2024 Live A/V Performances
Madison Brookshire and Lydia Greer
** PLEASE NOTE: Due to high demand, THIS LIVE CINEMA PROGRAM IS FOR FESTIVAL PASS HOLDERS ONLY **
Friday March 1st @ 9PM
at Fatwood
Ivey Rd, Carrboro, NC
** PLEASE NOTE: Due to high demand, THIS LIVE CINEMA PROGRAM IS FOR FESTIVAL PASS HOLDERS ONLY. No tickets will be sold at the door. **
Double or Nothing
Madison Brookshire, 2022
Performance for two 16mm projectors, harmonium, sine tone, and voice.
RT: variable
Offset 16mm projectors create an un-moving image: a field of light with a bright, inset rectangle. Sine tone, harmonium, and voice harmonize with and amplify the sound of the projectors.
No. 1
Madison Brookshire, 2022
One 16mm film on six reels, overlapping projection, color, sound.
RT: 12 minutes
Semi-symmetrical 16mm films fail to negate one another, creating a work of non-cinema. Color by Fotokem; Colorist: Doug Ledin.
About Madison Brookshire:
Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, including Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada. More info at: www.madisonbrookshire.com
Facing West Shadows: The Endless End
Lydia Greer
RT: 25 minutes
Facing West Shadows: The Endless End is a cinematic, sculptural installation also performed as extended cinema that illuminates the perpetuation of extinction and survival, the disrupted life cycles of native plants and animals, aquatic systems, and fire ecologies as affected by anthropogenic climate change. The viewer’s attention is guided through projected moving images, hand-made animation, and cast shadows with a multi-dimensional soundscape. Collapsing and expanding time, North American species will live and die within a looping, overlapping, multichannel, and multidirectional projection. Our role as animals within a system and as the planet’s apex predator is illuminated in a sculptural environment. As in proto-cinematic cave paintings and ancient shadow theatre storytelling traditions, Facing West Shadows: The Endless End seeks to understand non-human species and our relationships with them.
By weaving multiple moving images of Bay Area/North American ecologies, mycorrhizal networks, mirror neurons, fire, and water, Facing West Shadows: The Endless End takes the viewer on a time-based and immersive journey through cycles of ecological and species extinction and, sometimes, survival.
The Endless End was created at the DEAR residency for time-based arts in 2020 (Oakland, CA) during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the skies were apocalyptically tinged orange with wildfire smoke. The piece was then installed as a looping 750 sq ft multi-channel cinematic sculptural installation at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art for five months in 2022. Facing West Shadows worked together to create the installation (principal members: Lydia Greer (artistic director) and Caryl Kientz (theatrical director) in collaboration with artist Ya Wen Chien with additional artwork provided by John Hundley Greer and children who created and sent bird and insect puppets to Facing West Shadows during the pandemic. Music composed by Kristina Dutton and Fay LaRoque.
Hallucinations
Lydia Greer
RT: 10 minutes
Hallucinations is an experimental stop-motion animated film by artist Lydia Greer featuring puppets, performing objects, and cut paper. Hallucinations is inspired by the life and poetry of Mirabai, a legendary 16th-century poet and street performer in Rajasthan, India. Hallucinations tells Mirabai’s story of escaping gender-based violence, survival, freedom, joy, and ultimate transformation. On her husband’s death, she refused to join him on the funeral pyre, escaping to the mountains to find freedom as Krishna’s lover, enveloped in the supernatural. Performed at Cosmic Rays is a 10-minute extended cinema iteration of a longer version of Hallucinations, usually performed as a LIVE “animated” opera (Mirabai Songs by John Harbison performed by my collaborator, the operatic vocalist Shauna Fallihee) or used in a large-scale multiple-channel sculptural installation with the same title.
About Lydia Greer:
Lydia Greer is a widely exhibiting interdisciplinary visual artist, filmmaker, animator, and the artistic director of Facing West Shadows, a Lumia arts collective working with shadow casting/ hybridizing art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art in the gold rush climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. Expanding into film/animation, theater/opera, puppetry, and sculptural installation, Facing West Shadows creates surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms. More info at lydiageer.com.
Cosmic Rays Film Festival 