Artist in person — Q&A follows the performance
In Person Only
Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of film performances by Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa. The artist will join us for a Q&A following the performances.
The program features Nishikawa’s two most recent works for multiple 35mm slide projections and 16mm film that is altered in real time. These two performances by the artist build on the sense of visual and acoustic accumulation through climatic compositions starting from basic elements — monochrome 35mm slides, as well as linear incisions onto an exposed film loop — which entrance the viewer while highlighting the intimate, structural connection of image and sound.
Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 2 (2022) finds Nishikawa scratching off the emulsion of a 28-second 16mm film loop as it is being projected with a wood carving knife. The work shows the process of accruing single horizontal lines in the middle area of the frames, breaking with the verticality of film projection and playing with the nearly 1-second delay of the optical soundtrack on the filmstrip in what becomes a trompe l’oeil et l’oreille journey.
Performance for Three Slide Projectors (2023) is a durational piece involving three asynchronous, alternating projections onto the same screen of 35mm slides, each consisting of a single primary color (red, blue or green). The sound is the result of the amplification through contact mics of the slide projectors’ operating noises. As additional slides are inserted into the carousels and the pace of the advancements increases, ever so slight permutations of colors emerge amidst seemingly aligning sonic pulsations.
_
Tomonari Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting a scene in the public space through a chosen medium/format and techniques, while his performance projects focus on the process of creating a visual/sound phenomenon using analog devices, including 16mm film projector and slide projector. Nishikawa started using a 16mm film projector for his performance projects in 2013, scratching the film emulsion to produce the visual and sound. His on-going 16mm film projection performance project, “Six Seventy-Two Variations,” have been performed at Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Exploratorium in San Francisco, FRACTO in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, among others. He also uses slide projectors in his performance or collaborative work with sound artists, and one of such works, “Chiratsuki,” was performed with Sontag Shogun at Mono no Aware VIII in New York. He is based in Vestal, NY, and Tokyo, Japan. Nishikawa teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Program:
Performance for Three Slide Projectors
Audio and visual performance for three 35mm slide projectors, 2023, 20 minutes approx.
Color slides (red, green, and blue) will be inserted into the slide carousel of each projector as a performance to create a durational audio and visual piece. The timing of advancing the slides on each projector will be adjusted individually through a slider that is connected to a microcontroller, and a staccato sound from the device will be emphasized by contact microphones. — TN
Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 2
Audio and visual performance with 16mm film projector, wood carving knife, 2022, 30 minutes approx.
This is the second variation of my on-going 16mm film projector performance piece, for which I use a wood carving knife to scratch off the photographic emulsion of the looped film as a live performance. The scratched patterns will appear as an abstract animation on the screen and produce noises, as the optical soundtrack area is also scratched. Due to the distance between the gate of the projector and the position of the photocell to read the visual information for sound, the noise from a scratched pattern will be produced about a second later after it appears on the screen. — TN