Oddball Films welcomes intermedia artist Elise Baldwin to our Cinema Soiree, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. Elise Baldwin is an intermedia performer and sound artist whose live cinematic works center around themes of natural history, collective memory and relationships between technology and the natural world. Using custom software instruments, physical props and circuitry, she often combines and manipulates original and archival recordings. She will be presenting two recent audio-visual works: she will be performing her newest work The Philosophy of Storms (2014) live as well as presenting her multi-sensory circus experiment Hippodrome (2007). Additionally, to foreground Elise's presentation and talk we will be screening several 16mm films from the archive including Origins of the Motion Picture (1955), a fascinating documentary describing the events leading to the perfection of motion pictures, and examining the technological development, from the theories of Leonardo Da Vinci to the inventions of Thomas Edison; excerpts from Georges Melies's fantastical Baron Munchausen’s Hallucinations (1911), using new camera tricks and exquisite sets to bring the stories of the legendary Baron to life; and Lapis (1965), a mesmerizing early computer-generated animation from the great James Whitney.
Date: Thursday, March 19th, 2015 at 8:00pm
Featuring:
The Philosophy of Storms (2014, Performed Live)
The Philosophy of Storms is inspired by my fascination with early American meteorology, storm watching and our cultural evolution from a faith-based society to a scientific one. In the Victorian era, storms were often interpreted to be signs from God or indications of coming end times. With recording and communication technology, our collective perceptions of weather shifted towards scientific and predictive models. As always in Baldwin's work, there is the tension between the natural world and the technological means that we use to measure and record it.
Hippodrome (2007)
This audio/visual piece is the result of Baldwin's interest in the early American Circus, and the history of aerial performance. This form possesses great resonance both as an athletic pursuit and as a cultural symbol of the human desire for physical transcendence. For this project Baldwin collected hundreds of sounds and images from public and private archives, then abstracted and mutated these sources in a process of digital composting. The goal was to emphasize the material attributes of the sources while using contemporary tools to create a new structure and context for these existent fragments of cultural memory. This project was generously supported by Harvestworks.
Other Films Include:
Origins of the Motion Picture (B+W, 1955)
This fascinating documentary describes the events leading to the perfection of motion pictures, and examines the technological development, from the theories of Leonardo Da Vinci to the inventions of Thomas Edison. The film examines reliefs on Indian temple walls, DaVinci’s Camera Obscura, the Magic Lantern, the many facets of moving image inventions from the Thaumatrope, or “wonder turner ” , the Phenakistiscope, Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, the Zoetrope, Edison’s, Kinetograph and many more evolutionary moving image projection devices. Produced by the U.S. Navy in collaboration with The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, Thomas Alva Edison Foundation and the George Eastman House of Photography.
Excerpts from Baron Munchausen’s Hallucinations (B+W, 1911)
Georges Méliès was the magician par excellence of the early cinema, innovating constantly to bring cinema to its full expressive potential. In his rarely-seen version of Baron Munchausen, Méliès takes on the fantasies of the great traveling Baron, using new camera tricks and exquisite sets to bring the stories to life.
Made by a spiritualized James Whitney (one of only 7 films he created) and one of the most accessible experimental films ever made; Lapis was created with handmade cels evoking a single mandala moving within itself; its particles surge around each other in constant metamorphosis.
About Elise Baldwin:
Elise Baldwin is an intermedia performer and sound artist whose live cinematic works center around themes of natural history, collective memory and relationships between technology and the natural world. Using custom software instruments, physical props and circuitry, she often combines and manipulates original and archival recordings. Elise has spent much of the past two decades working as an audio director, multimedia producer and video editor on gaming and educational projects. Designing sound and creating musical compositions for many theater and film productions, she has had the good fortune to collaborate with talented musicians, dancers, performers and theater companies. Artist residencies include Arquetopia, Experimental Television Center, CESTA, and Harvestworks. Recent performances include San Francisco Cinematheque's Crossroads Festival, Headland Center for the Arts, Other Cinema, Soundwave Festival, PS 122, ResBox, New York Electronic Arts Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and CalArts CEAIT Festival.
