Chicago City Wire

Marc Downie & Paul Kaiser w/ Ken & Flo Jacobs, Ulysses in the Subway

—

Wednesday, March 2, 12pm-9pm CST

Logan Center Performance Hall

Ulysses in the Subway was created by Gray Center Mellon Fellows Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup as part of Framing, Re-Framing, and Un-Framing Cinema, their 2016 Mellon Collaborative Fellowship with Tom Gunning (University of Chicago, Cinema and Media Studies), and in collaboration with legendary experimental filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs.

Described by the artists as “a picturing of sound in 3D”, Ulysses in the Subway follows Jacobs as he rides the subway from his lower Manhattan home up to 42nd Street, and wanders through Times Square before descending back into the subway and returning home. Every frame of this film (1/24th of a second) helps to construct a 3D animation generated through original software created by OpenEndedGroup that algorithmically analyzes and visualizes 2000 audio samples per frame.

From OpenEndedGroup:

Evoking Manhattan’s vast subway underbrings to the eyes what normally goes only to the ears.

What you hear is a recording of Ken Jacobs’s somehow heroic exploration of the midtown subway lines and stations, followed by his triumphant re-emergence to street level and ascent to his walk-up loft, where Flo awaits him. Odysseus returning to Penelope.

What you see are extraordinary detailed animations that reflect the fact that for every 1/24th of a second, there are 2000 audio samples recorded. Each frame, then, is built from these 2000 sources. Built: that is, constructed in 3D from more than 20 different ways of algorithmically analyzing and visualizing sound. So that while the sound is always pictured accurately, the way it’s pictured can switch on a dime. These switches re-tune your eyes and ears; you perceive the world anew.

The image/sound synthesis turns fleeting presences (voices, footsteps, steel-drum performances) into oddly epic events. At key moments a frame might freeze on the screen so that the viewer’s eye can freely wander through the unbelievable complexity of a moment of everyday life.

A subtext of the film is an Edison film of the NY subway from 1905. Re-rendered in 3D, that film surfaces unexpectedly from time to time, the past making itself felt in the present. Its ghosts, too: for the fleeting images of long-gone passengers on a subway platform mingle with the sounds of passengers today.

Ulysses in the Subway received its premier as part of Forum Expanded at the Berlin Film Festival in Feburary 2017; shortly afterwards, it received its US premier at The Museum of Modern Art as part of the Doc Fortnight festival.

(Paul Kaiser, Marc Downie and Ken + Flo Jacobs, 3D DCP; surround sound, 60:00 min, 2016)

RSVP

Related Programming

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, A Thousand White Plastic Chairs

—

Wednesday, March 9, 12pm-9pm CST

Logan Center Performance Hall

A Thousand White Plastic Chairs documents Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s performance in the Logan Center Penthouse in March 2020, as part of “The Sonic Image,” an evening of performances conceived by Gray Center Fellows Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hannah B Higgins, and W.J.T. Mitchell during their Thinking Through Sound Fellowship.

In A Thousand White Plastic Chairs,  Abu Hamdan subjects his own voice to the mercy of lights controlled by Mitchell. The video is illuminated by these lights alone, which continually command and direct the artist’s speech and speed of thought by emblazoning his face in red and yellow. Here, Abu Hamdan re-performs the asymmetry between the speed of the technology, which allowed words to travel through copper cables at 4,600 meters per second, and the speed of the human mind to process what it sees and stores of a given event. These events are preserved within cacophonous and dissonant objects that embody the schism between an event and its reckoning, and mediate the conflict between a sound and what that sound means. This work proposes that the true capacity to bear witness is measured not through acts of coherent testimony and seamless speech, but rather through their breaking points.

As part of his larger project, The Witness-Machine Complex, Abu Hamdan examines the role of the simultaneous translators and the then-novel electronic acoustic infrastructure deployed to enable their work at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/6. Allowing the International Military Tribunal to take place in Russian, French, German, and English simultaneously, the work of the translators and their apparatus set a precedent for subsequent international legal procedures.

(Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 13:20 min, 2020)

RSVP

These programs are co-presented by Logan Center Exhibitions at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.

ON DRAWING DRAWING ON is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions, and curated by Zachary Cahill, Director of Programs and Fellowships and Mike Schuh, Assistant Director, Fellowships and Operations at the Gray Center, in collaboration with Jan Brugger, David Wolf, Alyssa Brubaker, and Leigh Fagin. This exhibition is made possible by support from Richard and Mary L. Gray and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the Revada Foundation, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, and friends of the Logan Center.