SEE THE TECHNICAL RIDER

See the list of Living Cinema performances

video of Between Science and Garbage

video of Endangered Species

video of The Statue of Giordano Bruno

video of Special Forces

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 is Living Cinema’s new piece. It was inspired by the bombing of Lebanon at the summer of 2006. After a few presentation as a work in progress, it was premiered in Beirut in April 2007 as a part of the Irtijal festival of experimental music. Then it was presented at The San Francisco International Film Festival, at Roulette in NewYork and at The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.

Special Forces was decided very quickly over a short phone call between me and Bob Ostertag sometimes in August 2006 while the bombing of Lebanon was raging on. We had been working for months on a new piece centering on computer games without any convincing results and we were still trying to fight our way through it.. When we talked that day, we were both overwhelmed by what was happening and we thought we could not let this pass. It is really one of the beauties of the Living Cinema project that it allows us to react quickly to what is currently happening. So we decided to reorient our project and use our game images and sounds to comment on the war in Lebanon. Days after this decision, we received a e-mail from the Irtijal Festival in Beirut asking us to come perform «something» there in April 2007. This invitation gave a strong focus to the piece. We were committed to premiere it in Beirut during the winter… assuming that it would be possible to fly in Lebanon by then. It came from a very visceral reaction to what was happening, especially the fact that many of the victims were children. But presenting it in Beirut soon appeared to be ridden with hard ethical concerns about what it meant to go in front of a Lebanese audience and show images relating to the war they had been suffering through. But at that point we had no choice but do it.. It is part of the Living Cinema concept to do things on the razor blade.

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. See the VIDEO).

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)

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See also Bob Ostertag's site