Thursday, January 25th at 8pm, returning to the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights, ISSUE’s 2024 Winter Season Opening welcomes sonic outlaws and multimedia collective Negativland for the NYC premiere of their work WE CAN REALLY FEEL LIKE WE’RE HERE. With video designed and produced by real-time cinema visual artist SUE-C, the collaborators bring their latest audiovisual performance about our nervous systems and realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that inevitably insert themselves between them to the stage. Local vocalist and producer Maralie Armstrong-Rial as VALISE will present a multimedia project that speaks and dances with itself.
“An urgent show by Negativland and artist SUE-C 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” (The Wire Magazine). Using original music, found sounds, and unique visuals since the 1980s, the legendary sonic collagists and video artist disrupt, critique, and “jam” the workings of mainstream cultural programming, advertising and mass media via (often humorous) art practices and tactics. WE CAN REALLY FEEL LIKE WE’RE HERE is no exception, and troubles the line between perception and reality.
Finding heritage in a genealogy of spiritual and sensual expression via technology, VALISE will perform with ISSUE for the first time. Whether transposing ancient star data into MIDI maps and song or recording North American rivers striving to survive industrialization, there is always a dovetailing of aura, material history, and digital technology present. Intermingling audio, video, sculpture, and performance VALISE invokes poetics from human-machine interaction.
Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work in the USA and in Europe.
Sue Slagle (SUE-C) is an award-winning artist, engineer and educator whose work in “real time cinema” presents a new, imaginative perspective on live performance. Her evolution as a new media artist began in late-90s San Francisco where she was an influential member of the electronic music scene, owning the experimental record label Orthlorng Musork, organizing audio-visual cultural events and teaching the first creative coding classes in Max Software. After finishing her masters degree in engineering at UC Berkeley she moved to Oakland where she became co-owner of the Ego Park gallery and helped launch the First Friday art walks. Her performances blend cinema and technology into an organic, improvisational and immersive act, created from live cameras, light pads and video algorithms. She has always pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction, employing emerging technologies and inventing many of her own, both through performance and tinkering with hundreds of students in her well-established teaching practice. She is currently a Video Designer at Meow Wolf.
VALISE is the solo project of multimedia artist and vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial. Maralie has been performing live with their multiplied & refracted selves, recording tapes and CDs, creating performance artifacts, and publishing short films and videos as VALISE since 2010 (and in various other projects since the 1990’s). Their live performances often incorporate an alchemical combination of movement, video synthesis, and experiments in audio texture to reach for that which is felt but unseen. VALISE shows range from a capella song and dance to microcontroller noise and multiple video projector events. In this project Maralie invokes poetics from the living pattern of dance between humans and machines, industry and ecology. Whether transposing ancient star data into MIDI maps and song or recording North American rivers striving to survive industrialization, there is always a dovetailing of aura, material history, and digital technology present. Maralie also performs collaboratively as Humanbeast and currently works as adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Recordings as VALISE have been published by Primitive Languages, No Rent Records, Angoisse, Devine, and Dead Gods.
