allusions (amongst others) develop and materialize through various chemical, digital and/or analog means, often an intertwined amalgam. This process seeks to accentuate the instability of these conditions and territories as a series of evocations, hauntings, convulsions, and evanescence.  Through sound (and more recently video), Haynes investigate these properties of corrosion, specifically on how decay parallels and relates to the perception of time when cycles of activity collapse into stasis, and how that stasis can rupture when any number of pressures are applied. These result from a cross-contamination of ultrasound detection, shortwave reception, surveillance camera observation, moribund radiophonic exploration, and/or electro-magnetic disruption.