NEGATIVLAND
SUE-C
Thomas Dimuzio
September 17, 2021
Doors at 8PM
Show starts 9PM
18+
Negativland & SUE-C:
IT’S NORMAL FOR SOME THINGS TO COME TO YOUR ATTENTION
Created in collaboration with “live cinema” visual artist SUE-C, the legendary sound collage group's new audio-visual performance project is about the world we live in, the minds that perceive it, and all of the evolving forms of media and technology that inevitably insert themselves between those two things.
Negativland creates art that draws attention to its own frame, and any frame designed to be invisible (as all the most lucrative ones are). In today’s media climate, it’s harder than ever to resist a voice designed to make you think it’s your own. Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation-based audio and visual works have touched on many things — pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, religion, death, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative activism in our media-saturated and multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture.
While it is true that Negativland became more publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation's copyright laws (even finding themselves being brought to Washington DC and Capitol Hill as citizen lobbyists for copyright and art issues), Negativland are artists first and activists second. All of their art and media interventions have intended to pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written and cited about in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work here and in Europe.
Time is passing quickly, and it’s not going to stop being normal for things to come to your attention.
In accordance with San Francisco city mandates, and to ensure the safety of our community, Gray Area requires all visitors to present proof of vaccination for in-person events. Masks are required for all attendees. Read more about what to expect during your visit.
Artists
Negativland
Since 1980, the 4 or 5 or 6 (or more) Floptops known as Negativland, a multimedia collective originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland surreally re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to.
SUE-C (Sue Slagle)
Sue Slagle, who goes by the stage name SUE-C, is a video and light artist working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. For the past 18 years, she has created handmade videos and live media performances, traveling extensively in Europe and the US. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, handmade papers, fabrics and miniature lighting effects.
Thomas Dimuzio
The music of Thomas Dimuzio transports the listener to other worldly aural realms. “His work has a narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners, ears alert… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining.” (Peter Marsh, BBC) His recordings have been released internationally by RéR Megacorp, Resipiscent, Asphodel, RRRecords, MonoType, No Fun Productions, Sonoris, Drone Records, Record Label Records, Odd Size, Seeland, and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Marcia Bassett, Alan Courtis, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, Alaric, ISIS, 5uu's, Matmos, Wobbly and Negativland. Recent performances include AngelicA Festival Internazionale di Musica, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CCRMA at Stanford, Recombinant Media Labs Don Buchla Memorial Concert, Warner Jepson: A Night of Indeterminacy and Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Art and Liberation. Dimuzio also hosted KPFA’s Frequency Modulation Radio which featured live on-‐air performances of sonic practitioners exploring the fringes of music. Dimuzio’s new live record “Sutro Transmissions” was released by Resipiscent in January 2020 to world-‐wide acclaim.
[email protected]
415.843.1423
Gray Area / Grand Theater
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Monday – Friday
10am – 6pm
After 6pm dependent on events.
