fbpx

RECOMBINANT REBOUND

CineChamber open through August 1

WED - SAT | 7PM, 8:45PM SHOWTIMES

Featuring works by
Biosphere · Burial · Fennesz · Dimensional Holofonic Sound · Egbert Mittelstadt · Jefre-Cantu Ledesma · Jochem Paap · Lillevan · Masako Tanaka · Naut Humon · Oval · Paul Clipson · Ryoichi Kurokawa · Scott Arford · Scott Pagano · Semiconductor

Recombinant Media Labs & Gray Area & STRRR TV & Minds Over Matter present Recombinant Rebound, featuring the RML CineChamber, a 360° surround adventure in immersive sound, spatial cinema and sensory strangeness. This distinct environment features two decades of panoramic performance created exclusively for the CineChamber, including the premiere of a new solo work in progress by Dimensional Holofonic Sound.

Reserve Your Tickets

Tickets now available through Aug 1

Reserve your ticket by clicking on the show date below.

Mon Tue Wed Thur Fri Sat Sun
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31 1

To ensure the safety of our community, Gray Area requires all visitors to be fully vaccinated or have received a negative Covid-19 test result within 72 hours of an in-person event. Read more about what to expect during your visit.

Single showing: $25

7PM Filaments in Strata

8:45PM Panorama Paranormal

Double feature: $40
Both hour-long programs, and ASK NAUT, an interactive conversation with Naut Humon, founder and artistic director of Recombinant Media Labs, who will share insights into the historical context and curatorial perspective for the CineChamber.

Group Rates: For groups of 6 or more, contact us at [email protected] for a group discount.

If you are a student or nonprofit worker, or facing financial hardship, we are offering discounts and scholarships. Apply here.

* Tickets purchased in advance may be exchanged for a $5 fee; expired tickets cannot be exchanged. No refunds.

* Note: flashing lights and high sound volume may affect those who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy or other photo and audio sensitivities.


Program

Recombinant Rebound is presenting two 60+ minute seated shows of curated works designed exclusively for the Recombinant Media Labs CineChamber.

Filaments in Strata
(2006-2009)


7:00PM

Captured experiential tracks from live archived concerts in the 2000's at the Recombinant Media Labs theatre in San Francisco. Octagonal swings from ambient to abrupt.

Biosphere, Egbert Mittelstadt
Elsewhere, Anywhere / People Are Friends and Birds Fly

Ryoichi Kurokawa
cm: av_c

Semiconductor
Brilliant Noise

Masako Tanaka, Oval
Halveplane V.4 + Flam V4.1

Scott Pagano, Jochem Paap
Umfeld

Scott Arford
Static Room

Ryoichi Kurokawa
Parallel Head

Panorama Paranormal
(2010 – 2021)


8:45PM

A surround sound paradigm as applied to the panoramic image.

Naut Humon
Xynaxis

Ryoichi Kurokawa
Orbit Study (preview)

Egbert Mittelstadt
Urban Horizon

Burial (Hyperdub), Masako Tanaka
Shell of Light

Paul Clipson, Jefre-Cantu Ledesma
Portrait in Half Light

Fennesz, Lillevan
Saffron Revolution Forever

Dimensional Holofonic Sound
The Lift

About the RML CineChamber

The CineChamber is a 10-screen installation lab site for trailblazing panoramic performance, built by Recombinant Media Labs (RML). It's a large but intimate rectangular surround surface apparatus, capable of scaling its 8 by 12 meter proportions to fit into the auditoriums, theatre stages and concert halls everywhere on the global circuit. Although one can walk around the flexibly adjoined screen structures and observe the content externally, the main attraction lies within the spacious windows on the world interior, encompassed on all sides by the multichannel audio and image displays in customizable formations.

The CineChamber platform offers extensive interdisciplinary staging opportunities and can be utilized by composers, engineers and innovators in a variety of ways for panoramic performance programs, interactive installation, live music, chartered exhibition screenings, conferences and educational workshops. It provides international artists the opportunity to take their creative impulse to the furthest frontiers of aural, optical and cinematic language, and propagates them in a comprehensive and rarefied environment. Numerous renowned artists have created modules for the CineChamber.

Filaments in Strata (2006-2009)


In order of re-appearance:

1. – 2. Elsewhere, Anywhere / People Are Friends and Birds Fly
music by Biosphere and films & photos by Egbert Mittelstadt

The sublime widescreen sonic cinematic syntax of Biosphere & Egbert Mittelstadt has graced the CineChamber screens for a number of seasons now after their live milestone residencies in the mid 2000’s. Opening with the weightless dreamful drift of Elsewhere, Anywhere, Egbert Mittelstaedt reveals a suburban subway interior where the passengers are captured in a catatonic still-life as their frozen images float in perpetuity around a discerning CineChamber Station. Trapped on a haunted metro train to nowhere are the animated apparitions that emerge out of these photographic figures, which for brief moments re-imagine the former preoccupation and lost voices of these restless commuter "ghosts.” The spectral twilight audio commentary from Biosphere's Geir Jenssen suggests that these People are Friends — activated spirits of a human presence long since suspended.

