Join San Francisco Cinematheque for a special reception with food and libations celebrating the exhibition of Keith Evans’ Fascination Device 108. This site-specific performed projection installation will be presented for one night only at a private art salon space in Noe Valley.
Paracinema: Ecologies interweaving the conceptions of cinema, involving the imaginative and practical machines that contribute to our focused attention towards the phenomena of lights and shadows on surfaces. An animate cinema system. (Keith Evans)
Throughout the 1990s, the Bay Area filmmaking collective know as silt provoked and inspired the local filmmaking community with complex, richly organic cinematic compositions and projection performances derived from collaboration, third mind dynamics, intense photochemical experimentation and an embrace of alternative processes. Continuing this tradition, collective member Keith Evans’ paracinematic projected installation work incorporates the cycles of the natural world with the tools of moving image arts, creating a series of “animate cinema systems” that explore ecologies of detritus and obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus.
San Francisco Cinematheque is thrilled to premiere Fascination Device 108, Evans’ new site-specific installation. The installation will be on view throughout the evening, culminating in a special performance at 7:30pm by Keith and Geoff Evans.
My performances and installations use and open up ecologies of detritus as well as obsolescences of the cinematic apparatus in its variegated electronic hydra heads, recycling and recuperating. For many years I have been investigating a dialogue between the materiality of the photochemical process and its translation into video and digital imaging. I can only merely scratch this surface, if it is to be found, in some of the directions suggested by these translations. But like scratching, what is added is as much taken away like ghosts in a hauntological dimension. My own personal influences for these types of images are, first and foremost, direct observation of natural phenomena, as well as ritual Paleolithic caves, the patterns of South American rainforest cultures and aboriginal Australian dreamtime energy fields. The Natural Scientists of the enlightenment era are of particular note for their interest, experimentation and descriptions of subtle, earthly and mystical phenomena.
Fascination Device 108: Images flow from inside a constantly evolving interconnected paracinematic ecology that reveals itself and its relationships as objects and reflections, cables and signals, thoroughly embedded within its own phenomena. Microfossilographs interlace with home movies of swimmers and refracted glassy insect trappings. An ungainly electromagnetic specimen of paracinema. The key component is the fascination that is brought by the curious to this contemplative device. The installations’ projections circuit around the walls/screens, to be viewed from many sides. Opening up the scale and the haptic sensuality of these perspectives and images is intrinsic to situating the viewer inside, creating awareness of the embedding consciousness of pattern and relationship. As viewers our relationships to space and each other are observed and our own scale and interconnectedness is exploded in fascination. (Keith Evans)