Wave Currents: Bruce McClure–Tune Your Pipes and Fall A Humming
Co-presented by the Philadelphia Independent Film & Video Association, the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University and College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts.
For information on the Saturday program, please click here.
Using modified and manipulated film projectors, McClure (trained as an architect) creates a completely immersive experience. Each elaborately constructed and highly original projector performances is a spectacular display of sight and sound. McClure conjures the early cinematic experience of the mechanical age combined with a dizzying dose of modern day visual pyrotechnics.
In the 1990’s 16mm projectors were being relegated to a technological yard sale of hobby horses for aficionados of the quaintly obsolete. This hybrid of incandescent and mechanical paradigms delineated in a roomful of people with a screen, a PA system, some film and audio equipment is a deceptively simple machine. It is, however, a powerful tool to ensconce, escape, transpose, reflect, amplify, compress, deflect and obstruct. These are some of the operative verbs constantly under revision in the formal suite of reception. In an auditorium, sited within the arc of an audience, the 16mm. projector is privileged as a part of an extra-ordinary nonlinear differential equation. Leaning into an enfilade of harmonically related, phase independent, sinusoidal inputs the projector signals to an inveterate pasture of nerve endings. Threaded with loops, film becomes only a technical substrate, a sprocketed analogue in service to the projector’s engagement with neural images that hang between the gaps of the bio-synod. Bruce McClure’s projection performances transfix film in headlights, flatten it and leave it behind as road kill. In this work the mimetic potentialities of the projector to tell a story through enactment and directness upsets the argentine cinematic picture palace shaking its walls and tearing fresh openings for light and ventilation. Projection performance, according to McClure’s definition, “abandons the camera on the other side of the picture plane valorizing the latent hush of a theater populated by cooperation and darkened with expectancy creating a vantage point for aimless observation and drift of internal gyroscopes.”
- Bruce McClure, Brooklyn, NY, August 11, 2011
Wave Currents is an ongoing series that investigates the interaction between live cinema and live music, showcasing a variety of artists whose work is creating an entirely new category of sound/moving image performance. In order to demonstrate the breadth and variety of current audiovisual practices, Wave Currents encompasses work that ranges from abstract to representational from performative to lacking any obvious human presence. Works are analog and digital – some use cutting-edge tools and others manipulate the almost-dead medium of celluloid film itself. What connects these performers is a passionate interest and curiosity in the complex and multi-faceted relationships between sound, visuals, meaning and context.
