UNSEEN series | Summer 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.

UNSEEN in June returns with three meditations on the ways the body, sound and image mediate each other.

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

Jody Stillwater + William Kingston Davies, "Speedoom"

"Speedoom" is a collaborative audio/video performance-based project that tells a story of a body, the skin, the bloodstream and the mythological intertwining embedded within them. The performance uses hundreds of visceral, intimate photographs of the body and sculptural video loaded into triggered caches that interact through Ableton and Max/MSP/Jitter with an oppressive, mechanical and also elegant, melodic, floral sound aesthetic to tell a story of the oft dissonance/harmony of the human organs. The visual media both triggers and is triggered by the audio, and everything plays with a quickly shifting and jittery temporality.

Samantha Weinert + Osman Koc (from NOS Visuals), New collaborative performance

Samantha Weinert performed for UNSEEN last summer and we are excited to have her return. Her music performance work incorporates biofeedback and breath, exploring their potential to open up an intimate and more vulnerable realm of expression. She will be collaborating with Osman Koc (from NOS Visuals), who will be creating responsive visuals on his custom software platform that enables sound to directly affect the visuals and becomes an instrument that allows for artistic interpretation and improvisation.

Kris T. Force "The Mirror (extended)"

The Mirror (extended) was created with Max/Msp/Jitter in combination with Moog 3P and Buchla 100 recordings. The Mirror was created for octophonia, 8 channel audio, with an audio reactive video synth. This presentation of The Mirror (extended) will showcase a new mix created for the Grand Theater's immersive playback environment. The Mirror is available as a fixed media audio track on Transcedigitalism, A Compilation of Esoteric Drones released by Silent Records/Daathstaar, 2017. The Mirror may be viewed with eyes open or closed.

Image: still from "Speedoom" by Jody Stillwater.

Artists

Jody Stillwater

Jody Stillwater (周青海) is a writer, director and creative technologist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arrhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation and narrative cinema. He is a finalist for the SFFILM Kenneth Rainin Screenwriting Grant and has screened his films at the De Young Museum, YBCA, Mutek, ISEA 2019 South Korea, Marfa Film Festival, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival in Barcelona, Rockefeller’s Imagine Science Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival, directed films for Google, Knotel, Bentley Mills, performed & installed multiple new media projects at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab (incorporating film + technology), the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab (built around choreography + film), appeared as a featured guest on Asian Pacific America with Robert Handa on NBC and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018. He has received grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and Fleischhacker Foundations.

William Kingston

William Kingston davies is a San Francisco based experimental musician performer pop artist with an eye & an ear for the touching and absurd. His work is founded in the principals of re-appropriated technology, semiotics and the willful destruction of symbols, established sounds and societal structures. His main ongoing work is the art pop project Hair Thing. He studied Music, Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz

Samantha Weinert

Samantha Weinert is a frequent collaborator with Marc Kate and is interested both in live improvisational performance and exploring new ways to expressively and meaningfully interface with electronic instruments.  She aims to deconstruct commonly-held assumptions about how such instruments are played, and feels strongly that new paradigms of instrument design lead to new modes of experience and inevitably to new forms of music. Her exploration of these ideas has led to her current instrument, a synthesizer played by breath controller and modified polypressure keyboard. She studied fine art, music, and philosophy at the University of Illinois (Urbana) and currently works as a synth tech at Waveformless in Temescal, Oakland.  

Osman Koç

Osman Koç is a creative technologist / artist, who uses technology as a medium for expression. Directed by his curiosities, Koç’s works touch many different fields such as cybernetics, artificial intelligence, biosensors, kinetic sculptures, reactive lighting, audiovisual performances and games with alternative physical controllers. In 2014, he co-founded Iskele47, a multidisciplinary design hub / makerspace in Istanbul, where he experimented, prototyped, taught, consulted, collaborated, made and played. Since 2017 he is continuing his activities in San Francisco, CA. Currently he uses Noisebridge as a place to prototype, develop and hack. Performing under the name NOS Visuals, Osman Koç has performed in many art festivals such as Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Signal Festival in Prague and Europalia Festival in Brussels.

Kris T. Force

Kris T. Force is a composer, performer and multi-media artist living and working in the San Francisco bay area and exhibiting and performing throughout the United States and Europe. Kris works as a solo artist and as a collaborator with select individuals and groups. She is an award winning sound designer for all types of media. Kris engages both old and new mediums, classical techniques and new technologies. Her work utilizes forms including sound, installation, drawing, painting, performance, video and new media. In her practice, the transformation of media characteristics through processes of decay, duplication, pause, juxtaposition, materiality, signal and transmission, and the possibility of capturing the liminal moment of transformation, is an ongoing pursuit. She is inspired by themes of the extra-mundane and uses technologies to extend her senses beyond the limits of the corporeal body. Kris is interested in the medium taking on its own intelligence, apart from her creation, thereby employing living signals, sympathetic resonances, procedural processes, generative algorithms and self realizing systems.