The 6th annual Mono No Aware expanded cinema event is having a breakthrough year. For the first time, it is now officially taking place over two nights: Dec. 7-8 at LightSpace Studios in Brooklyn, NY. Each night is also completely free to attend.

Mono No Aware is always an absolutely unique event featuring live cinematic performances that are, for the most part, designed to take place one time only. If you don’t see these here, you won’t see them anywhere.

Each performance also features a celluloid element, either 16mm or Super 8mm, which is usually combined with some sort of live audio performance. However, there are also several film installation projects, such as Jodie Mack‘s ultra-cool zoetrope bike — a cinema that is entirely pedal-powered!

Filmmakers and performers from all over the country — and a few from overseas — will present their pieces for one night only, so make sure you attend both nights for two entirely different and separate evenings.

Full descriptions of each performance is below, but for more info, please visit the official Mono No Aware website.

December 7

7:00 p.m.:

IV PHASES
16mm multi-projection installation / Film Loops with two-way mirror & optical sound environment
Robert Howsare (Kansas City, Kansas)

IV PHASES explores chance operations and interventions upon film through the use of multiple projectors and film loops. The hand-printed imagery references the structure and systems of the celluloid frame. When played through optical sound projectors, the printed mark on the 16mm film creates it’s own soundtrack, determined by the pattern and opacity of the ink. Conceptually, IV Phases presents the seemingly infinite possibilities that exist from a finite system, as film loops of varying lengths are continually falling in and out of sync creating continuously shifting imagery. When viewed from the back, the two- way mirror acts as a screen for the layered projection, while simultaneously becoming a projector/reflector that deconstructs the layers upon the opposite wall. The apparatus is now implicated in it’s own projection creating a volleying between material and process. The projection allows an opportunity for further possibilities of chance operation through audience interaction.

SELECTED SCENES WOVEN FROM STAR WARS IV A NEW HOPE AND STAR WARS V THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Super 8mm film with projected light / Back lit installation
Mary Stark (Manchester, United Kingdom)

‘SELECTED SCENES’ is a hanging tapestry hand-made from Super 8mm celluloid film and lit by un-spooled projectors. Mary has come to understand the tactile objects she creates as ‘edits’ and sees a reel of film as a spool of thread.

EXPANSION CONTRACTION
16mm single projection / Film loop
Miro Hoffman (Allston, Massachusetts)

EXPANSION CONTRACTION consists of a 16 mm film loop taking an untraditional path. The film travels on a set of rollers, up the wall, across the ceiling, and feeds back into the projector. The celluloid becomes a line drawn through space, and exposes the moving image flashing past the light of the projector. The single projection installation is a one-minute loop of layered patterns of flashing color that warps the flattening of space.

BIKE-CYCLE
Zoetrope / Pedal powered interactive installation
Jodie Mack (White River Junction, New Hampshire)

A pedal-powered zoetrope culled together from an exercise bike of experimental animation legend Cecile Starr, a piece from a discarded animation stand, an old bike wheel, and single light source — re-calls a pre-cinematic miracle: the magic of motion.

MEASURES
Super 8mm multi-projection & colored gels / Toy instruments and audience participation
Tara Nelson (Malden, Massachusetts)

MEASURES explores the synesthetic relationship between sound, image, motion and color. Four super 8 projectors are each gelled with a primary color: red, green, yellow and blue. Before the performance begins, members of the audience are given a toy instruments, and asked to play a corresponding color.

JE NE SAIS PLUS (WHAT IS THIS FEELING)
16mm multi-projection performance / Live film loop edit and sound mix
Kristin Reeves (Muncie, Indiana)

An obstacle course between the heart and the doctor’s office leads to [DESTINY.] Playing her tower of nine projectors to the timing of a prerecorded soundtrack that pivots around international versions of “You Don’t Own Me,” Kristin Reeves meditates on the materiality of the body and the struggle to achieve personal sovereignty within its bounds. Built on 27, 10-second 16mm film loops constructed from reshot found footage and direct laser-animation techniques.

WATERSHED / SURFACE PATTERNS
16mm multi-projection performance / Live musical performance
Mike Bonello / Man Forever (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania & New York, New York)

WATERSHED / SURFACE PATTERNS is the result of several years’ experimentation with a 3-pass color process, done in camera with color reversal film. This hyper-colored multi-film projection features the Cowanshannock Creek, the Youghiogheny River on “Over the Falls Day,” and the Atlantic Ocean in Far Rockaway. Surface Patterns is a piece of music by Man Forever from the album Pansophical Cataract (Thrill Jockey Records, 2012). Bonello performed as a member of Man Forever earlier this year, when in the process of learning this song he was told to visualize the surface of water as it goes over, or is just about to go over, a waterfall.

RICHARD GAMBLE
Drum machine, keyboard and vox / Live music performance
Richard Gamble (Brooklyn, New York)

Richard Gamble performs a live music set including tracks off of his self-released ‘Vagrant’ EP. Gamble is resident DJ at LOST SOUL a monthly house/techno/disco party based in Bushwick and founder of a music/multimedia label under the same moniker. This year he performed at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF) plus a number of local venues including Vaudeville Park and the Wreck Room.

