Robert A.A. Lowe + Hollis Frampton @ Silo City

This one-night performance is an ancillary event to the Hollis Frampton exhibition on view through September 5 at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center and CEPA Gallery, courtesy of Dean Brownrout Modern/Contemporary, and part of Squeaky Wheel’s Silent/Sound, a series of events that pair silent films with sound artists for new and unexpected audio-visual collaborations and experiences. The event is generously supported by the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, administered by Arts Services Initiative through the Buffalo River Funds program, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and M&T Bank.

 

About Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b. 1975)
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, an artist and multi-instrumentalist who works with voice to create spontaneous and ecstatic musical compositions. Lowe—who also performs under the moniker Lichens—uses effects boxes to loop guitars, percussion, and vocals to form a reverberating drone. His most recent performances and recordings, such as Timon Irnok Manta and Lítió Fólk, have combined his voice with modular synthesizer patch compositions. Lowe believes that the sensitivity of analogue modular sound systems echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, and that the two together can induce a trancelike state that promotes deeper listening.

Robert has collaborated and worked closely with Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Rose Lazar, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Tarek Atoui, Ben Vida, Mark Borthwick, Lucky Dragons, Alan Licht, Michael Zerang, Doug Aitken, Patrick Smith, Monica Baptista, Lee Ranaldo, White/Light, Kevin Martin, Chris Johanson, Tyondai Braxton, Sabrina Ratte, David Scott Stone, Genesis P-Orridge and Rose Kallal, as well as many others. He has performed internationally, at locations such as Doug Aitken’s Migration Happening at 303 Gallery NYC (2008) and Princeton University (2010); All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival, Minehead, UK (2008); The New Museum, NYC (2008); Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, UK (2010); PS1 NYC (2010); Primavera Sound festival Barcelona, ES (2011); CPH:DOX film festival performance Copenhagen, DK (2011); Mono No Aware V, NYC (2011); and Ann Arbor Film Festival (2013).

 

About Hollis Frampton & the Magellan Cycle

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) is an avant-garde icon—a pioneering filmmaker, art theorist, and photographer—and co-founder of the highly revered SUNY Buffalo Department of Media Study program, serving as faculty from 1973-1984. Magellan, Hollis Frampton’s (1936-1984) most ambitious and complex film project, is generally less recognized than his other work, and its invisibility is understandable. The spectator who approaches the unfinished Magellan confronts only fragments; the completed Magellan films comprise only about 8 out of the 36 hours planned. Moreover, Frampton intended Magellan to be a calendrical cycle, with specific films to be shown on each day of the year-properly viewed it would be 369 days long. Metaphorically modeled on Ferdinand Magellan’s exploratory circumnavigation of the world, the project aspired to remarkable aesthetic, historiographic, and conceptual challenges to cinema and perception. Structurally complex, the films in the cycle are divided at the first level into three groups (Birth of Magellan, The Straits of Magellan, and Death of Magellan), forming a “a series of shaped observations that include portraits, cadaver footage, re-stagings of Lumière films, visits to slaughterhouses, double exposures, a field of peaceful dairy cattle, allusions to Muybridge, electronic imagery, industrial pictures, a state fair– a kind of capsule version of the twentieth century that might have been placed on the Voyager spacecraft as it soared out of the solar system to worlds unknown” (Robert Haller).

 

Above text adapted from Michael Zryd’s program notes for the Anthology Film Archive’s 2003 presentation of the complete (extant) Magellan cycle and from Robert Haller’s catalog text for a retrospective screening at Korea’s EXIS Film Festival. Titles in brackets refer to the Magellan Calendar.

 

Selected films to be shown from Magellan: