The Milk Bar - Live Film Festival Feb 2nd, 3rd 2007 at CounterPULSE

Friday: Special Focus on films from the Open Cinema Festival including work by St. Petersburg's most famous clown PLUS many local and US artists. Friday's program includes:

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Saturday: Focus on "live" work including Anthony Discenza and Michael Zybszynski's, "News Cycle #2"

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Anthony Discenza and

Michael Zbyszynski

News Cycle #2

Video: Anthony Discenza,

Composition: Michael Zbysznski

News Cycle #2 is a live collaborative digital artwork consisting of reprocessed, interwoven excerpts from three 24-hour cable news networks. The raw material is 36 hours of news footage, 12 hours each from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox news on one day last summer. Each section of the piece represents a different compression of the day’s footage, exposing digital and analog artifacts inherent in the technical processes. Zbyszynski manipulates the resultant sound from this footage using a customized digitizing tablet to "draw" a score by extracting data from the video stream. He uses the tablet to select specific scan lines from the piece, generating changing buffers that are subsequently convolved with either the audio content of the video, pink noise (in silent sections), or a mixture of the two.

Anthony Discenza was born in New Jersey in 1967 and currently resides in Oakland, CA. He received his undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Wesleyan University in 1990 and an MFA at The California College of Arts and Crafts in 2000. Since the late 1990’s, Discenza’s work has focused primarily on our relationship to mainstream media. In addition to his personal work, he devotes a great deal of time to HalfLifers, an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist Torsten Z. Burns. Mr. Discenza’s solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including The New York Video Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He was recently included in the “Reprocessing Information” exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Discenza is currently represented by The Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Video Databank of Chicago.

Michael Ferriell Zbyszynski is a composer, sound artist, performer, and teacher in the field of contemporary electroacoustic music. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in composition from the University of California, Berkeley and studied at the Academy of Music in Cracow, Poland, on a Fulbright Grant. Playing flute, saxophones, clarinet, Yamaha WX-7, live electronics, or things made from coffee cans and PVC, he has appeared with Roscoe Mitchell, Myra Melford, the Berkeley Symhony Orchestra, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Other Minds Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Montréal Jazz Festival. He has taught at the Universities of California Berkeley and Irvine, Berklee College of Music, and Northeastern University, and can be heard on the ARTSHIP recording label. Currently, he is Assistant Director of Music Composition and Pedagogy at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.

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Erika Chong Shuch and Ishan Vernalis

To Hellen Bach (2007)

An ESP Project film

created by Erika Chong Shuch and Ishan Vernallis

performed by Erika ; camera/ edit by Ishan ; music by Allen Willner, and others

To Hellen Bach was created out of a three day experiment. The story of the film unfolded because of the imagery Ishan and Erika were attracted to. We did not decide prior to our three days together anything about the content of this film.

Special thanks to the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts

Since graduating from U.C.S.C in Theater Arts, Ishan Vernallis has presented performative and multimedia works at the S.F.MOMA, the Seattle Art Museum and most recently worked with the E.S.P. Project creating the video element to “ORBIT, (notes from the edge of forever)” which has been nominated for an IZZY award in visual design.

Erika Chong Shuch is a theater maker and teacher. She is co-director of the Experimental Performance Institute at New College. The Erika Shuch Performance Project (ESP Project) is a group of actors, dancers, musicians, and designers creating original performance work aiming to articulate the world’s hopes and horrors in an artful and compassionate way. The Goldie Award winning company has shared work through the International Arts Festival and received support through residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, ODC, 848/ Counterpulse, and Djerassi. Erika worked under the mentorship of Joe Goode through CHIME, a mentorship program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. She is a recipient of the Gerbode Foundation’s Emerging Choreographers award.

ESP Project is honored to be a resident company at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco’s oldest alternative arts space, where their newest work, 51802, will premiere in Fall, 2007. An excerpt of 51802 will also be performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in March, 2007.

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Evelyn Ficarra and Ian Winters

Rendition (2006)

Composer: Evelyn Ficarra (UK/SF)

Piano: Myra Melford (SF)

Video: Ian Winters (SF)

Created collaboratively for film, prepared piano and harpsichord, CNMAT composer Ficarra (UK/US) and filmmaker Winters present Rendition. Following its debut at London’s 2006 Cutting Edge Festival, the US premiere features solo piano music performed by the acclaimed jazz pianist Myra Melford. The film is an animated window into a fractured world of two precariously balanced musical ecosystems, engaged in a struggle over resources and intelligence, where "all the things of the past rearrange themselves, line up in rows, and whatever is present is utterly and urgently present." (Rilke) Rendition was originally commissioned by Jane Chapman and Kate Ryder for their Keynote+ ensemble.

“Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist-composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." (Francis Davis, Stereo Review)

Evelyn Ficarra studied with Jonathan Harvey and has written music for dance, theatre, film, radio and the concert hall. Her solo CD 'Frantic Mid-Atlantic' is available on the Sargasso label www.sargasso.com . She has recently taken up a fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is working towards a PhD. www.evelynficarra.com

Myra Melford: From her first album in 1991, it was clear that this pianist and composer would stay around," the New York Times said of Myra Melford. Melford has not only stuck around, but she has flourished. She has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including nine as a leader , performed in more than 30 countries, won major awards for composition and piano performance, and worked with some of the world's most innovative musicians. Melford's staying power is the product of ceaseless musical travels; she's always going somewhere. As Francis Davis noted , "Myra Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." Melford is also active in music education. She is currently Assistant Professor of Improvisation and Jazz in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley. www.myramelford.com

Ian Winters is a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer, video-maker and performer. His recent work focuses on the intersections of photography, video and performance, often as collaborations and site-specific works with musicians, composers and choreographers. He trained in photography, film and performance at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston and Tufts University. www.ianwinters.com

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Andrew Lyndon, US

Cat Black Sea (2006

This premier is a sequence from an in-progress 30 minute film, Catblack Sea.

Andrew Lyndon is an Oakland-based videographer, animator, and filmmaker who makes stand-alone video, freelance multimedia work, video theater sets, and narrative film. He currently teaches animation and film at California College of Arts, and is is the digital imaging and video instructor at Pixar Animation Studios. He was the editor for the 2005 Siggraph Animation Festival, producing and editing the festival trailers. He recently finished animation and titles for the documentary Making Whiteness Visible, as well as a forensic animation detailing the replication of DNA to be used as court evidence. He received his MFA in painting from Yale University.

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Andrew Bucksbarg, US

Chair (2002) 06:55
Chair is an audio-visual piece that follows artist-performer Julie Adler and her chair as she explores the abject character of a trashed office space in downtown Los Angeles. Setting up a relationship between the chair-women, the space and a smoky substance, Chair explores themes of isolation, abandonment, waste, decay and deterioration.

Andrew Bucksbarg is a media artist, experimental interaction designer, audio-visual performer and a professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. Bucksbarg’s work and interests reverberate in the space of new technology/media practices and theory. As an experimental interaction artist, Bucksbarg concerns himself with technologies and social systems that support tactics of ambiguous, autonomous social creativity and exchange.

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The League of Imaginary Scientists: A Live Diagram of the Human Condition (an Imaginary Science experiment)

an interactive performance examining the connection between thought and action while figuring the digestion of the world, drawn with interactive media, movement, and new sound

movement...blindsight choreographer/dancer paige starling sorvillo
interactive audio...George Cremaschi
responsive environment...the League of Imaginary Scientists

A Live Diagram of the Human Condition (an Imaginary Science experiment): An interactive performance examining the connection between thought and action while figuring the digestion of the world, drawn with interactive media, movement, and new sound. Choreographer/dancer paige starling sorvillo moves within a drawn, responsive environment constructed live by The League of Imaginary Scientists and sound artist George Cremaschi. Eating words and swallowing clouds, starling sorvillo brings her lexicon of animated gestures and expressions to contemporary Butoh. Overlaid with scientific data, the live interaction relays the political and physical anatomy of consumption.

About the players:
The League of Imaginary Scientists concocts interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with scientists, technologists, and artists engaged in many media. While the League’s collaborators are very real, these card-carrying imaginary scientists have adopted pseudonyms to protect their anonymity in the cutthroat world of digital soft science: Live Diagram contributing imaginary scientists are Doctors Aojiru, Chao Hwa Chung, and L. Hernandez Gomez. Live Diagram collaborators are paige starling sorvillo, a 2007 CHIME awardee and artistic director of the performance collaborative blindsight, and versatile musician/composer George Cremaschi.

links: www.imaginaryscience.org | www.blindsightperformance.org | www.paigesorvillo.com

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Dan Carbone, US

Untitled : A special world premiere featuring Andy Kaufman from the 1970's...

Dan Carbone has been active in San Francisco Bay Area theatre since 1995 as a both a playwright and performer. He studied with Ann Galjour and Grace Walcott, appearing in the Solo Mio Festival’s “Best of Writer’s Who Act”, and has also appeared as a solo performer at EXIT Theatre, Climate Theatre, The Marsh, Venue 9, Studio For, Studio Valencia, the Speakeasy, The Field, and The Milk Bar. His Solo Performance piece Up From the Ground, won Best of the San Francisco Fringe and SF Bay Guardian Goldie and Upstage/Downstage Awards, and was nominated for a Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Award for Best Solo Performance. Nurtured as both a writer and performer during the last decade by his continuing association with both EXIT Theatre and Kaliyuga Arts, his other plays have included Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals (3 SF Bay Guardian Upstage/Downstage Awards), The Pilgrim Project (Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Award for “Best Original Script”), An Impersonation of Angels or The Enigma of Desire, There Be Monsters!, and now Kingdom of Not. He has acted in, and contributed material to, numerous videos by the legendary underground film directors George and Mike Kuchar, including George’s Secrets of the Shadow World, which included excerpts from There Be Monsters! and premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2000. Dan is a graduate of the NYU Film School and currently lives and works in Oakland, California. www.dancarbone.net

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Anne Haydock, US

Eaten

A game of dress-up: windows and wallpaper, hawks and moths, olive loaf and margarined toast.