External to the tube underground is the overground glided grandeur of Birds Fly where time and floated photo-plasms stretch and pull out of shape as they emerge from the lonely trains amidst a pulsing Biospheric undercurrent and Mittelstadt’s Slit-Scanned figurines.

3. cm: av_c
by Ryoichi Kurokawa, cross media hybridization

Adapted from Kurokawa’s longer cm:av_c concert program from the mid 2000's, the Recombinant Media Lab Trans Media archive expansion module consolidates & repurposes some essential excerpts from this former full hour production in full 5.1 channel surround. A timeless passage through thirteen minutes of Ryoichi's initial leap to prominence, there’s a feeling of a wayward balance between technologic modulation and a naturalist inspiration, between a modernist recombination and an atavistic cultural minimalism. A synaesthetic congruency where two different materials coexist but are drawn to a synthetic collision at the same moment as these contradictory substances become vacillating vectors vibrating as a unified neural pattern of simulative electrochemical auditory or olfactory visual impulses — what the eyes after images might imagine seeing when their lids are closed.

4. Brilliant Noise
by Semiconductor, sunspots and radio-phonics

Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor has brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganized into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.

5. Halveplane V.4 + Flam V4.1
by Masako Tanaka, visual and Oval (Markus Popp), sound

Halveplane V.4 + Flam V4.1 is a visual representation of Markus Popp’s Ovalcommers (early 2000’s period), delving to visually simulate fragmentary and densely-layered sound blasts with irregular, textured, and complex percussive elements. Listeners perceive Oval’s intricate integration of processed audible electrical glitches and tonal instrumental sources alongside Masako Tanaka's ephemeral labyrinthine clusteral disarrays.

6. Umfeld
by Scott Pagano, wraparound image, and Jochem Paap, ear enveloped sound

Jochem Paap & Scott Pagano's spatial experiments in hyperanimation led to their motion and music collaboration of Umfeld, which provides a glimpse of what it might be like to not just see and hear what’s within the range of our senses, but also the frequencies outside those limits. It is both a final product and a process. It started as an hour-long graphics film in concert with an intricately shape-shifted 5.1 soundtrack.
The title Umfeld is German meaning «environment» or «surrounding» and, essentially, that is what it is: a series of environments engulfing the listener/viewer. Pagano & Paap superimpose, displace, multiply, mirror, deform, and add complex audio-synchronized generated imagery and sound toward their mix, creating an overall comprehensive capability which exceeds the individual streams.

7. Static Room
by Scott Arford, illumination bursts and errant frequencies from analog television

The Static Room module is a raw ballistic AV bullet from Scott's ongoing series of performance & exhibitions which, with the palpitating chromatic moiré patterns from TV static and flawed connections, omits all representational images and ceases to portray a linearly composed narrative event. Clamorous tones and monochrome fields break down into vibrating sheets of interlaced fluttering and tumultuous crackling luminosities that make it possible to hear the buzz- shredding images and see the flickering sounds.

8. Parallel Head
by Ryoichi Kurokawa, visual and sound

A seminal Kurokawa project from the later 2000's gets the full panoramic treatment with the rapid fire Parallel Head—a real head turner in this 360-degree revamped version. Here Kurokawa upshifts his dynamic blip fast data pings to tidal waves of transitory, contradictory elastic tempos which are re-assembled in a sudden and surprising dramaturgy of distinctly indivisible sub-narrative temporalities. One may find themselves constantly “waking up” which is to say rolling back into full spectator consciousness after having been lulled gradually and then drifted into another cinematically cognizant space and then ineluctably being pulled back into the hypnotic condition.

Panorama Paranormal (2010 – 2019)

In order of recurrance:

1. Xynaxis
by Naut Humon, acousmatic apparitions

One of Xenakis’s first “polytope” multimedia pieces Persepolis was chosen for re-interpretation with customized remixes that the composer was aware was about to be released by Asphodel Records in 2001 when he passed away. The interlacing of the hybrid pieces by various contributing composers draws partially from the original work, emphasizing its noisy sonorities and overlapping waves of intensity. Naut Humon, who curated & spatially layered the customized re-workings, applied those remix source beds with other outside electronic shards from the Asphodel Frankenstein Symphony release & extra found audio splicings for this dedication tribute remix to the future memory of Iannis Xenakis.

