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UNSEEN series | Wobbly, Bill Thibault, Kerry Laitala, Cyrus Tabar

Gray Area’s 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.

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

In July, Kerry Laitala and Cyrus Tabar will perform Transfixing triptych (2016) a three channel meditation on domestic traps and sabotaged relationships using a mix of archival and 21st century imagery. Breathing new life into ‘Transfixed‘ (2005) a film investigating a family romance, Laitala expands the limits of the frame by melding its images with flashes of graphic renditions of fossil forms and a science film about the sun as a harbinger of heat. Bridging the gap between past and present, a series of thought pictures transcribe moments of cautionary pleasure. Cyrus Tabar will be live mixing vinyl records through to produce a lush terrain of sound for Laitala’s complex and chromatic projections.

In addition, Laitala will screen Orbit (2006), a 16mm film work with live manipulated soundtrack. Orbit takes one into the realm of the mistake.... a playful pulsation of mis­registered images made when a lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to regular 8. The handmade soundtrack comprises flutterings of optical noise reverberating to the splices of the film. Crackle! Pop! We enter through the oval window, while the Gravitron spins eternally. Following Laitala and Tabar, we will have a multi­channel surround collaboration between Wobbly and Bill Thibault. Growing out of his work with primitive feedback oscillators as a member of the group Negativland, 'Monitress' is an artwork where the audio inputs of 2­4 iOS devices are routed in various configurations, causing self­playing chain reactions as they listen to each other to either process the audio, or convert the signal to MIDI information to drive a synth app's output. The resulting sounds are frequently uncontrollable, but also very intimate, and audibly born out of his increasingly personal relationship with the mobile device. In performance this piece runs anywhere from 20 to 180 minutes. Frequent collaborator Bill Thibault will be providing generative visuals including procedural geometry and captured 3D point clouds.

Artists

Wobbly

Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990, exploring the many ways in which society’s relationships with music were changed at the moment we gained the ability to capture, manipulate and reamplify sounds at will.  Technology promises us the ability to permanently document any sound as if it were an object; musicians react by using it to redefine the act of improvisation, creating a music which inherently resists the act of being recorded. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing:  a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in structures which the human performer influences more than controls.  Wobbly’s live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and the Freddy McGuire Show compliment live mix media collages executed twice a month on Negativland’s Over The Edge radio program on KPFA FM.

Bill Thibault

Bill performs improvisational 3D computer graphics using his own custom-coded performance platform.

Having found realtime interactions with computers to be the only really interesting ones, he's worked with loudspeaker arrays, multi-projector environments, MIDI and game controllers, GPUs (graphics processing units), and live camera feeds: combining many of these to synergistic effect.

Thibault has performed periodically since 1990 in the Bay Area in a variety of musical ensembles featuring improv, beat-driven electronics, rock, power and noise electronics, and solo contexts. He teaches Computer Science at CSU East Bay. His current work employs audio from live musicians to influence force-based 3D animated layouts of various network topologies.

IRL Carpet

IRL Carpet is an interactive installation that uses simple geometric heuristics for shot composition in an attempt to reveal filmmaking processes to the audience and isolate their emotional charges. The viewer is captured by a "depth camera" in a real-time and placed in sets built from 3D point clouds of the Mission district.

Kerry Laitala

Kerry Laitala is a media archaeologist whose works spans the territories of photography and expanded cinema performances to 3D single channel videos and sculptural installation. Laitala’s work synthesizes ideas and ephemera from the realms of science, history, and technology. Her work with installation, photography, para­cinema, performance, kinetic sculpture, and single­ channel projection investigates evolving systems of belief. She studied photography and film at the Massachusetts College of Art and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. www.kerrylaitala.net

Cyrus Tabar

Cyrus Yoshi Tabar is an American filmmaker and musician based in Oakland, California. He uses his work as an investigative tool to explore personal histories in perpetual motion. Through found footage, live mixing vinyl records, and live sound design he aims to conceptually and formally mimic the fragmentation of memory. As a first generation American, with parents from Tokyo, Japan and Tehran, Iran, Cyrus ventures to externalize the ambiguity of his identity into vibrant visual and aural landscapes.