NO MEDIA is an open improvisational realtime/performance media art event.

THE CONCEPT Participating artists are randomly matched in sets of 3 && given 10mins to perform. NO MEDIA aims to bring together artists from a broad range of performable disciplines (poets + dancers + expanded cinemaistas + free jazzers + audio/video noise makers + etc) to challenge the conventions of their practice by responding in realtime to artists from other disciplines.

THE RULES No Media At The Beginning! NO preparation is allowed. Bring your tools, devices, instruments, props, etc., but you’ve got to start with a blank slate. NO time will be allotted for ‘setup’. There will be a 2min turn around time where you can carry your stuff up and meet your collaborators. No Media At The End! NO documentation allowed. It happens once && in realtime.

About Recall: The project Recall aims to open a platform to reflect and explore the fundamental flaw in the construction of memories through processing and recollection, based on sound or visual compositions. The project’s goal is to allow the act of recall to be executed in a live performance setting, where these elements can be further contemplated.Recall consists of three projects to perform a set in which memory is activated, not as a true recreation of the moment, but rather a distorted construction of the experience.

The first project is a collaboration between Amanda Gutierrez and Anthony Janas entitled Aunties. This case focuses on the personal story of two sisters who live in Chicago and its visual analogy with two sisters who live in Mexico City. These relationships seek to emphasize the reflections of middle class women, evident in their oral histories and the spaces they inhabit. The video and sound techniques open the possibility for formal constructions, using metaphors resolved as an abstract portrait.
Guest performers: Stephany Colunga and Erika Dellenbach

Is a live performance collaboration between audio group The Fortieth Day and video artist Lisa Slodki.

The Fortieth Day is the duo of Isidro Reyes and Mark Solotroff, both key players in the heavy-electronics outfit BLOODYMINDED, a band known for its aggressive and confrontational live shows. Solotroff is also known as the vocalist in the doom/shoegaze band Anatomy of Habit. In The Fortieth Day, Reyes and Solotroff utilize guitar, bass, drum machine, and analog synthesizer to create epic, blackened, psychedelic-industrial drone soundscapes, likened to “sustained, withering blasts of high-pitched noise that are as distinct from one another as spotlights sweeping across the night sky; jackhammer clatter, jet-engine whines, and forlorn keyboard melodies dart in and out of those huge sounds with the grace and impunity of plovers picking a crocodile’s teeth” [Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader]

Lisa Slodki creates real-time performances and installations, often working in collaboration with the Chicago experimental audio and noise communities. Performing with The Fortieth Day under her Noise Crush moniker, Slodki generates VHS tape loops which are mixed live through a battery of VCRs to construct evolving projected superimpositions. Pulsating light of decaying VHS tape and manipulated found footage conjure familiar yet indiscernible images, engaging with the fragility of both medium and memory.