On Screen/Sound: No. 6

The sixth screening in the series On Screen/Sound features two works composed exclusively using light: Lis Rhodes' Light Music and Henning Lohner and John Cage's One¹¹ and 103.

With two opposing 16mm projectors illuminating the room, Lis Rhodes' Light Music shakes its audience from passive observer into active participant. Composed by printing black and white patterns onto celluloid film, which are then read by the projector as both audio and image tracks, Light Music flickers this "score" directly onto the audience as their shadows merge with the oscillating images. The sputtering of the projectors themselves blend with the audio to immerse the audience and make them feel at once as the projectionist, audience, and star.

The only feature-length film by the iconoclastic artist John Cage, One¹¹ was completed in 1992, the year of his death. A 96-minute contemplation on the movement of light, accompanied by sounds that just happen to occur at the same time (Cage's orchestral work 103), One¹¹ is not a normal film. As Cage says "One¹¹ is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity, which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power."

PROGRAM

• Light Music (1975–77) Lis Rhodes Studio 1
• One¹¹ and 103 (1992) Henning Lohner / John Cage Concert Hall