John Davis is a Northern California musician and filmmaker whose work builds on the relationship between moving image and sound through live performance and studio-based works. John curated and performed in the series Gravity Spells: Bay Area Experimental Music and Expanded Cinema Art series in Berkeley, and recently participated in the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Soundwave Festival, and the Re:Sound experimental music series on Mare Island.

Joshua Churchill is a San Francisco-based cross-disciplinary artist whose immersive site-specific sound and light work takes the form of both installation and performance, often blurring the line between the two. In addition to performing with filmmakers such as Paul Clipson and John Davis, Churchill also performs and records under the moniker Plumes, and as a member of experimental black metal/noise outfit Sutekh Hexen. Churchill has exhibited and performed throughout the US and abroad.

The artist who collaborated with Liz Harris, Sarah Davachi, Jefre-Cantu Ledesma, and others died suddenly aged 53. Paul Clipson was a San Francisco-based filmmaker and experimental film artist whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians. His largely improvised, in-camera-edited films bring to light subconscious preoccupations and unexpected visual forms. His works have been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Clipson works exclusively in film, which imbues his images of nature, urban structures and streets and the human figure with raw immediacy. His layering of images, which shift in speed, perspective and content, though always adhering to a montagelike logic, collapses the limitations of time and space. The movement of images without an overlay of narrative reflect on the nature of film itself. “It is self-referential,” Clipson acknowledged. It’s a kind of road trip of the soul – a compendium of meditations, travel and memory that induces a dreamlike state. “There was never that interplay to make anyone's music fit the film, and that’s how I’ve worked ever since,” he said. “How the music and images mix together is kind of exciting. There are a lot of internal rhythms in the images. It’s like osmosis. I’m intuiting the method and process of what the musicians do, creating an architecture of imagery that in turn has a percussive and propulsive property.” A lot of the editing happens when he shoots. “I film as if I’m performing, almost like a musician. I’m more interested in the latent potential meaning, rather than a specific idea. I like that ambiguity: Just as the music doesn’t specify, rather it creates an environment you respond emotionally to.” Spontaneity is built into his process. “I like a poetic rhyming with a sense of chance, like a skipping stone that changes the trajectory but continues the thread.” He’ll shift from black-and-white to color and back again, and a lot of the expressiveness “has to do with subtleties of movement.” Paul was an incredibly bright light and source of truly boundless energy, his generous heart and vivid talents touched the lives of countless people. It is impossible to quantify the depth of this connection.

Zachary Epcar is a film and video maker currently based in Oakland, California. His work has shown at the New York Film Festival - Projections, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Images Festival, and the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, and San Francisco International Film Festivals.

Composer and performer Samuel Hertz received his MFA at Mills College. His work has recently been seen/heard at ACUD MACHT NEU (Berlin, Germany), Nebulullaby (London, UK), Bains::Connective (Brussels, Belgium) ACRE Gallery/ACRE-TV (Chicago, IL), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle, WA), Harvestworks (New York, NY)l. He is currently at work on a commission by the OpusCentrum Ensemble (Bourges, France) and is an artist researcher for the Anthropocene Curriculum in association with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany).

Known principally as a maverick spirit in the world of avant-garde American cinema, Lawrence Jordan played an important role in the late 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco art scene. Jordan was recently awarded the Brakhage Vision award at the Denver International film Festival, was visiting scholar at Texas Tech University, and was featured in a solo exhibition of his work at The Lab in San Francisco.

Hydroplane (Renzo Gorrio) is an SF-based electronic musician, composer for NPR's Snap Judgment, and curator of IDP (Intelligent Dance Party).

Alexander Randon is an indie music app developer / electrical engineer / composer, and creator of Fugue Machine, Arpeggionome, and Link to Midi. Rather than composing and performing music meticulously, he aims to refine an improvisation process over time — using custom iPad Apps, MaxMSP, Ableton Live, and various hardware gear. Check out his soundcloud here.