See the list of Living Cinema performances
video of Between Science and Garbage
video of The Statue of Giordano Bruno
video of Living Cinema at Roulette – Special Forces
This project first started by a performance presented at the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in February 2000, under the title of Entre ciencia y basura. The piece involved a combination of music (Bob Ostertag), live scratched animation (Pierre Hébert) and theater (Baltazar Lopez). The project continued in a transformed lighter form more apt to touring with only Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hébert.
The fist phase of the project consisted in developing a live video processing software for Pierre Hébert who thus ended up abandoning animation engraved directly on film as a base for performance. Thanks to the support of Joshua Kiy Clayton, Bob Ostertag wrote this software with the first beta version of what was to become Jitter a few years later, the now well known video processing language. Actually, Between Science and Garbage was one of the first pieces using Jitter presented publicly, well before it could be found on the market. The Jitter patch we use kept changing in order to fit the need of the performance and also to adapt to the constant evolution of Jitter. This constant work on the software was an integral part of the evolution of Living Cinema. Nevertheless our aim never was the display of the marvels of computer work but rather the constant staging of the confrontation between the bodily actions of the performers and the processing by machines so that the process remain as transparent as possible for the viewers.
Although there were some early exploratory performances in the spring of 2001, the real beginning of Between Science and Garbage and Living Cinema was the show presented at The Walker Center for the Arts in Minneapolis on September 20 2001, one week after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. It is at this occasion that the project found its fundamental thread as a live commentary, on the razor blade, of the world situation. We performed Between Science and Garbage during two years until the beginning of the war in Iraq. Then we made a DVD version of the piece which was published under the Tzadik label. We continued on with another piece entitled Endangered Species which referred to the ongoing war in Iraq and to the reelection of George W. Bush as president of the United States. This was performed until the end of 2005 and a DVD version is now in the process of being made.
Special Forces (note: we don’t perform Special Forces anymore, we are currently preparing a new piece entitled Home which is going to be premiered at the Perugia Contemporary Art Festival Le Arti in Citta on 26/09/09. More information about Home is going to be posted soon)
Since 2001, there has been up to 60 Living Cinema performances a bit everywhere around the world (in the United States, in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Nederland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, Lebanon and Japan). The fact that it is totally improvised made it possible to constantly adapt to the most recent events in the world situation. The presentation of the main piece was often time accompanied by shorter pieces that were made after video shooting done on the same day in the very city where we were performing (for example The statue of Giordano Bruno performed in Rome after video shooting done on the Campo dei fiori.).
Special Forces (note: we don’t perform Special Forces anymore, we are currently preparing a new piece entitled Home which is going to be premiered at the Perugia Contemporary Art Festival Le Arti in Citta on 26/09/09. More information about Home is going to be posted soon)
For more information about Living Cinema and about the conditions for presenting a performance, please contact Pierre Hébert (ph@pierrehebert.com) or Bob Ostertag (bob.ostertag@mac.com)
Connect to the BLOG.
