The sixteenth annual High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music gets underway this week, and the fest starts up tonight at the Penthouse Gallery with Outer Visions, an evening of sound and light performances anchored by a presentation of Peter Burr‘s four-channel “green | red.” It will be projected onto a 16-by-9 foot cube (see a detail of the projection here) that was built for the performance. I’ve only seen snippets of the film, but it feels kind of like skipping through channels on a TV where the signal isn’t coming through completely. The imagery runs from an abstract expressionist canvas made of rasterized splotches of digital glitch to the dancing static of a TV tuned to a dead channel to a first-person chase through landscapes without any characters, all scored to a rhythmic pulse courtesy Seabat.
Also performing are local video artist Mark Brown and musician Benny Boeldt (aka Adventure), collaborating on a live video and sound manipulation; Kristen Anchor presenting her audio-visual “Magic Movie Machine” improvisation, which includes a modified 16-mm films, modified projectors, and assorted objects; local artist Tom Borax and his “Lab Coat of Many Colors,” a four-channel live light and synthesizer performance; and Lexie Mountain presents her “Christina’s World World World” performance installation.
Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show at 8:30 p.m., $5. And don’t miss the HighJinx Parade on Thursday, that leads to the Theatre Project festival venue for the concerts.
Author Bret McCabe is a haphazard tweeter, epic-fail blogger, and a Baltimore-based arts and culture writer.
