COLLABORATION AS A MEANS OF CONTROL /  by melinda shopsin

August 23, 2011
Aurora Picture Show
Houston, TX

New York City-based artist Andrew Lampert regularly creates multi-projector live cinema performances and offbeat short films with his friends and musical collaborators. Each project is most certainly the result of shared efforts and creative input, yet the end results are attributed to him. For this video salon titled COLLABORATION AS A MEANS OF CONTROL Lampert will explore the grey area of ownership with a fun, funny and funky selection of new and recent films guaranteed to beg the question: Hey, whose in charge here anyway?

This is what it look like when I spoke at Aurora Picture Show

This is what it look like when I spoke at Aurora Picture Show

ANDREW LAMPERT PRESENTS: ANDY LAMPERT /  by melinda shopsin

May 31, 2011 @6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011

Please join EAI for a special evening with artist and filmmaker Andrew Lampert, including a screening with performative elements and a conversation between Lampert and musician/writer Alan Licht.

Andrew Lampert Presents: Andy Lampert is part of EAI's ongoing 40th anniversary programming. Celebrating video's rich history across the last four decades and its vitality today, EAI now looks to the future with a series of projects featuring young artists whose works are redefining the use of the moving image in contemporary art

Andrew Lampert is at the forefront of a new generation of artists engaging with film, video and performance, revisiting and extending the dialogue around an expanded cinema. Pursuing the alchemy between artist, art, and audience in a public space, Lampert explores the contingency of film as a medium, introducing unscripted and chance elements. Reveling in cinema as a performative environment, Lampert reclaims this space from a mass media culture to emphasize its potential for immediacy and accident—and to make each of his screenings and performances a one-of-a-kind event.

Lampert's media works defy strict categorization as films or videos. At EAI, Lampert will project Super-8 films and also present works on video. Taking on the role of projectionist, he will orchestrate the screening, providing introductions and commentary with performative elements. The event will include the first New York screening of a video from Lampert's new diary series, shot (often surreptitiously) with the artist's cell-phone-sized pocket video camera; short films described by Lampert as "the death of Kodachrome," and two works that look at adolescence, one in a fictionalized, filmic past (ETKA AND MASHA: TEENAGERS OF THE OLD WORLD, 2010, 12:29 min) and the other in today's video-saturated reality (MADELINE VICTORIOUS, 2010, 6:26 min). These projects are unified in their emphasis on the frame around the edges of narrative—the genres and clichés in which he cloaks on-screen action, the happy accidents during production, and the unexpected events during a screening that shape the audience's response and foreground human activity in the cinematic context.

Lampert explores the cinematic experience as content, experimenting with the physical spaces between projector, projectionist, audience and screen—and with the experiences made possible through their convergence. The cinema becomes a site of abstract and magical production in his performances, videos and films, as Lampert investigates the gap between an artwork's private intent and its public reception.

Following the screening, Lampert will join Alan Licht and EAI's Rebecca Cleman in conversation. Licht, an acclaimed musician, writer and curator, is a frequent collaborator of Lampert's. Over the last five years, they have staged a number of live performances together under the name Lamp/Licht. The program will conclude with a Q&A session.

IMAGES FESTIVAL: CINEMA IS NOT CELLULOID /  by melinda shopsin

April 6, 2011 @ 9:30
Polish Combatant's Hall
206 Beverley St.
Toronto

 Images Festival hosts me for this suite of works featuring the inimitable Caroline Golum.

 

 

Live Images #4: CINEMA IS NOT CELLULOID

An archivist by trade, Andrew Lampert spends his days reconstructing and preserving films, combining elements and materials to create a physical catalogue of significant works available in unchanging form to contemporary and future audiences. As an artist he tends to reverse this process, separating the elements that comprise a film to draw attention to the shifting relationships between sound and image, history, memory and time. His performances consist of silent films with live narration, sound tracks with live projection or a combination of both. The illusion of reality is sacrificed to the reality of the moment and the accidents that happen when elements are out of sync: "The projector and the screen and the projectionist and the audience together are far more integral to cinema than any film running through a projector in a booth behind the audience." For Lampert, cinema is what happens in the moment, and his performances engage with the layers and intersections of time as it is recalled, recorded, projected and replayed.For the Images Festival Lampert will perform the works AM I FROM BROOKLYN?, an autobiographical guided tour of Brooklyn and beyond; RIGMAROLE REVERSAL,  a non-sync account of a lost soundtrack; and CAROLINE GOLUM AS in which the eponymous actress auditions to play the filmmaker's great great great great great aunt in late 1700s Siberia.

Školská 28 /  by melinda shopsin

March 11, 2011
Školská 28
Prague, Czech Republic

A coming together of pieces from past and present, an introduction to Prague and to you A hello and what are we doing here?

