Binary Cities: Experimental Film Screening

October 17th 7pm @ Counterpulse
Film Screening and Q & A
1310 Mission St. @ 9th St. - San Francisco

ABOUT MARC COUROUX

A bizarre mini-masterpiece...has an off-the-wall inventiveness and lightness that captured
very much my experience of living in Southern California..." (Bob Gilmore, author, Harry
Partch, A Biography)

On Saturday, October 17th, 2009 NEXMAP premiered Couroux’s film 68/70, which interweaves fact and fiction, the present and the past. 68/70 is a collision of footage from 1970s Hollywood with news coverage of recent traumatic events. Couroux is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in his experiences as a contemporary music pianist. Acclaimed as "the Glenn Gould of contemporary music" (Musicworks), he won the OPUS Award of the Conseil Québécois de la Musique in 1998 for his work in disseminating Canadian piano music around the world. As a video/sound artist, Couroux is concerned with creating metaphorical spaces for the exploration of socio-political issues. John Davis’ film Mark You, Make Believe My Dear, Yes will screen before 68/70. M.Y.M.B.M.D.Y. is a resurrection of Soviet propaganda film from the 1980's matched with a visceral sound montage that animates spectres from recent history. A Q&A discussion will follow the screening with both filmmakers. The screening of Marc Couroux’s “68/70” is made possible in part through funding from the York University Faculty of Fine Arts Research Projects Grant and a Canada Council for the Arts travel grant.

The work of Canadian interdisciplinary artist Marc Couroux is firmly rooted in experiences developed while active as a contemporary music pianist. Acclaimed by one writer as "the Glenn Gould of contemporary music", Couroux won the OPUS Award for "Discovery of the Year" in 1998, attributed by the Conseil Québécois de la Musique for his work in disseminating Canadian piano music around the world (Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Ludwigsburg, Paris). His early (piano performance) works were centered around the reinvention and renewal of the audience-performer dialectic, challenging the received and seldom questioned notion of the performer's physical presence within the sociopolitical confines of the public event. In 1999, he created the monumental American Dreaming John Cassavetes and the following year (2000), le contrepoint académique (sic) was presented at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, a work described as "controversial", "demented" and "illuminated”.

As video/sound artist, Couroux is concerned with creating metaphorical spaces where sociopolitical issues can be explored. His Rockford - Keep on Rolling superimposes images from the 1970’s TV show onto a power grid, reflecting the other Los Angeles, plunged into rolling blackouts during the Energy Crisis of 2000. Rockford has been presented in a number of international festivals, including the prestigious Club Transmediale in Berlin in 2006 and the PDX Fest (Peripheral Produce) in May 2009. In 2003, Couroux presented a work for piano and 17 mini-speakers, Blowback at Breakfast: a Dr. Kissinger Mystery, a Watergate-era environment centered around wiretapping and surveillance, with Henry Kissinger as main protagonist-pianist, dryly reciting congressional testimony while simultaneously leaking vital secrets to the listener. In 2006, Watergating (Selected Hearings), a large-scale audio-video performance work was presented at the Vasistas festival in Montreal; in this work, the concepts of hearing (acoustical phenomena) and listening (socially or politically mediated hearing), were critically investigated through the lens of the Watergate scandal of 1973-4. In 2007, Couroux presented two offshoots of Watergating: Carpenters et al, Downey Lyrical Holdings, a Real- Time System as of March 29, 2007 was concerned with exploring concepts emanating from and associated with technology, through non-technological means (such as delay), and was performed by neither/nor in Toronto; The Fetishization of Music and the Regression in Listening, presented in Edmonton in 2007 as part of Latitude 53’s Visualeyez festival of interdisciplinary art, was a performance intervention designed to operate a form of Situationist détournement on the musak environment. Couroux is presently at work on a 6-hour audio-video work—68/70 (blindspots) (truth 24 times per second)—to be presented by the San Francisco interdisciplinary organization NexMap next October.

John Davis is an artist and teacher living in San Francisco. He works primarily with film, video, photography, and sound. His artworks have been shown in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and internationally. His background in anthropology and visual art provide fodder for his myriad representations about the construction of reality via the onslaught of media in a political economy. His audio works are an anodyne to the spiritual conflicts inherent in consumer capitalism, and supplement his film and video work.

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