The Sunspot Cycle
Alexandre Estrela
Friday 31 May 6-8.30pm
Saturday 1 June 12-6pmFlat Time House
210 Bellenden Road
London
SE15 4BWFlat Time House
Raining oil at the Berkeley Art Museum....
Carbon Song Cycle, a new performance work in expanded cinema, live electronics, voice and chamber ensemble by Pamela Z and Christina McPhee 2013
Louis -Georges Schwartz on Christina McPhee’s SHEDCUBED
Excerpt from LA FURIA UMANA / 16 (2013)
The drawings and McPhee in the act of ma(r)king them along with the shed’s interior function as compositional materials in the videos and the videos themselves function as compositional elements in the installation. Mistaking the drawings seen in the installation for finished, salable, art-commodities drains ShedCubed of its powerful, immediate sense independence By re-presenting her drawings not as works but as work engendered within a material matrix, McPhee is able to distance ShedCubed from the market relations of art consumption and thus to think the relationship between the conditions of her practice and Capital’s demand that it result in a product destined for a market.
The interior of McPhee’s shed materializes an original relation between the work and the matrix from which it. The shed becomes a camera within which McPhee is an element. Her mastery of line expends itself tracing shifting lines produced by natural illumination. Her skill refuses any already recognized mode of expression. Re-marking the lines made by sunbeams on the shed’s walls means working on a line that only exists in particular place at a particular time that McPhee’s line indexes. It also means working on the fissure of the figurative and the abstract. The great skill required to trace the line of light and shade leaves a mark that can appear to be a casual abstract doodle.
McPhee elaborates an idiom situated in relation to the longer history of drawing as a skilled practice. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh accounts for Raymond Pettibon’s drawing practice as an assertionof skill in order “to rescue as a practice of contemporary the mnemonic spaces of language and visual representation under the conditions of their systematic extinction by techno-scientific rationality and spectacle culture … [taking place] at precisely those social sites where the resistance against techno-scientistic rule and the results of its most advanced devastation are the most evident. ” McPhee asserts her skill over and against its subsumption in the sphere of social reproduction, which remains coded as feminine.
Diagram A (Carbon Drawing) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.
By the light of a mobile phone, Christina McPhee draws a score over video animations of climate-change graphics, as Pamela Z and the chamber ensemble play the score in real time.
Image animation source: Nature: Climate Change 2013
drawing software: Lyes Belhocine
Christina McPhee: drawing performance
Pamela Z: voice and electronics
Dana Jesson: bassoon
Charith Premawardhana: viola
Theresa Wong: cello
Suki O’Kane: percussionvideo technician: Drew Detweiler
Set design: Hargrave Studio
Unpredictable Weather / De-Mobbing Crude from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.
In this song from Carbon Song Cycle, Pamela Z relays a scientist’s voice through unpredictable jet streams, while Christina McPhee conducts an ‘experiment’ to extract graphite from motor oil….
Voiceover: Dr. Richard Kane
Pamela Z: voice and electronics
Dana Jesson: bassoon
Charith Premawardhana: viola
Theresa Wong: cello
Suki O’Kane: percussion
Biosphere I (sounds ) and II (populations) / Geothermal Combustion - excerpt from Carbon Song Cycle at BAM/PFA 2013 from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.
“Animal’ sounds and populations are set in a deep ecological landscape, in this excerpt from Carbon Song Cycle, in premiere performance at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, L@TE series, April 12, 2013.
Images Christina McPhee / music Pamela Z
creative commons license 2013In this video reconstruction, immersive video content is shown in clips montaged to the documentary footage of the performance at BAM/PFA.
Voiceovers on climate change courtesy of Dr. Richard Zare. Animations of scientific visualizations from Nature: Climate Change 2013.
Carbon Song Cycle by Pamela Z (music) and Christina McPhee (images) is a collaborative new music and immersive cinema work, and is scored for video, voice and electronics, and chamber ensemble (viola, cello, bassoon and percussion). The project is funded by grants from the MAP Fund 2012 and New Music USA’s Commissioning Program.
In this video, Pamela Z (voice), Charith Premawardhana (viola), Theresa Wong (cello), and Suki O’Kane (percussion).
The Heat / Carbon Surf from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.
Pamela Z delivers her pop-inflected ‘Heat” in relays of reverb sound with chamber ensemble members Dana Jesson (bassoon), Charith Premawardhana (viola), Theresa Wong (cello), and Suki O’Kane (percussion), in this
clip from the premiere of Carbon Song Cycle at Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive, April 12, 2013. Christina McPhee’s video installation sets are shown in the documentary footage. Images from her “Carbon Surf Drawing”, shot at Rincon Beach, Santa Barbara with additional drawing animations, are montaged to the performance in this clip.Carbon Song Cycle: christinamcphee.net/carbon-song-cycle/
Carbon Song Cycle is a performance work for multiscreen cinema, voice, electronics and chamber ensemble. It has received major support from The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; the music was commissioned by New Music bay area through New Music USA’s Commissioning/USA program.
