The Depth and the Ply
Launch of Glass Bead's first online issue
Site 0: Castalia, the game of ends and means (glass-bead.org)
Friday 19th Febuary 2016
7:00 pm - Presentation of Glass Bead's overall project by Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard and Inigo Wilkins
7:30 pm - Film screening - The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda), (2015, 70min) by Metahaven
The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) challenges the Internet as a weapon of mass disruption. A cinematic adventure that spans documentary, art film production, and music video, it conceives of and visualises the idea of worldwide social media as an emergent architecture for political activism and propaganda.
Two unknown men speak on the phone. They discuss their involvements in military operations in eastern Ukraine, accompanied by images of a chaotic stroll through a nightly, Russian forest. A plane passes through the moonlit night sky, and a voice recites a poem by Anna Akhmatova, while a woman, in near darkness, looks at herself in the black mirror of her computer screen. Then, she looks at us. Enter the strange and deceptive world of The Sprawl, a strikingly poetic film on propaganda in the internet age.
Metahaven’s feature debut film is a documentary and a music video. Silent sword fighters stare at us. Silent actors look at us. They gaze at their screens, and at the deepest corners of YouTube. Strange and colorful interfaces overlay their appearance until medium and message become one. Together with cinematographer Remko Schnorr and electronic musician Kuedo, Metahaven in The Sprawl create a new visual world for the internet’s geopolitical agitprop.
Trailer of the film : The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)
9:00 pm - Ear of Cyclone, sound performance by Yoneda Lemma (appearing as Katrina Burch & Donatas Tubutis, or d-n-e) with the sound installation of d-n-e
Two sonifying articulations triangulate to form the dimensionality of a listening experience, between an indifference point and a zone of disintegration. A listener––the indifference centre, sounding pipe, or its archaeological equivalent, ‘datum point,’––is situated in the unstable zone of sonic milieus and concrescent sonic junk. It is as well a player lost in a plot, a bucket with an ear, who must excavate or carry-out a sense- making procedure into a system of echoes, resumptions and resonances, (re)constructing a site through sonic suggestions. Perception of sound is archaeological (durational, decompositional, and stratigraphic). Layers of processual abstractions reveal that these spaces entered by a listener are synthetic (listening-knots): simultaneously engineered and discovered, each sonic concept artifacts a listening experience. Gestures of sonic abstraction articulating perceptual automatisms, weave xenoic vehicles (sonic types) in a generic, epistemic landscape (into an artificial memory system), wherefrom a listener gains traction (extracting polyrhythmic frequencies) on reticulated conceptual nodes and is, in this procedure, endowed with the possibility to synthetically deploy maps and hypothetical cues for freeing the horror of thought (that escapes itself). Boundaries of sense slip like snakes. What mind alike can speak of Xeno without having begun to articulate its earworms?
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Free entrance on reservation
to reservation@leslaboratoires.org or 01 53 56 15 90