UNSEEN series | Broken Solar/City of God
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.
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
Oakland based artist Chris Duncan will create a live score for the debut of BROKEN SOLAR, a new film by Headlands Center for the Arts Spring 2016 artist in residence Sarah Rara. BROKEN SOLAR is a meditation on natural resources, human-built environments, and the aesthetics of renewable energy. BROKEN SOLAR studies photo-voltaic surfaces, converting light into energy using the waste from solar installation as material, the video-in-progress makes use of discarded pieces of broken solar cells, reconstituting and recombining solar fragments into warped formations. The bones of a blue whale (solar-powered, taking it’s energy from the sun via phytoplankton and krill) makes an appearance and shimmering sheets of mylar, acting as stand-ins for waves of light, weave throughout the video. For the score, Duncan will respond to the film with a combination of field recordings made on the Northern California coast line and processed tones generated from tuning forks and harmonicas.
Then guitarist Sean Smith will present a program of long form composition and improvisation featuring original music and video by his project, LFZ as well as the first ever completely live interpretation of "...city of god" a a composition for tape loops and live guitar solo by the legendary Northern California duo, Science Fiction, whose extremely rare 1980 private press LP has just been reissued on Smith's imprint, Stimulus Progression. Science Fiction privately released only two discs circa 1980 so rare to become the stuff of legend. Here's some words taken from Mutant Sounds about their LP, Terrible Lizards: “This is as eerily prescient and vibe-rich a document of sub-underground weirdity as you're likely to encounter for some time.”