 

 

 

curated by Henry Hills

Drawing by Martin Blazicek

Drawing by Martin Blazicek


Two Evenings: Reihe Experimentalfilm /  by melinda shopsin

MARCH 5&6, 2011
Leipzig, Germany

I was a guest for two evenings at Reihe Experimentalfilm thanks to Leif Magne Tangen.
Night #1 featured ALL MAGIC SANDS (single channel/double image, 2010) with SOME DECEMBER (2010). Night #2 featured a lot of Youtube clips (not mine) and various shorts.

Single Malt at Bowey Poetry Club /  by melinda shopsin

Jan 9, 2011
The Bowery Poetry Club
New York City

"Is there anything that says, "The holidays are here," more than a bunch of poets sipping whisky? And besides, doesn't poetry sound better when you are drinking? Bob Holman and Robert Fitterman host this crew of vagabonds and have matched each writer with a single-malt beverage. You can pick your favorite match at the end, but by that point it might be a tall order.

This year's readers: Anselm Berrigan, Kristen Gallagher, Andrew Lampert, Stacy Szymaszek and Lawrence Giffin."

Ecce Promo /  by melinda shopsin

November 19, 2010
National Arts Club
New York City

In conjunction with Alan Licht’s current show Cross Promotion at AVA and Diapason, the artist has organized a special evening of live press release readings. A variety of writers, editors, artists, musicians, curators, and normal people have been invited to read a favorite press release aloud, be it good, bad, or bizarre.

Readers: Domenick Ammirati, Michael Azerrad, Carly Busta, Howie Chen, James Hoff, Angela Jaeger, Glenn Kenny, Andy Lampert Zach Layton, Alan Licht, Justin Luke, Jack Mello, Jay Sanders, Elizabeth Schambelan, Michael J. Schumacher, Monica de la Torre, Mike Wolf

CONDUCING At Roulette /  by melinda shopsin

October 7, 2010
Roulette
New York, NY

CONDUCING was performed as part of EASY NOT EASY, a three night festival curated by Matt Mehlan (Skeletons) & Doron Sadja (MIRRORGATE, West Nile). Using the idea of "Simple Scores" as a starting point, they asked a wide array of some of NYC artists to compose and perform a series of "simple" new scores as well as some scores by more established artists. These concerts were to help raise money and awareness for Roulette  as they prepared to move to their incredible Art Deco theater in Downtown Brooklyn.

Performers:

Aki Onda – Tapes, Electronics
Richard Garet - Electronics
Ben Greenberg – Electric Guitar
Katherine Young – Amplified Bassoon, Electronics
Sergei Tcherepnin – Modular Synth
Maria Chavez – Turntables
Shahzad Ismaily – Bass, Synth, Etc
C. Spencer Yeh – Violin, Electronics

Greater New York /  by melinda shopsin

September 4 and September 11, 2010
Greater New York
PS1/MoMA

“Despite—or perhaps because of—his training as an archivist, Andrew Lampert’s films and performances undermine any expected reverence for the preservation and exhibition of media artifacts. “The projector and the screen and the projectionist and the audience are together far more integral to cinema than any film running through a projector in a booth behind the audience,” Lampert has written, in a short statement on his practice. “Celluloid is not cinema, not even close.” For Lampert, cinema is what happens right now, and he loves to tangle the lines between the documented and the live, creating sets of rules for each work that allow for improvisation and chance operations. As part of Greater New York Cinema, Lampert will present two afternoon events. For “Contracted Cinema” on September 4, Lampert will perform Jacka Spades (2009), his audio-visual record of a day of Super 8 filming in New York, presented back in real time, and the similarly peripatetic Am I From Brooklyn? (2010). On September 11th, “The Old World and This One, Too” will include Lampert’s take on the dance film and portrait genres, as well as the premiere of a Super 8 double-projection with artist Fern Silva, who will perform with Lampert as the duo Double Trouble. In keeping with Lampert’s events at Anthology Film Archives and beyond, both shows will include impromptu readings, odd bits of media ephemera, and door prizes to lucky audience members! ”
— Calendar text
AM I FROM BROOKLYN? (2010), screened on Sept. 4

AM I FROM BROOKLYN? (2010), screened on Sept. 4


THAT'S UNDERTAINMENT at Anthology Film Archives /  by melinda shopsin

April 6, 2010
Anthology Film Archives
NYC

UNESSENTIAL CINEMA presents an expanded cinema event by Skip Elsheimer, Andrew Lampert Stephen Parr and Greg Pierce that will forever be known as THAT'S UNDERTAINMENT. 4 concurrent, adjacent projections of totally boring films and footage can't be boring when devoured as a whole, right?


PROJECTO DYSFUNCTION at Medical Film Symposium /  by melinda shopsin

January 22, 2010.
Medical Film Symposium at the Surgical Ampitheatre of the Pennsylvania Hospital
Philadelphia, PA

PRJOECTO DYSFUNCTION
A collaboration with Greg Pierce (The Orgone Archive).

Greg and I were miraculously allowed to stage a multi-projector event in the nation's oldest surgical amphitheatre, which served as an operating room from 1804 through 1868. We simultaneously ran 14 projectors and only blew the electricity once. Many thanks to Dwight Swanson, Joanna Poses, John Pettit (who made the video above), Rachele Rahme and Adam Abrams.

