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a man silhouetted on a low lit stage surrounded by electronics and music instruments.

WOW & FLUTTER

The San Francisco Tape Music Center

A two-day festival celebrating 40+ years of evocative creation featuring performances the classic and contemporary works by the original members of The San Francisco Tape Music Center (Bill Maginnis, Tony Martin, Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, and Morton Subotnick) with The Ensemble Sospeso and a percussion ensembles under the direction of Brian Wilson.

Integrating the radical sensibilities of the avant-garde and the counterculture of the 1960s with the arts, film, and performance practices, the members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) created art with impact that is still being felt today. Formed in 1961 by Pauline Oliveros (now Arts Department faculty at Rensselaer), and Ramon Sender, Morton Subtonick, Tony Martin, and Bill Maginnis, the SFTMC has collaborated with artists including Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. The SFTMC's "do it yourself" ethos and commitment to experimentation has made them some of the most forward-thinking artists of our time. Their pioneering work with electronic music, as well as mixing film and images with sound during a performance, has set the bar for all that has come since.

The five principal members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center converged on the RPI Playhouse on Friday, October 1st and Saturday, October 2nd, 2004 to perform concerts showcasing both celebrated SFTMC works and modern pieces. This event was a historical SFTMC retrospective. The early monumental pieces remain vital and groundbreaking, and the performances of the artists' current works allowed us to experience the thriving energy of their ongoing artistic research.

VIDEO

Program

  • Pauline Oliveros and Tony Martin, Circuitry for 5 percussionists and lights
  • Morton Subotnick, Until Spring Revisited for laptop and 8-channel audio
  • Tony Martin, Silent Light with images and light projections
  • Ramon Sender, Tropical Fish Opera for fish and four musicians
  • Morton Subotnick, Mandolin for viola, piano, tape with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin
  • Pauline Oliveros, Bye, bye Butterfly for tape with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin
  • Ramon Sender, Great Grandpa Lemuel's Death-Rattle Reincarnation Blues
  • Pauline Oliveros, Apple Box Double
  • Ramon Sender, Kore for tape with with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin
  • Ramon Sender, Desert Ambulance for accordion, tape, with visual composition and performance by Tony Martin
  • Morton Subotnick, Release for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and 8-channel computer
  • Pauline Oliveros, Pauline's Solo for accordion and eight channel Expanded Instrument System (EIS)

Main Image: Wow & Flutter on the Rensselaer Playhouse stage. Photo: Franz Swarte, 2004

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Three people chatting intently silhouetted against a large projection of a cluttered room.

THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER

The Wooster Group

THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER is the Wooster Group’s first interactive 360° war film. Sitting inside a panoramic screen, the audience is surrounded by the film’s bewildering narrative space, where the action can only be seen and heard clearly through a virtual peephole that scans the circle, controlled by a member of the audience. The audience becomes immersed in a process of discovery whereby the very choice to look or turn away actually creates the story. This installation—which takes its title from a banner visible in the final scene of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film, On the Beach, depicting a post-nuclear apocalypse Earth—is a film about war and the ways that individuals respond to war. Seated in a revolving chair in the center of the 360° space, audience members take turns controlling a virtual “window” to highlight discrete aspects of a story about British and French troops battling for control of Fort Calypso (a battle site in the French and Indian War); joining the battle are grotesquely enlarged children’s toys vying for attention with politically minded blog-gers, unsavory YouTube videos, and a mercurial host who attempts to articulate the implications of this unique “narrative space.” With each viewing, a new cinematic experience is spun out of the choices of individual audience members. 

Initiated in 2003 as EMPAC’s first commissioned work, THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER took four years of development and production to complete, including technological research and collaboration with international partners in Australia and Germany. It was directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and developed with Jeffrey Shaw for his interactive panoramic cinema.

The Wooster Group is a collective of artists who make new work for the theater. Under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte and with its associates and staff, the group has created over 40 works for theater, dance, and media. For more than 30 years, the Wooster Group has cultivated new forms and techniques of theatrical expression reflective of and responsive to our evolving culture, while sustaining a consistent ensemble and maintaining a flexible repertory. Elizabeth LeCompte has directed all of the Wooster Group’s productions since the founding of the company in 1976. Jeffrey Shaw has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema, and installation paradigms of the ’60s to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms.

Main Image: The Wooster Group in residence in Studio 1, 2003. Photo: EMPAC.