(25:00, 16mm Loop/ Light-Sensitive Synthesizer/ Voice/ Violin/ Electronics, 2007)
Maximalism through minimalism, peace noise. This collaborative performance between musician Joe Grimm and filmmaker Ben Russell finds its roots in Alvin Lucier’s phenomenological compositions and Anthony McCall’s cinema of the spectacle – in a dynamic marriage of these two histories, Grimm and Russell produce a work of expanded cinema that makes material the relationships between light and sound, sound and space, and space and time.
Peace Noise is presented in the cinema, under the guise of cinema. Joe Grimm stands in front of the screen, producing a range of sounds through mixer feedback, throat singing, violin, and standing waves; Ben Russell stands at the opposite end of the theater, using lenses, prisms, and a series of 16mm flicker loops on a tabletop projector to control the light-sensitive synthesizer that is at the screen. The frame expands, breaks, spreads onto the walls as the sound warbles, builds, and intensifies. In the course of their 25:00 structured improvisation, Grimm and Russell radically alter the terms of viewership, asking their audience for nothing less than to be completely aware and totally, peacefully, overwhelmed. [ more information ]

Peace Noise [ movie clip, 320 x 240 px, 29.35 MB ]