Five aesthetically varied segments draw on direct animation, hand manipulation, time-lapse photography, and choreography to create a sometimes lyric, sometimes jarring meditation on what it can mean to eat and be eaten.

Anne Haydock is an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Film and Video Production. She has screened documentary, experimental, and hybrid works at festivals and curated events in the U.S., Canada, Europe and the U.K. Her creative and research interests include early documentary forms and theory, transgendered images of femininity, steganography, and dead and dying mediums. A recent transplant from Philadelphia, Anne now lives and works in Iowa City.

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Jennifer Gwirtz

The Residency Project: Hand Study

Jennifer Gwirtz has performed in venues all over the Bay Area, as well as in Boston, Chicago, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic. She received her Masters in New Genre Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. With John Baumann, her husband and work partner, she has co-produced shows as Right Brain Performancelab since 1998, most recently “Faith, Folly and Revelation” at ODC in 2006. The video that is being shown tonight is the result of a Resident Artist Workshop at Shotwell Studios in June 2006. She has performed with Spinning Yarns Dance Collective, Mary Armentrout Dance Theatre and Maxine Moerman Dance Theatre, and was seen in Dan Carbone's play “There Be Monsters” at the EXIT Theatre. She will also be in "Deep Maps," a collaborative evening at ODC on February 9 and 10. When she is not dancing and making videos she teaches Pilates at The Body Gallery in San Francisco and is five-month-old Rain Carla’s mother. She is very excited to be in the Milkbar International Film Festival.

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TOO PUBLIC: Stine Eva Jorgensen/ Sol Hockings, Denmark

Obstruction

Too Public consists of two Danish female performance artists and film-makers. Coming from a theatre, dance and performance background Too Public explores innovative ways of how to integrate live performance/movement with film/new media and poetry/sound. For more details see www.myspace.com/stineeva

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Miranda Mutanta, Britain

This Bloody Show

A photo and film essay about my changing relationship to performance, and my performing body since becoming a mother. It is a document of giving birth to my daughter, the most intence physical performance of my life. It is also a reflection of the inescapable way a baby takes over (at least for me) your body, time and energy, becoming the focus of all creativity. This focus on the baby becomes a kind of mutual performance, the baby is watching and reflecting the adults avid attention.

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2007 St. Petersburg Open Cinema

The Open Cinema Festival is a partner festival to the MilkBar run by the Bereg Art Center in St. Petersburg. It features some of the best new experimental film from St Petersburg and across Russia including unique performance collaborations such as Islands by the Russian Butoh group, Derevo, and Cigaretta by AKHE as well as new animated shorts such as Lullabies by Liza Skvorcova, Bed by Masha Sharafutdinova, and The First Round Dance by Masha Godovannaya among others.

As part of the partnership prior selections from the MilkBar festival showed in the 2006 Open Cinema Festival. Films will be introduced briefly by Katya Madrid, a former bay area artist and art historian now based at St. Petersburg’s European University.

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MUSIC BIOGRAPHIES:

EDMUND WELLES: THE BASS CLARINET QUARTET has the distinction of being the world's only original, composing band of four bass clarinetists, they invent and perform heavy chamber music. The bass clarinet has a 5 octave range and a huge span of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic capabilities. Since 1996, Cornelius Boots has led and composed for Edmund Welles, which received a Chamber Music America Grant in 2004 for the creation of Agrippa's 3 Books, a multi-movement work inspired by occult philosophy and heavy metal music. This piece is featured on their debut album of the same title [mixed and mastered by Grammy-award winning sound alchemist Oz Fritz] and the piece was premiered in 2005 on both coasts, including a performance at John Zorn's new NYC venue The Stone, which made All About Jazz NYCï¿1⁄2s Top Ten Performances of 2005. The album also made the Top Ten Albums of 2005, along with artists such as Wayne Shorter and Peter Brotzmann. www.edmundwelles.com

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The Resonance Quartet

The Resonance Quartet (Heather Frasch, Jason Levis, Lisa Mezzacappa and Aurora Rising) is interested in exploring and redefining the space in which it performs, creating a new listening experience for the audience. The space becomes the sound object in which gestures and textures arrive from working within that object. The Resonance Quartet is interested in searching for new and exciting venues, or sonic spaces, in which to perform, such as caves, warehouses, gyms, etc., and the various possibilities in which to exploit that space.

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Myra Melford

From her first album in 1991, it was clear that this pianist and composer would stay around," the New York Times said of Myra Melford. Melford has not only stuck around, but she has flourished. She has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including nine as a leader , performed in more than 30 countries, won major awards for composition and piano performance, and worked with some of the world's most innovative musicians. Melford's staying power is the product of ceaseless musical travels; she's always going somewhere. As Francis Davis noted , "Myra Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." Melford is also active in music education. She is currently Assistant Professor of Improvisation and Jazz in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley. www.myramelford.com