2017
next: 2018
a thousand machines
photo © 2017 Birringer
film and live electronics / music
Johannes Birringer (film)
Paulo C. Chagas (music)
Premiere performances:
November 17, 2017 Culver Center, University of California, Riverside
November 22, 2017 Arts@Artaud, Artaud Performance Center, London
Performed by Gary
Barnett (Los Angeles)
Finbar Hosie (London)
Description
"Wer seine
Laster besiegen will,
muss seinen Lastern nachgehen"
[Oscar Wilde]
A troubled yet famous
classic masterpiece of the silent film era – Fritz Lang’s futurist
Metropolis (1927) – provides the catalyst for this contemporary revisiting
of machinic modernism. Both deeply ironic as well as melancholic in nature,
this short audiovisual remix is ultimately disturbing, in its quiet commentary
on the delusions of “workers leaving the factory” (the title of
the earliest cinematic moments of Lumière). There is no exit. Chagas’s
piano music is haunting and spectral, descending into a furiously imagined
loneliness.
The workers in Birringer’s a thousand machines are shrouded in mist
and fog, the darker atmosphere of the industrial underworld depicted in Lang’s
curiously patronizing ideological filmic mess of a failed communal uprising
against Capital. The uprising drowns, ending in a pathetic scene of reconciliation
– between capital and labor – in this grand dystopian city of
future and present class tensions. The workers in a thousand machines are
not robots, however, but “brothers” who exchange places (one briefly
escapes into the Yoshiwara pleasure club, alluded to by Oscar Wilde’s
epitaph) and move fluidly in the sense of Meyerhold’s biomechanics.
They are also actors.
Thus, they are dancers and workers in a museum of cinema (Lang’s original
version was 153 minutes long, released in a drastically cut version by UFA
and Paramount; lost footage was only recently rediscovered in Argentina in
2008; Soviet and East German archives also had recovered some missing scenes
and restored them in 1972). This museum is troubled and broken up, as the
restored version now allows a fuller critique of the original film’s
völkisch and fascist resonances, and Lang’s megalomania.
This treatment in a thousand machines does not so much undermine the Wagnerian
tones of Lang’s film which features a Parsifal-like mediator, the son
of the capitalist leader, nor delve into Rotwang’s engineering of the
erotic robo-Maria, but focuses on the Heart Machine, the perverse clock that
seems to control the city’s electrical supply. The city breathes with
an electronically augmented soundtrack of whispers, spacecraft radio signals,
distorted speech sounds, lost fragments from science-fiction – slowly
becoming immersed in the musician’s strokes, a liminal piano music that
makes this audio-visual composition by Paulo C. Chagas and Johannes Birringer
drift off from any idealistic ending. All associations with the mass ornaments
of machine modernism and the architectures of the triumph of the will dissolve
in the concluding misty vapor, where Japanese butoh dancer Min Tanaka stands
alone, an unaccommodated body in midst of an alienating built environment
(today’s London).
This performance represents the third film-concert collaboration between composer Paulo C. Chagas and media choreographer Johannes Birringer. Their first digital oratorio, Corpo, Carne e Espírito, had its world premiere at the Klauss Vianna Theatre, Belo Horizonte, Brasil during the FIT-BH Festival 2008. Sisyphus of the Ear, a silent film for live percussion and electronic music, premiered in Ufa (Bashkir) at the Bashkir Philharmonic Society in October 2016, and went on tour in 2016-17.
Bios
Paulo C. Chagas is Professor of Composition at the University
of California, Riverside. A very versatile composer, Chagas has written over
150 works for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic music, audiovisual
and multimedia compositions. His music unfolds a pluralistic aesthetic, using
the most diverse musical materials from different cultures, acoustic and digital
media, dance, video, and audiovisual installations.
Chagas is also a prolific author of articles on musical semiotics, electroacoustic
and digital music. His most recent book Unsayable Music (Leuven University
Press, 2014) presents theoretical, critical and analytical reflections on
contemporary music creativity. The six essays of the book approach music from
different perspectives such as philosophy, sociology, cybernetics, musical
semiotics, media, and critical studies.
Websites:
http://paulocchagas.com
http://music.ucr.edu/faculty/chagas/
Johannes Birringer is an independent choreographer/media artist. Since 1993
he has been artistic director of AlienNation Co (www.aliennationcompany.com),
and has created numerous dance-theatre works, videos, digital media installations
and site-specific performances in collaboration with artists in Europe, the
Americas, China, Japan and Australia. His film installation “Vespucci”
toured Brazil in 2001; a dance film, “XU”, was created and exhibited
in Beijing in 2004, and “Canções dos olhos / Augenlieder“
(with music by Paulo C. Chagas) was featured at SARC, Belfast and the 2007
Dança em Foco in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The collaborative telematic
installation “East by West“ was shown at DEAF2003, Rotterdam.
The oratorio “Corpo, Carne e Espírito,“ created with Paulo
C. Chagas, opened the 2008 FIT Theatre Festival in Belo Horizonte. He lives
in Houston and London, and co-directs the Design and Performance Lab at the
Artaud Center, Brunel University London, where he is a professor of performance
technologies (www.brunel.ac.uk/dap). Together with fashion designer Michèle
Danjoux he has created immersive dance works featuring electro-acoustic and
sensortized wearables. DAP-Lab’s “Suna no Onna“ premiered
in London in 2007; the mixed reality installation “UKIYO [Moveable Worlds]“
premiered in 2009-10 before touring in Eastern Europe in 2010. A new dance
opera, “for the time being/Victory over the Sun,“ premiered at
Watermans International Digital Arts Festival in 2012; an expanded version
was shown at Sadler’s Wells (2014). The dance film “Lung Pulmo
Pneumo“ was exhibited at Cinedans Festival, Amsterdam, in 2014. He collaborated
on the European METABODY project, along with 12 other European organizations,
and DAP-Lab’s kimospheres, a series of immersive installations, began
touring in 2015-16. He is also founding director of Interaktionslabor, an
annual media lab housed in an abandoned coalmine in the Saarland (http://interaktionslabor.de).
* * *
Pibloktoq
dance film
Arts&Artaud, Artaud Performance Center, London
Produced by The North Answers/Shadows of the Dawn Productions
Photography: Pia Arke
Libby Hooper (performamce)
Amara Bjorkhaug (camera) Johannes Birringer (camera)
Clark Morton (performance)
Matthew Arnott (music)
Voice by Marina Abramovic
Karim Hadaya (production assistance)
Johannes Birringer (camera/editing)
* * *
becoming tree
created for theatre installation,”Letters to the Unknown Friend in New York, “ directed by Olga Danylyuk
Arts Arsenale, Kiev, Ukraine
"becoming tree" is a video poem created by Johannes Birringer in honor of a group of young scholl children in the eastern part of the war torn Ukraine who worked towards a creative theatre installation project, shown to the public in Kiev in late December 2017 and again in Jjanuary 2018.
The children were seeking contact with the outside world and a fictional correspondence between them and an unknown friend resulted in the production of four audio tracks, answers sent to the children to their questions, and a small the small film "becoming tree" - both media 'letters' were included in the public installation in Kiev.
performance, Johannes Birringer
sound, Knighton Park, Nine Simone ('Sinnerman')
editing and postproduction, Johannes Birringer
(c) DAP-Lab/Shadows of the Dawn Productions
* * *
Subjective Fashion, exhibition
Alberta, Canada
curated by Elena Siemens
The Subjective Fashion exhibition has been documented and published in a special issue of Polyglot.
The Polyglot Magazine of Poetry and Art, Issue 2 (Fall 2017)
