The full line-up of Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival confirmed The Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival is Finland�s annual festival of experimental music and moving image. The third Avanto festival builds bridges between the past and the present by showcasing some of the most exciting avant-garde excavations and explorations in sound and visual arts. The festival includes live performances, film screenings, club events and more. Guest performers and filmmakers come from the UK, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Canada, Finland and the USA.
Live performances The opening night pays homage to Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941), the Finnish pioneer of electronic music and self-designed instruments. The programme starts with the premiere of Mika Taanila's documentary on Kurenniemi and a reconstruction of the early interactive dance performance Deal (1971). Air acrobat Ilona JS�ntti and urban street dancer Topi Tateishi create their own soundtrack by using Kurenniemi�s DIMI-O video synthesizer which transforms the movements into sounds. To top it all off, Pan sonic (FIN) performs live using Kurenniemi�s original 1960�s instruments, Andromatic, DIMI-A and Electric Quartet. The headline live acts at the Kiasma Theatre of the Museum of Contemporary Art are People Like Us (UK), Semiconductor (UK) and Carl Michael von Hausswolff (SWE). People Like Us brings to the festival its new digital collage show using appropriated sounds and film. The work joins kitsch, cultural stereotypes and found conversations in an unruly way. Semiconductor�s live Sound Film performance combines stylish animation with inspiring noise. Graphic designers Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt build architectural miniature worlds that are a true fusion of sound and image. Carl Michael von Hausswolff is one of Sweden�s foremost contemporary visual and electronic noise artists. Von Hausswolff�s sound recordings document the immaterial qualities of sound and electricity and their physical, spatial effect. He combines minimalist, yet maximal soundscapes with red light. One of the festival highlights is the world premiere of [plumbs]�s (CAN/FIN) Ondulation, a changing composition for water, sound and light. Sound waves become hydraulic waves and reach the viewer's eye as light waves. Ondulation is not quite music, sculpture or cinema but a hypnotic mixture of all three. [plumb] is a lateral branch of [The User] who are joined by Mikko Hynninen. Information Explosion is a concert containing works created at the electronic music studio of the University of Helsinki. The studio has had a leading role in the history of Finnish electronic music and it now celebrates its 40th birthday. It is the oldest studio of its kind still in active use in Scandinavia. Exhibition Franz Pomassl (AUT) makes sound installations that surround the visitor with physical sounds. He studies the limits of our hearing; he fills the neutral, dimly lit spaces with sound frequencies that cannot be heard but can be experienced with the body�s audio-tactile system. Pomassl manipulates our sense of space, direction and distance, and creates works that expand our aural experiences. Films Bruce Baillie (b. 1931) is one of the founding fathers of the San Francisco experimental film movement. The 71-year-old director shot his poetic The Holy Scrolls during a period of 30 years. In Avanto Festival, Baillie presents the 12-hour-long cinematic epic in its European premiere. The Holy Scrolls contains fictional, factual and personal material. It is shown in six parts with live soundtracks by Es, Kemialliset YstS�vS�t, Mikko Maasalo, Pan sonic�s Mika Vainio and Ilpo VS�isS�nen. The film programme at Kiasma Theatre includes retrospectives by Lis Rhodes (UK) and Peter Tscherkassky (AUT). Both directors are guests at the festival. London-based artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes is one of the still-active pioneers of structural cinema. She introduces her original short films including an expanded cinema piece Light Music to the Scandinavian audience. Peter Tscherkassky is one of the most celebrated experimental filmmakers of our times. His films combine the representational with the abstract, and the theoretical with inspiring handcrafted techniques. In his films, Outer Space and Dream Work Tscherkassky has �remixed� Sidney J. Furie�s horror film, The Entity (US, 1982). Outer Space has won over ten prizes in international film festivals and was ranked as the third most important film of the year 2000 by Cahiers du Cinema magazine. Dream Work won the main prize at Oberhausen Film Festival 2002. Film Ist (7-12) shows in a funny way what film was before sound. The director Gustav Deutsch has taken shots from old silent films and arranged them into new wholes by subject. He brings to the surface the tricks, clichZ�s and melodrama of silent cinema but always with sympathetic tenderness towards the old films and their performers. Martina Kudl�cek�s In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a cinematic portrait of the legendary filmmaker and voodoo expert Maya Deren. The documentary contains essayist images, stories told by Deren�s contemporaries and rare archive material. Deren�s music recordings from Haiti and John Zorn�s soundtrack enrich this portrait of the unique artist. Avantoscope presents some of the most exciting trends in contemporary avant-garde cinema. The night shall offer a veritable feast of far-out abstractions, massive collages, strange music - and even narratives. The eclectic repertoire ranges from Torsten Lauschmann's absurd urban symphony to Naomi Uman's monumental animation. There are new films by Ian Helliwell, Liisa Lounila, Elida Schogt, Duncan Campbell & Mary Hill, and others. Clubs Friday's Avanto Club is organized by Finnish-Russian label N&B Research Digest. Their artists F.R.U.I.T.S. (RUS), Benzo (RUS), Anton NikkilS� (FIN) and Pink Twins (FIN) focus on lyrical noise, bass-heavy rhythms and plunderphonics with a post-Soviet orientation. The special guest of the evening is Pomassl (AUT). In Saturday�s Avanto Club, Russell Hasswell (UK) creates physical and brutal soundscapes; Fe-mail (NOR) performs playful noise music with electronic and acoustic instruments. Pan sonic (FIN) fills the venue with floating sounds and hypnotic rhythms, and Kurenniemi�s collective instrument Electric Quartet is played by its original players for the first time since 1970. Venues, tickets & the festival web site Avanto festival venues are Kiasma, Orion Cinema, Gloria and Semifinal. Ondulation will be performed at Lume Centre, while Franz Pomassl�s installation can be experienced in Gallery MUU. Tickets for the Kiasma Theatre are available in advance from Kiasma, for festival clubs in Tiketti, Digelius and Dis�n�Dat, and for The Holy Scrolls at Orion Cinema. The festival pass (67 euros) can be reserved in advance at Kiasma and collected from Avanto Festival info desk on 20 November. The web site www.avantofestival.com will open soon. Now it contains the schedule. For all press enquiries please contact: Milla Kontkanen, Press Officer at Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival 2002 Tel: +358 9 825 1239, mobile: +358 50 339 3596 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Diskono ====== http://www.onoksid.freeserve.co.uk ICQ : 147706189 ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] archive: http://www.mediascot.org/ambit info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