2. Orbit Study (preview)
by Ryoichi Kurokawa, sound sculpted panoramic capture

Kurokawa’s original long form Orbit prototype premiered at Mutek 2012 in Montreal. This short form test flight version found Ryoichi transforming images of winter weather street scenes with a most primitive 360 mini-camera to deform alternate and aberrated earthworlds as it slips, rotates, and scans various skyline vicinities into near lucid r.e.m DMT dream states. Ryoichi destructs and reconstructs architectonic and organic abstractions with spatialized precision coercing a near total touchstone of half the prime senses. This minimized conflux of gestures, chaos and polarized ambiguities where virtual and actual images are no longer as distinguishable in a pixelated seesaw haze but the split second spatialized choreography impression is distinctly apparent.

3. Urban Horizon
by Egbert Mittelstadt, panner based habitats

A staggered impressionistic voyage through reality-ruptured metropolitan urbanscapes on an un-flattened earth. The deconstruction of the footage is trailed by a phase framed lingering unfolding for a creeping, unwinding, wraparound whirlpool. Films crawl forward in flawed slow motion and are prone to accelerate and de-fracture. This is warp-sensitive movement, not as we always know it, but might wish for on a deep blue lysergic night out.

4. Shell of Light
by Burial (Hyperdub) and Masako Tanaka, motion graphics

Burial's Shell of Light mystery song, from "Untrue" (2007), is the re-materialization of animated film footage, recombined, collaged and partially permeated by atmospheric sub narratives, and re-synthesized for this absorbing mercurial manifest. On the soundtrack inflection piano’s & sad strings eddy to a crawl as rain drizzles over mournful muted vocalizations. The haze daze is upon us brooding, reclusive and moody but with inches of color in its supple fabric.

5. Portrait in Half Light
by Paul Clipson, motion pictures, and Jefre-Cantu Ledesma, inner sanctum sound

Clipson's approach to making films was an attempt to bring to light subconscious preoccupations that reveal themselves while filming into an improvised stream of consciousness manner. Aspects of memory, dreams, and recordings of the everyday were juxtaposed within densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments vast and small, all within a flowing formal and thematic experimental aesthetic that encourages unplanned-for results. Maintaining a predominantly intuitive process in conceiving and creating films, where improvisation, utilizing mistakes, and "wrong" images (such as the overexposed or out of focus) were part of his filmmaking methodology. He was less concerned with a preconceived end result and more with being immersed in a visual exploration of the moment, where un-thought, unexpected elements reveal themselves.

6. Saffron Revolution Forever
by Fennesz, processed fretboard and tone barge Lillevan, vision drench
Co-produced by RML & ECAS / CTM

Saffron Revolution stretches out a single, euphoric multi-layered chord across much of its duration before dissipating away into a pattern of string delayed time tappings. Saffron Revolution is far and away one of the Cinechamber's most atmospheric and submergent modules, both in terms of the corrosion and sheet waves themselves, plus the sheer iridescence of the all-encompassing Oceania tidal-tronic harnessed within.

8. Dimensional Holofonic Sound presents "The Lift," a multi-media experience designed to transport a group of people to another level. The audience will enter the elevator-like CineChamber for a journey to different worlds created specifically for this immersive format.

This work in progress is a multimedia companion to the 2020 release of "Seeing Is Believing" by Dimensional Holofonic Sound, AKA Ben Stokes. This is Stokes' first custom media piece for the CineChamber. Those familiar with his work will recognize he has projected video on many shapes and surfaces, (the Shadowsphere tour 2010-2012) but this is the first time the audience is placed on the inside, looking outwards. The center vantage point is further enhanced by a full surround sound audio mix which stretches the dimensions to certain limits. This is not traditional audio-visual, rather, visual-audio.

Recombinant Media Labs

The Recombinant Media Labs organization was founded to research the qualities and artistic potential of Spatial Cinema. It does so by means of Experiential Engineering; exploring processes that propagate the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic AV exhibition. RML acts as producer and presenter of hybrid artworks and performance archiving based on spatial media synthesis; intermodal works using image, light, sound and other disseminated media in three-dimensional space. The CineChamber is RML's curated, nomadic platform under the artistic trajectory of founder & Director Naut Humon plus a superhuman crew.

STRRR

STRRR is the future of horizon-expanding television. Where superstars and brilliant newcomers hailing from the world of music, art, design, film, and fashion present their favorite clips and films through the nearly unlimited archives of the Internet. Each meticulously crafted episode presents a self-portrait of the selector, which allows us new insight into their life and work.

Minds Over Matter design

MOM is a San Francisco based ideation and design lab created in 2020 by the founders and creative team behind Obscura Digital.

Subscribe to our mailing list