An evening with Negativland @ The Pageant

351 east 6th st,Chico CA 95928

13 September, 2022

Description

Legendary sound collage group Negativland and live cinema visual artist SUE-C collaborate in a live audio-visual performance about our minds, the world we live in, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions. This urgent show calls time on a tech dystopia that is as malevolent as it is stupid, to meet the terrifying contemporary moment as the world slides incrementally into meltdown. Since 1980 Negativland, a multimedia collective from the San Francisco Bay Area, have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Negativland creates art that draws attention to its own frame, and any frame designed to be invisible (as all the most lucrative ones are). In today’s media climate, it’s harder than ever to resist a voice designed to make you think it’s your own. Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation-based audio and visual works have touched on many things — pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, religion, death, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative activism in our media-saturated and multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture. SUE-C is a video and light artist working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, handmade papers, fabrics and miniature lighting effects.