Thornton, Platz, Forcefield

TERRA COGNITA:
RECEPTION WITH LESLIE THORNTON, BERLIN ROSENTHALER PLATZ, FORCEFIELD

Terra Cognita reception | Performance by Forcefield:
Sept. 21 | 4:30-6:30pm | IDEA at the Bread Factory (704 Tillary St.)
(Performance by Forcefield begins at 5pm)

THE 10,000 HILLS OF LANGUAGE | Leslie Thornton

Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process—a collective one, “position(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.” She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Alan Sondheim and Harun Farocki, all artists who are opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the museum or gallery space as well as in the public spaces of the movie theater, television and the Internet. With The 10,000 Hills of Language, the complex elements that demarcate Thornton’s work came together as an installation—a multi-screen media environment—in which the interplay between media and environment, language and pleasure is brought to a new intensity. “Finally, in 10,000 Hills, I’m bringing forward a premise that always lay beneath the surface of Peggy and Fred in Hell—that language is both Heaven and Hell, in other words, expansive and limiting, complex and ambivalent,” says Thornton.
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The Cinematexas installation, offers a continuous unfolding of biological, technological and “celestial” images, evocations of a silent, pre-verbal, outside of language. There is the sound of ducks splashing and quacking. A flurry of white forms, seen just inside the door, resolves into white ducks running back and forth endlessly within a confined space. The (rear-projected video) ducks are housed at the base of a dark wall which cordons off the rest of the interior space, inviting the viewer towards a flickering light beyond. On a low triangular platform there are more ducks running at floor level, forming a silent pedestal on which rest two television monitors displaying the core material—footage of two children—Peggy and Fred—and strange interludes of speech analysis conducted by robotic entities. The children are precocious, relishing their own ingenuity, tripping blithely over words, contorting language to their own ends. There is an implicit tension between the children and the robots, as they seem to echo and interrogate each other. The dominant sound overall is of the children in their environment, and the (A.I.) robots, intermixed with ambient sounds of historical and pop-cultural origin, the quacking ducks in the distance. From this interior perspective, all three image sites are simultaneously visible, suggesting a rich, and unpredictable environment. Across the three sights there are starling, sometime frightening synchronicities, randomly generated. The whole piece plays on a disturbing edge between humor and terror, a poetic cocktail that Thornton seems to have perfected, and which places the viewer in an unusually vulnerable position. – Thomas Zummer

BERLIN ROSENTHALER PLATZ | Berliner-Alexanderplatz Group

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"Berlin Rosenthaler Platz" is a filmic puzzle-work created out of a classic novel and its reflections. Several key scenes from the famous novel by Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, are undertaken--a "critical reconstruction" under new and/or comparable social circumstances, shot in original sites, arranged in a nonlinear way and framed by abstract sequences.

Several questions are adressed in a 5-part video, presented in front of a broader timelin/description/overview video. The 5 pieces deal in different ways with the questions mentioned above, ranging from full scale acting scenes, interpreting the layered personal relations that Alexanderplatz provides, to perfectly abstract sequences that shed a light on the so-called "2nd level", that Döblin himself mentions in (not published) introduction versions as being part of his novel.

PERFORMANCES & INSTALLATIONS | Forcefield

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All locked up in fur and metal, animate but never animated, some have two legs, some are delineated like renaissance portraiture, others are placeholders for us humans in variously bleak or sunny scenarios, some cross roads, others are ciphers for terror, sometimes they just run, but where did they come from and where are they going? Ancestor robots and muppet androids from Lost in Space to Sid and Marty Krofft to the Star Wars watering hole to MSK 2000 went from corny to camp to banal and back again. Forcefield stops the spinning wheel at banal and settles in. The Providence-based collective structures their milieu-based video mobile as a nuts and bolts shout out to what Tom Gunning called “a cinema of attractions,” movies made before The Great Train Robbery forced storytelling on countless innocent victims. Forcefield also wants to stun and amaze, but only with valium-packed inaction. Quivers, glimpses, musings, wanderings, only middles, no beginnings and no ends. All hail Fort Thunder! The middle is always the best bit! — Steve Ausbury

Also showing at Cinematexas by Forcefield:

Sad Robots (video / installation / performance)
Sept. 18-22| IDEA at the Bread Factory (704 Tillery St.)

Performance with Miranda July:
Sept. 22 | 7pm | Scottish Rite Theater