Friday, 23 May, 20:30, Vagonu Hall, PROCESS Expanded

Beneath the Spectral Oak

Melissa Ferrari (USA), Darja Kazimira & Zura Makharadz (LV/GE) 

A Magic Lantern Phantasmagoria performance

Beneath the Spectral Oak summons the tradition of magic lantern phantasmagoria, an 18th-century form of horror theater that used hidden lanterns to project apparitions and mythical creatures. Anchored in the conceptual framework of historical phantasmagoria, this revival traverses scientific, supernatural, and spirit realms, tracing antiquated specters that bleed into modern belief systems.  Performed with 19th-century magic lanterns projecting hand-painted and antique lantern slides, light and shadow are woven into haunted landscapes and conjured visions of spiritualists, alchemists, and incorruptible bodies.  

Performers

Melissa Ferrari is an experimental nonfiction animator, magic lanternist and educator who seeks to acquaint folklores of the past with contemporary culture. In exposing peripheral histories, she aims to unveil the wonder that lies in the shadow of nonfiction, rather than fiction. Her practice engages with the mythification of science and pseudoscience, the preternatural, and histories of phantasmagoria and documentary. 

Melissa is based in Los Angeles (USA) where she received an Experimental Animation MFA at CalArts. Her films and magic lantern performances have been shown internationally in venues such as Hot Docs, The Exploratorium, UnionDocs, Hauser & Wirth, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival.  Her commissioned documentary animations have appeared on PBS, the BBC & CNN.  As an educator, Melissa specializes in teaching nonfiction and experimental animation, and she will be a Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the College of the Atlantic.

Darja Kazimira&Zura Makharadze is a Latvian-Georgian musical project dealing with free improvisation and experimental music in the context of various concepts of ritual music and ritual art. This project also has a visual sequel, which captures experimental bodily practices, affective states, etc. 

Friday, 23 May, Vagonu Hall, 20:30

Wave Behavior/ Comportement d’onde

Loic Verdillon, Clovis Lemaire-Cardoen (FR)

Two 16mm projector performance with sound and light

Wave behavior (Comportement d’onde) is a 30 min Improvised performance for two 16mm projectors played by Lewis & Clovic. The projectors become animals of film-free projection. The raw light, arriving 24 pulses per second, is ceaselessly sculpted to create form and movement. We play with pre-cinema for a Space-Noise Opera with optical manipulation and light beam trituration… an audio-kinetic fiction of four hands. Simulacra are sent and dispersed in every direction, but because we see only with the eyes, it occurs that, where we turn our gaze, it in that moment that all the objects strike it with form and color. In that instant the emitted image pushes forward and advances the layer of air between it and the eyes… this chased layer of air thus bathes our pupilles and passes on. All of this must naturally  occur with a prodigious rapidity.

Performers

In 2012, Clovis Lemaire-Cardöen began a university studies in anthropology in Lyon, where he became interested in experimental filmmaking practices, from creation to distribution. In 2013, he joined the 102 volunteer collective and then the experimental film programming collective "Artoung!". At the same time, he explored various artistic practices, notably improvisation, and in 2015, he and Loïc Verdillon created the project of a film without film "Wave Behavior," an improvised play of light and sound. Since 2018, he has been exploring blacksmithing and metal deformation. He currently lives and works in the countryside around Bourges in France.

Loïc Verdillon is a filmmaker, musician and printmaker. Since 2010, he has been actively involved in 102's music and film programme. His current research focuses on sound, its materiality and its forms. He built ‘yotta-phone’, a performance for multiple megaphones, played in various festivals during the summer of 2015. His graphic work focuses on Ernest

Chladni's sonic forms in experimental printmaking. In 2015, he combined plastic art and audio for the installation of an ‘amusement park’ made up of dissected loudspeakers, working with the primitive elements of copper, paper and magnets. Since 2016, he has been co-directing and working at Atelier MTK Laboratoire de cinéma indépendant in Grenoble, where he makes films and performances in 16mm. He has presented Expanded Cinema performances of films and organised 16mm workshops around the world, including in Norway, Italy, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Belgium and Indonesia.

Tickets: bezrindas.lv 

Friday, 24 May, 20:00, Vagonu Hall, PROCESS Expanded

Warm Data

Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki (FI)

Step into the bustling streets of Toronto through the project designed as expanded cinema, where the visual narrative unfolds in layers of urban information captured entirely on 16mm black and white film to tell the story about city symphony.

Entitled “Warm Data,” it shows deep into the fabric of the metropolis, where every frame pulses with the city dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is typically learned only through quantitative data, (cold data).