December 8

7:00 p.m.:

GANZFELD TEST
16mm multi-projection installation / Interactive sculpture
Amanda Long (New York, New York)

GANZFELD TEST is an immersive color space experience for one or two spectators at a time. Color fields and flicker films fill a cinema that covers the viewer’s upper body, surrounding the head completely with light. A ganzfeld is a uniform visual field – akin to standing in a blizzard that obscures the horizon – where the sky and the land become one and the viewer’s sense of depth is lost. This installation utilizes a 360-degree infinite film loop environment of pulsating color fields to create a similar disorienting effect.

B-90 NOIR
16mm single projection / Live mix of radio waves
Johnny Rodgers (Binghampton, New York)

B-90 NOIR is inspired by Hiroshi Teshigarhara’s The Woman in the Dunes, a film about confinement and escape. B-90 NIOR attempts to turn away from film as a document of an event by producing a field of unscripted encounters. Here is a visual and sonic provocation, an invitation, into the liminal, the always transitional.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S AUNTS
16mm single projection / Live voice-over with two megaphones
Elina Brotherus (Helsinki, Finland)

Two photographers are working to make a self-portrait with a large-format view camera. They pay homage to Francesca Woodman, who for her age could be their niece.

CEMENTAGE
Super 8mm + 16mm projection performance / Live light-as-sound performance
Masha Mitkov (New York, New York)

Cemented technology, the figure connected to the floor attempts to play a mangled VHS into the mix. Transforming objects beyond function, this piece explores how to un-build concrete, ground up: from black and white images to the motion they stir. Though the films are mute, the things on which they project absorb light & digest into sound.

WHERE’S THE CHILD?
Super 8 mm multi-projections + 35mm slide projections / Live theater, dance, and voodoo
Joey Huertas aka Jane Public and Suzana Stankovic (New York, New York)

WHERE’S THE CHILD is a performance that will reveal the trauma involved in high conflict divorce and parental alienation tactics. Live voodoo and false allegations will be used to visually demonstrate how parents and children can be systematically used as weapons of destruction against one another, despite any loving relationship history surrounding the original family composition.

THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL
16mm dual-projection / Live mix of cassette recordings, field recordings and electromagnetic amplifacation of projector motor
Margaret Rorison (Baltimore, Maryland)

THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL is an ode to Harry Bennett, the artist’s 93-year-old grandfather. Harry made a living as a painter for Gothic and Romance novels in the 60s & 70s and is now living with dementia. He spent much of his life as a solitary man, committing himself to walking, philosophizing and creating. This piece incorporates their shared love for reflection amid landscape. The 16mm footage was shot during a residency in The Ozarks. The audio accompaniment of this piece incorporates recordings of Harry Bennett, field recordings of oilrigs and fishing wire in a Louisiana bayou, and live amplification of the projector’s motor using both contact microphones and electromagnetic pick-ups.

WILL O’ THE WISP
Super 8mm + 16mm multi-projection / Live ensemble dance performance, vocals, and props
Katie Fleming & Sean Hanley as Holus Bolus, Charlie Adams, Leslie Guyton, Rachel Garis, Matt Bovee, Sara Dobrinich, Kevin Jones, Laura Murphy, Angel Ortiz, Benjamin Robert, Carrie Walsh & Samantha Owens (New York, New York)

WILL O’ THE WISP is a multi-disciplinary performance devised by Holus Bolus to explore the relationship between home and self-identity and is based on research into the events surrounding the slow destruction of a small town in Pennsylvania. Centralia, PA was an active anthracite coal mining community until the 1960s when an abandoned coal deposit caught fire. In the following decades the government and community struggled to decide Centralia’s future. It was eventually evacuated due to the toxic gasses expelled by the subterranean fire, wafting from the very same hills on which the town was founded. In creating ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, Holus Bolus desires to provide audiences with an immersive transcendence through the integration of film with potent ensemble dance and vocal performances.

JAHILIYYA FIELDS
Synthesizers, drum machine, and vox / Live music performance
Matthew Morandi (Brooklyn, New York)

Jahiliyya Fields performs a live set including tracks from this year’s 2 X LP release UNICURSAL HEXAGRAM (L.I.E.S.)

“L.I.E.S. boldly go where most other House labels wouldn’t dare, presenting an excellent LP of cosmic synth music with religious overtones conceived by Matt Morandi aka Jahiliyya Fields. It’s one of the label’s most substantial releases to date, and not only by length. The music itself is of a wholly more gratifying calibre than their usual – albeit excellent and unconventional – dancefloor releases, drawing upon a wealth of exploratory synth music and symbology fro Islam and Thelema to set the mind off on more spiritual, intellectually nourishing forays. From a Terry Riley-like ascension/immersion ‘Servant Garden’, ‘Ocean Mom’ melts into therapeutic new age drone and noise washes, while bass rhythms creep into the equation with the throbbing arpeggios of ‘Air On Earth’, and the oscillating flux of ‘Water Breaker’. A soundtrack to Steve Cossman’s ‘White Cabbage’ returns us skyward with ecstatic propulsion, and the conclusive ‘AAAAA’ kneads and weaves tangy synth discord and frothing pulses into a starry hammock” – boomkat (Manchester, UK)