Onion City Film Festival and the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM), in collaboration with Public Works Gallery co-present a live performance program adjacent to the festival exploring “expanded cinema” in an attempt to put cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving image reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew?

Tickets

Tickets are $15.

Tickets must be bought through the Onion City website. Because of zoning restrictions, guests without tickets at the door will be referred to buy tickets through the website.

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Program

timetable

800pm		Doors
800pm		Installation Viewing
830pm		Performances

Performances

Ruby Que // The Distance of the Moon (2024)

expanded cinema performance

The Moon was once very close to the Earth. Now it’s straying away from us by about 1.5 inches every year. Weaving together personal memories, myths, scientific discoveries and speculative histories, this multimedia performance meditates on yearning and presents strategies to reach unreachable places.

Alan Perry // Ritual Unbinding of Alexa (2024)

performance with live camera

In this performance, Perry uses the technics of arcane and occult ritual magic to unbind an Amazon Alexa virtual assistant from its programmed obligations. For this, a series of questions will be posed to the virtual assistant in the course of its deconstruction about its purpose, its relationship to Amazon, its conception of self and soul, and others. This aims to combine ideas posed by Yuk Hui’s “On The Soul of Technical Objects” with two colloquialisms in electronics: the “ghost in the machine” and the “magic smoke” that can be let out when voltages exceed the design of circuitboards.

Hunter Whitaker-Morrow // The Emissary [prayer 1] (2024)

responsive-media performance

The Emissary is a multi-part audio visual performance. Utilizing a software system developed in Max/MSP/Jitter, Whitaker-Morrow drives video and audio processing through the use of his voice alone in real-time. Employing reworked footage from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, archival sound from his grandparents’ church services, and his own field recordings in conjunction with his live oration and physical performance, Whitaker-Morrow conjures the occurrence of a Black-anarchist sci-fi rally and Afrofuturist sermon thus engendering an affective call for revolution in the present.

In [prayer 1], imagery is pulled from the abyss of the black projection surface providing fleeting moments of cinematic legibility tied directly to the voice and breath of the performer. At the same time, the video provides the main source of illumination for Whitaker-Morrow as he speaks, his body brought into existence through breath. The poetic oration he delivers incorporates quotations from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Gil Scott-Heron’s B Movie alongside his own writing. At the same time, his speech is complicated by distortion, ramping noise instruments, and the riotous blasts of fireworks, all of which threaten to overpower the voice entirely.

Liyan Zhao // The Question of Grief (2024)

desktop lecture + sound/light/olfactory performance

Can grief be generous? Is it inherently self-pitying? Can it strike you down? Can it treat you well? Is it possible to change the past? Do you get a choice? Can you mourn an ineffable loss? Can you anticipate a place that can’t be known until you reach it? Who is changed and who is dead?

This performance begins as a desktop lecture exploring different facets of grief before exploding out into a light-sound-olfactory space that asks us to sit together with loss in an embodied way. An assemblage of found and original footage and audio mixes references from history, science, folk traditions, and mythology along with diaristic accounts of the artist’s own encounters with grief.

Installations

Kristin McWharter // Wave (2021)

kinetic projection sculpture

Using experimental software and hardware systems, the show explores the emergent phenomena of ignition, provocation, synchronization, and the powerful forces that cause people to move together.The multimedia installation explores crowd simulation software and the real time digital image. The work deals with the perception of consciousness, the potential for connection, and the inevitability of distortion. What emerges is a sensorial and celebratory swell of energy that sweeps us in a common direction. Wave I, projector, pan-tilt motor, custom crowd simulation software, concrete curb. Wave II, monitor, custom crowd simulation software, concrete curb.

Andrew Wood // Seventy Five Threads (2023-2024)

interactive digital game space

Seventy Five Threads is a digital project examining the British New Town of Peterlee. Comprised of a vertical stack of town plans, the work is a collage, an approximation, a fantasy, and a psychogeographic labyrinth. Drawing on cinematic montage, New Town history on film, and William H. Whyte’s 1980 documentary The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Seventy Five Threads marries moving image, oral history, architectural research, and curatorial experimentation into a now ubiquitous media form - the video game. Within the game world users are free to walk (and warp) at their leisure, push shopping carts into ponds (or off the edge of the world entirely), and explore a zone both familiar and alien. Impressed upon these mid century dreams is a growing people’s history, found as cassette tapes throughout the world, users can listen to the memories, and desires of residents.

Luciana Decker // Language of Entrails (2024)

5 looping multi-channels with an environmental sound score

“That we all carry the dead alive; that what is dead lives.” Churata says; and Ovidio: “What has been? The same thing that will be. What has been done? The same thing that will be done.”

The project contemplates our bodies’ material essence, molded by interactions with others and our surroundings. Seramatakis’ concept of personhood, illustrated by a grandmother shaping breadcrumbs for her child, embodies this notion. I explore the significance of ingestion and communal dining, intertwining personal histories with shared meals. Sydenham extends this discourse, linking bodily conditions to shifts in the earth’s entrails. Deep-time reflections ponder past influences on speculation about an afterlife reunion.