Performer

Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki (FI/PL) is a visual artist Polish original, living, working, inventing and having fun in Helsinki, Finland. She is a knee-deep in photo-sensitive film and expanded print-making adventure. The core of her practice became a fusion of film and print oscillating between different scales from large canvases to 16mm films, space projections and live-cinema performances. She uses analogue machinery as optical instruments to build her stories located somewhere at the borderland of print, film and theatre.

Tickets: bezrindas.lv 

Saturday, 24 May, 19:00, Bar 1983, installation

Line Describing a Cone (1973)

Anthony McCall

Line Describing A Cone is what I call a solid-light film. It uses the projected light beam for its own sake, rather than as a medium for information. The screen is therefore superfluous, although a wall necessarily interrupts the light beam. The viewer must not turn in the direction in which the screen normally faces, but towards the light beam emerging from the projector. (...) The viewer can move around the slowly emerging light form, and thus participate in the spectacle.

Artist

Active in the avant-garde cinema communities of London and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, Anthony McCall began working in film and performance before developing his ‘solid-light’ installations, beginning with Light Describing A Cone, 1973. In this work, audiences moved freely within the space as a three-dimensional cone of light slowly emerged from a projector. P. Adams Sitney, in his landmark history of avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, described McCall’s installations of the 1970s as, “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” Since the 1990s, technological advancements have allowed McCall to continue to develop these installations, to involve multiple projectors inscribing increasingly complex and interwoven forms. 

Free entrance

Friday, 24 May, Vagonu Hall, 20:00

Probes

Olivier Periquet, Quentin Conrate (FR)

Improvised duo performance

Place a diamond tip on a record and listen to the characteristic cardboard-like sound, imagining it stretching endlessly. Let a beam of light touch a crystal object and watch the caustics ripple out into the space. Simple objects are explored through entirely acoustic and analogue instruments, revealing hidden optical and sound qualities that are otherwise inaudible or invisible in their normal use.

Performers

Olivier Perriquet has been practicing live cinema and installation for twenty years, often in collaboration with sound artists and musicians. Be it expanded cinema or video, installations and performances, his work frequently and implicitly refers to the scientific imagination and its language. Drawing on media archaeology, taking up Flusser's idea of 'playing against the apparatus', he crosses disciplines until one can no longer distinguish which media produces which form, using noise, the emergence of form, recognition of a ground within a form, as means of access to the ineffable in human and nonhuman experience.

Quentin Conrate is a sound artist and drummer active in contemporary music, musical theater and different fields of experimental art. He developped a specific approach on the drum set by reducing its elements. He called this new setup "incomplete drum kit" which allows him to explore the possibilities of creating a new set of acoustic sounds with its technics. His works are often crossing visual art and sound, dealing with space and movement. Currently working with different companies of dance performance and theatre, he's also writing his own pieces performed as solos or for different projects. He's frequently touring in Europe with numerous musicians and released many cds on labels worldwide.

Tickets: bezrindas.lv 

Friday, 24 May, Vagonu Hall, 20:00

Film-Circuit in Series

human infrastruture (KR)

Film-Circuit in Series reveals the hidden energies of silver halide film, treating it as both image and circuit. Two circuits intertwine: one of tin dendrites, grown upon the organic patterns of video feedback, and the other etched by high-voltage discharge. By triggering the spark through the dendritic circuit, human infrastructure generates Lichtenberg figures, fractal patterns tracing electricity’s passage, in real time.

Inspired by Kirlian photography’s attempt to reveal the aura of living beings, this process exposes a hidden ‘nervous system’ within the film—fragile veins of metal shimmering with spectral energy. As these electrical traces emerge and dissolve, the film becomes a site of unstable transmissions, where matter itself pulses with a ghostly charge.

human infrastructure is a Seoul-based audiovisual noise duo. human infrastructure combines noise music with experiments in expanded cinema to create cybernetic systems in which sound and film image modulate each other. Their idea of audio-visual is not one in which audio affects visuals in a causal way, or visuals determine the sound, but rather one in which audio and visual build upon each other through the incorporation of multiple bodies. Recently, they have been focusing on inscribing generative images on film through electrochemical interventions, and are developing devices to operate them. human infrastructure also runs Gäro, a lab for experimental analog audiovisuals, to organize screenings, seminars, and workshops for and by artists and scholars of moving images. They have opened for Experimental Film & Video Festival EXiS in 2023 and performed at WeSA Festival in Seoul.

Tickets: bezrindas.lv