Brussels/Ghent

Almost Cinema (October 6-17th) presents work from visual artists and performers whose work is intertwined with cinema. The audience at Almost Cinema will rediscover cinema with new and established artists showing exciting experiments or interesting reflection on cinema and its affilitates.

Exhibition Almost Cinema 2009
Featuring works by Hans Op de Beeck – Celebration (Belgian premiere); Bram Vreven – Rays; Aernoudt Jacobs – Permafrost (premiere); Felix Hess – It’s in the air; Jean-Noël Montagné –
Je te parlerai dans un reflet de lumière; Pablo Valbuena – Augmented sculpture series (created for Almost Cinema); Kurt D’Haeseleer & Bérengère Bodin – Je connais des gens qui sont morts (premiere of the installation and performance); Juliana Borinski – LCD.

In the Almost Cinema programme, Vooruit investigates how cinema can break away from the screen. Visitors are invited to step right into the middle of the cinema experience, and experience the dynamics of basic cinematic principles like light, sound, space and movement more intensely. And it is usually the small, simple or subtle things that amaze us: tiny ripples in the new film painting by Hans Op de Beeck, Bram Vreven’s fascinating game of black and white fields and volumes or Felix Hess’s flowing movement of small flags.
In his new installation, Aernoudt Jacobs experiments with the sound of cracking ice. Sound artist Felix Hess’s intervention in the space makes the visitor spontaneously prick up his ears and observe in silence. Like this, Hess draws attention to the effect of silence instead of sound.
Since his projection on Den Haag’s city hall last summer (part of todaysart festival), Pablo Valbuena has continued to amaze audiences with “augmented spaces”. His newest work for Almost Cinema, “extended series”, places an aesthetic game with space centrally. The interactive installation by Jean-Noël Montagné confronts the visitor with the limitation of the feeling of space, as the inhabitants of (conflict) areas confronted with a separation wall experience on a daily basis.
Juliana Borinski tries to recreate the magic of pre-cinema in the movements of liquid crystals, which can be found in modern computer and television screens. Kurt D’Haeseleer & Bérengère Bodin have created a moving landscape with inflatable objects in which live performances communicate with (the reflection of) video images.

Live programme Almost Cinema 2009
Some highlights, full program here http://vooruit.be/en/serie/50

BALTAN Laboratories presents Tez, Synchronator (Gert Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk) and Edwin van der Heide – Fri 9 oct, Vooruit

The evening features live performances of three works that, using a minimal and formal approach, create an own time-space continuum: LSP by Edwin van der Heide, SYNCHRONATOR by Bas van Koolwijk & Gert Jan Prins and PV868 by TeZ. Talks with the artists and a panel discussion before the performances will shed light on the research, the motivations and the working processes of the featured artists.

In LSP Edwin van der Heide explores the relationship between sound and three dimensional image using laser projections. He composes with the frequency and phase relationship of the sine waves, aiming at creating signals that have both a structural musical quality and a time-based visual quality. SYNCHRONATOR is a video and audio research project by Gert-Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk that combines digital and analogue means in a rigorous down to earth approach: they work with a vocabulary of electrical signals that is characteristic of machines themselves and that often cannot be recorded. PV868 is an experimental performance by TeZ in using a combination of flickering video and binaural beats to produce an audiovisual feed/stimulus which allows moving visual patterns to emerge directly in the brain.

What these artists have in common is that they are all interested in researching the core elements of their medium. They are deeply interested in the physical, physiological and psychological phenomena that make a medium possible. They create their own tools to realize their artistic ideas and perform with their self-built soft- and hardware machines.

The discussion will focus on the use custom technologies, self-built technological set-ups as musical instruments, performing and improvising with self built machines and generative systems, and also on the expanded concepts of space, sound composition and cinematic narrative in contemporary audiovisual work. What sort of a space is created in these works?

The panel will be moderated by Arie Altena, and apart from the performing artists, also includes contributions by Lucas van der Velden and Angela Plohman from BALTAN Laboratories.

KAIROS - Wed 14 Oct, Minard
Kairos is a short science fiction film by Belgian artist Alexis Destoop and American writer Aaron Schuster. Filmed mainly in the Australian outback, the movie deals with questions of time and landscape, colonization and desertification. The film follows the adventures of Larry Church, an agent of Collective Time Flow (CTF), a government organization created in the aftermath of the Great Temporal Catastrophe to take control of the passing of time and ensure that the population remains synchronized.
The evening at Vooruit highlights the unique soundtrack of the film, composed and performed by internationally renowned experimental musicians Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley. Their musical creation is an integral part of the Kairos universe, dramatizing the breakdown of time through a sonic texture which moves between repeating pulse and clashing dissonance.

CINÉMA INVISIBLE - Thu 8 Oct, Vooruit (Domzaal)
composter HELEEN VAN HAEGENBORGH and others
With the arrival of CDs and mp3s, the glory days audio cassettes seem well behind us. However, old, self-made tapes remain a must-have for many a music lover. Pianist Heleen Van Haegenborgh, up-and-coming drummer Lander Gyselinck, double bass player Kristof Roseeuw and electronica artist Jürgen De Blonde, a.k.a. Köhn still cherish the magic of the audiotape.
For their Cinéma Invisible project, Van Haegenborgh and her colleagues work with old audiotapes from the archive of visual artist Jasper Rigole. His ‘International Institute for The Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other people’s Memories’ is a continuously expanding multimedia archive of found private documents.
For Cinéma Invisible, the musicians work with private recordings of, for example, a holiday. They create an audio drama, a film without pictures, where the audio material forms the basis for the musical improvisation. The musicians focus on the relation between text, music and silence as well as on the images that these convey. Visual artist Kelly Schacht takes care of the set design.

NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA – RAMBO SOLO - Thu 15, Fri 16, Sat 17 Oct, Vooruit (Balzaal)
Young New York company Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which performed Poetics: A Ballet Brut at Vooruit last year, is one of the biggest stage revelations of the past years. Their performance Rambo Solo is as fascinating as it is simple. Ever since he was ten, Actor Zachary Oberzan has been obsessed with the film Rambo and First Blood, the book on which the film is based. Oberzan narrates the story in full detail with childlike enthusiasm. On the three screens behind him, you see the reconstruction recorded in his tiny New York apartment: the loft bed becomes the cliff Rambo dives from, the shower becomes a prison. When his memory fails him, Oberzan fills the gaps with creative variations. As his story unfolds, the difference between the movie superhero and the stage actor becomes more and more unclear.

Symposium Shot by Both Sides! Double Take
Thu 15 Oct, 10:00–18:00, Vooruit (Domzaal)
Organized on the occasion of the Belgian première of Double Take at the Film Festival Ghent and the exhibition Double Take Plus at bkSM in Strombeek and Mechelen, this international symposium explores some of the main issues of Grimonprez’s film. Apart from including a screening of Double Take and a lecture by its filmmaker, the symposium deals with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the visualizations of doubles and monuments, the oscillation between cinema and television, Cold War iconography and our contemporary culture of fear and catastrophe.
Speakers are: Johan Grimonprez, Tom Mc Carthy (Author of Remainder), Edwin Carels (KASK), Steven Jacobs (KASK, Antwerp University), Dany Nobus (Brunel University) and Jodi Dean (Hobart & William Smith Colleges, NY).
Full program on http://doubletake.kaskprojecten.be/program.