““Projecto Dysfunction: Acute Projections by the Orgone Archive & Public Opinion Laboratory” You might know a thing or two about Philadelphia’s place in the history of the birth of the United States, but did you know it also opened the first public hospital? The only evening of screenings not open to the public took place in the original Surgical Amphitheatre of the Pennsylvania Hospital, a behind-the-scenes spot unavailable to most tourists. In the early days of medical school education, people learned surgical techniques by watching actual surgeries. The education of would-be doctors relied on the availability of the sick, who would be operated on in “operating theatres,” tall, round rooms with stadium seating. The procedure took place in the center of the room, and members of the medical profession (and sometimes the general public) looked on. The medical film helped put this teaching procedure out of business. It was an apt venue for an evening of experimental projection of medical film (1950s-1970s, 8mm, super 8, 16mm, color, B&W, sound, silent, TRT 70 minutes) by Greg Pierce (Orgone Cinema Archive) and Andrew Lampert (Public Opinion Laboratory). This event was certainly the most photographed occasion of the week, and with good reason. The Surgical Amphitheatre itself is quite beautiful — simple, Georgian. The audience sat and stood in the upper balconies of the theatre. Once the lights went down, the space became a 360-degree screen, as the projectors were set up at ground level (where the surgeons and patient should have been), except for one on the third level. They pointed up and around, all over the room. The projectionists wore white lab coats, which became screens as well. A Pageant Analyzer projected near the ceiling, at a very slow frame rate, a reel of women’s faces pre-surgery. At times it was difficult to discern what their future procedures might entail, but frequently their expressions mimicked those of the audience watching gruesome surgery films on the tiers below. This screening contained many of the kinds of films that had first sprung to my mind when the symposium was announced. Educational and procedural films made for medical students, surgical films that replaced the operating theatre, guts galore. The faded color glory of many of these prints did nothing to minimize the gore factor nor to minimize the discomfort some of the audience members experienced. A cat was induced to vomit in the film Vomiting Control (re-named by Andy Lamptert, The Act of Puking with One’s Own Mouth). An inscrutable film showed something to do with cows. Other projections included a live human birth, brain surgery, cartilage removed from a chest, and the dissection of a rat. Audio recorded by Alan Lomax in operating theatres and hospitals was played at some points. The audience was invited to move about to get different views of the films. Just when the performance seemed to have reached perfection, the projectionists upped the ante, pulled out small disco balls, and planted them in front of Super 8 projectors. Multitudes of tiny frames traversed the room at vomitous speed. Hundreds of digital photos were snapped, many films were viewed, the operating theatre revived as a cinema in the round. The gang retired, only to meet the next morning for the academic portion of the symposium.””
— Liz Coffey, THE MOVING IMAGE Vol. 10, #2

 

GUITAR FILM AT GUILD & GREYSHKUL /  by melinda shopsin

February 8, 2009
Guild & Greyshkul Gallery
New York CIty

GUITAR FILM was presented as part of the exhibit ON FROM HERE at Guild & Greyshkul Gallery. Thanks to Sara Vanderbeek and Esme Watanabe,

GUITAR FILM (2009)

GUITAR FILM (2009)

A lesson on how to make a film and how not to play guitar. A film in two parts with a large gap in the middle. The "story" is heard in the continuous audio. Featuring the very patient Melinda Shopsin.

SWEETHEARTS At International Film Festival Rotterdam /  by melinda shopsin

2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Netherlands

The second performance of SWEETHEARTS, this time in Dutch and English.

Shot by Jeanne Liotta

“…archivist/programmer/projector performance artist Andrew Lampert, whose delightful Fluxus homage, the live piece SWEETHEARTS, involved three 16mm machines projecting the letters A, B and C, and two women to the sides of the screens reading and responding to survey questions in English and Dutch that ask the audience to divide themselves into groups based on answers to increasingly intimate questions. With Lampert darting back and forth between the control table and the clanking projectors, the piece combined the handmade chaos of 1960s underground art with a computer-age nod to binary classification, where all information can be reduced to 0s and 1s. It also reduced the idea of projection and audience involvement to its most elemental level, making it fit into the overall framework of the “Sharits in Context” program to which it belonged.” – David Schwartz, Chief Curator of the Museum of the Moving Image writing for sensesofcinema.com

“Dear Holland,
It’s time that we discussed the situation. Lets be open with each other. I mean, how long can we avoid our hearts? To find shared ground we must first speak a common language. How else can we have a dialogue? Through the movies? There is some land and water between us, Holland, but still I’d like to get closer. You understand that New York City is a lonely place for an American guy. Lets rendezvous in the secret drawing room, spill our secrets on your parlour bed. Is there a Europe we can slip away to? A mountain hideaway we might call our own? We wouldn’t need much, a little grass bed, maybe a pillow, my coat makes a fine blanket. You and me together, exchanging long glances, in harmony intertwined, Holland. I’ll meet you there.”
— Program note