Video Documentation 8mins

NB. Listen with high quality speakers or headphones to hear sutble phasing and pulsing of composition-- especially as it nears the end of the video.

Also Performed at: The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative Mar 21, 2010.

Radiance is dedicated to Alvin Lucier who graciously attended the premerie.

Radiance (soundtrack for a silent cinema)

Charles STANKIEVECH

Live Audio Visual Performance for Shellac Record, Turntable, Microphones, Computer with Custom Software, and Video Projection

World Premiere:
MATA Interval 3.1, ISSUE Project Room, NYC, Jan 13 2010.

Radiance moves from the representation of recording to the materiality of architecture.

Using a 1910s shellac record manufactured by Emile Berliner (inventor of the flat record), Radiance is a live soundtrack to footage shot in the historic movie palace Cinema Imperial of Montréal (the city surprisingly home to the first architecture built exclusively for cinema exhibition).
A site once visited by Hiroshi Sugimoto for his long exposure photographs, Radiance reverse engineers the process creating a motion picture out of a still image. Within the virtual world of the Radiance's projection, a slow zoom into the cinema palace's screen unveils a 35mm reconstruction of Nam June Paik’s «Zen for Film» which was original projected in the Cinema Imperial for this production.

Parallel to the image, a reiterative recording technique à la Alvin Lucier’s «I am sitting in a room» carves away at the white noise of the silent last groove of the record to reveal the resonant tones of the performance space.

A work that functions as an archive of 20th century audiovisual technology as well as a presentation of self-reflexive conceptual art from the 70s, Radiance is reborn by responding to the architecture in each performance.

NB: Radiance (soundtrack for a silent cinema), a live performance, developed out of the multichannel video installation Aletheia’s Veil commissioned by Dazibao, centre de photographies actuelles.