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True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore 

(2007) 

by The Light Surgeons is the result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, New York.

The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally.

True Fictions is an audio visual spectacle that fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and live cinema which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.

 

Source: The Light Surgeons' website

 

 

Recorded and shot in and around Troy, New York, True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore is an eye-popping performance of epic proportions with projections on multiple over-sized screens that fuse documentary film making, live and electronic music, animation and motion graphics with innovative digital video performance tools.

Taking American folklore as a departure point, the UK-based Light Surgeons tackle the universal question of how our personal, political, and national myths evolve from subjective stories to widely held truths. The artists guide the audience through this terrain with a live collage of documentary footage, interviews and music recorded in Troy and across the rest of the state of NY- from Troy's Uncle Sam's Day Parade to a cramped music studio in Brooklyn to an upstate Native American reservation and more.

 

Source: EMPAC

 

 

True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore, found footage, architecture, people, Live Visuals

Reading

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (2008) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/ artist theory in which artist/ practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. (VJ Theory)

VJing (2010) is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article VJing, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010 and was produced as a physical outcome of the wiki-sprint, a collaborative writing workshop that was held 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva. (Greyscale Press)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Robert Heel is a German audiovisual artists, VJ and electronic musician in the fields of video and sound design, installation, audiovisual live performance, VJing and music production. (Robert Heel)

Christian Ernest Marclay (*1955) is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Christian Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument. (Wikipedia)

Logic of mind (2006) by Robert Heel. The scenario of this piece is a static shot of a wooden floor. Main elements for the composition are a synthesizer, a drum machine and different parts of the screen for percussive sounds of knocking. (Robert Heel)

Funkstörung: The Zoo (2004) - Zeitguised's interpretation of The Zoo by Funkstörung is a lighthearted piece that affirmates the facility of synthetic constructions against the heavy, serious notion of established constructions, including CG's own means of photorealism. (Zeitguised)

Coldcut: Natural Rhythm (1997) by Hexstatic is the second part of the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, Stuart Warren-Hill's first experiment in video sampling, the first piece being Frog Jam and the third being the critically acclaimed A/V single Timber, which won the MCM Atlas [French national TV] Award for Best Video Editing (1998). Although Stuart was the main architect of this trilogy, it was created with the support of Coldcut and Greenpeace. (Hexstatic)