Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at 11:59pm
The Mushroom Archive
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by Bradley Eros
A hypogeal influence on New York City culture for decades, artist Bradley Eros has explored and transformed cinema through a range of approaches—as a filmmaker and creator of works in collage, photography, poetry, sound, and installation, but also as a curator (he was co-proprietor of the now-legendary Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, one of Light Industry’s major inspirations).
For Eros, cinema might be contracted down to the subtle glimmerings of a cut-crystal drinking glass thrown against a bare wall, or expanded into living matrices of images projected by multifarious forms of technology; art can be as ephemeral as melting abstract ice-sculptures, or fragile installations made from lowly balls of crumpled-up magazine pages. Some of his most memorable creations have been nothing more than coined notions, put into circulation through poetic manifestos and instantiated (or not) as screenings, performances, and, most importantly, collaborations with others. These concepts over the years have included: mediamystics, ephemeral cinema, erotic psyche, Vampÿrates, eau de cinema, Ocula, subterranean science, cinema povera, poetic accidents, fragmentstein, musique plastique, Narcolepsy Cinema, metaBody, The Owl of Minerva, Artaud-Butoh, Velvet Hermetic System, Oysters of the Id, Imageless Film, and Black Hole Cinema.
For this special solstice event at Light Industry, Eros has assembled participants from two of his ongoing collective endeavors: Optipus, an ever-shifting group of projection-performers, and The Mushroom Archive, an informal network of 16mm and 8mm film print collectors. Members of the Mushroom Archive will bring prints to the Optipus participants at Light Industry during the day on December 21, and together create and rehearse a one-time performance that will take place at midnight—sharp.
⟁
OPTIPUS: THE MUSHROOM ARCHIVE / A MULTI-FORMAT, MULTI-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE
WITH THESE MEMBERS OF OPTIPUS (& VARIOUS FILM PRINT COLLECTORS OF THE LOOSE COALITION OF THE MUSHROOM ARCHIVE)
MycOpti {myco~cinema / micro~cinema / mycelium film / mushroom archive / Optipus}
BRADLEY EROS, LARY 7, SCOTT KIERNAN, RICHARD SYLVARNES, RACHAEL GUMA, GABRIEL GUMA, MASAMI TOMIHISA, LELE DAI, AVA WITONSKY, LINH VU, BENJI SANTOS, LILY SAROSI, JEANNE LIOTTA.
OPTIPUS: THE MUSHROOM ARCHIVE is a collaborative expanded cinema composition featuring live music, poetry, and performance. We aspire to weave together a spectrum of elements of the mycelium underground and its visual fruiting bodies, represented here by the film medium & its offshoots. Our images & themes including death, decay, regeneration, remembrance, transformation, and the biomorphic ecology of the body and mind. In this, we hope to evoke the connective and regenerative potential of mycelium.
We use (or misuse?) film projectors {35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm, R8} + slide projectors (35mm & magic lantern), overhead projectors, and video projection & cameras (hand-held, live recording & re-mixing), plus shadow play, liquid light, transparencies, gels, external lenses, loops, hand-processed & hand-painted celluloid, objects, foley, mirrors, mylar, contact mics, mobiles, synths, strings, percussion, samples, transistor radios, music boxes, toys, appliances, & mutable and myriad screen surfaces . . .
- BE
⟁
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 11:30pm. No entry after start of performance.