CEPHALOPOD: BEEF @ Supernormal Festival, Braziers Park, Oxfordshire
5th – 7th August 2016
Cephalopod is a collaborative film-based hub taking residence for the weekend of Supernormal 2016. Their striking mollusc-inspired shed hidden deep in the woods will host a scheduled selection of events from BEEF members and friends; including a 16mm film drop in workshop as the cephalopod transforms into a darkroom, screenings from BEEF members & friends, and a performance of experimental live soundscapes from Saltings & sound explorations and excursions from BEEF members.
SUPERNORMAL is a three-day, experimental arts and music festival taking place at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire. It offers a platform for artists, performers and musicians to work collaboratively and creatively for a new kind of audience seeking experiences out of the mainstream.
BEEF is a self-sustaining film and sound collective with an analogue heart initiated to support and nurture experimental film in Bristol. This project is part of the Shed Commissions by Supernormal Festival.
LINE UP:
Friday Evening:
From 8pm
CEPHALOPOD Film Screening
A collection of short experimental films selected by BEEF artists.
Artists showing:
Lauren Cook, Katie Davies, Shirley Pegna + Brenda Waite + Kyra Norman, Kathy Hinde, Stuart Moore, Joanna Mayes, Rosa Menkman, Tanya Moulson, Kevin Rankine & Simon Olley, Antonio Roberts & Lucy Hutchinson, (UNCollective), Niyaz Saghari, Oliver Sutherland, Daisy Dickinson.
SALTINGS & Laura Phillips
SALTINGS brings together three Bristol-based musicians from different nationalities and musical backgrounds. A shuddering mixture of cello, double bass and live programming, they aim to tentatively address the unknown areas of existence that lie just around the next turn, or beyond the corner of your eye. It is a controlled space of darkness, preying on its audience, luring them into a world full of drones and noise. Drawn from many influences, the resulting soundclash sucks you in and leaves you feeling equally elevated, shaken and craving more. For this unique performance BEEF artist Laura Phillips will collaborate with the group to create an audio-visual ensemble of live video manipulation and improvisation.
Vicky Smith & Shirley Pegna
BEEF artist Vicky Smith & Shirley Pegna collaborate in unique outdoors screening of the experimental 16mm work: Primal, 2016, duration 10 mins.
Saturday Day
11am – 1pm Cyanotype Workshop from Ruth Sharman
Using this simple historic photographic process, you will be able to create your own beautiful blue-prints using found materials, music related objects and the sun’s rays. Cyanotypes are a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints.
2pm Shirley Pegna: Sonic Hide and Seek – Exploring & Listening
This workshop offers experiences of ear extensions, creative cooperation, enhanced listening, explorative clambering and tea drinking.
Shirley Pegna is a sound artist and musician based in Bristol and member of BEEF. She is interested in sound and vibration travelling through different materials, exploring it as a connecting agent over extreme long distances as well as for more localised sounding events.
Saturday Evening:
From 8pm
Louisa Fairclough Super 8 Sunsets, 2000
Sunsets filmed on Super 8 while driving out of the city. Fragments of footage are optically printed onto 16mm film, the abstracted view slipping in and out of sync, dissolving and doubling: images repeat and return. The oranges, reds and yellows of kodachrome sunsets. 16mm, 12 mins, silent
Bea Haut Defenestration, 2015
Mixing up film and domestic structures, this film reaches beyond the frame, testing out access and escape, aperture and portal, visible and invisible. With an optical sound that also extends across the frame boundary into the visible.16mm, B&W, 4.40 mins, optical sound.
Ian William Craig
Blending choral, ambient and noise influences together into his customised array of analogue tape decks, composer/vocalist Ian William Craig moves you over shifting tectonic plates of operatic improvisations, fields of tape hiss, haunting pastoral melodies and billowing clouds of becoming.
Matt Davies
A phantasmagorical expanded projection of multiple 16mm film loops and sounds. Matt Davies is an artist, field recordist and collector whose work is primarily engaged with the act of listening and the exploration of chance based composition. This performance incorporates playful acoustics created from recording the transformers inside film projectors; an alchemical mirage of 16mm found footage that is re-purposed by contact printing and abstraction through light play and lens trickery.
Sunday Day
11am – 1pm 16mm Film Toning Workshop
This hands-on workshop provides an insight into toning processes of early cinema. Learn how to contact print 16mm film, cut up found footage and the many possibilities of experimental 16mm film making.
Sunday Evening
From 8pm
Mary Stark
Mary Stark is an artist filmmaker based at Rogue Studios in Manchester. She works primarily with film performance exploring the wonder of film projection, light, shadow and the sculptural materiality of the filmstrip. Join us at the Cephalopod Sunday evening, where Mary will serve a special blend of 16mm found film footage with sound and cups of tea…
Melanie Clifford
Melanie will present a work in three parts featuring observations, research and ideas formed during the residency and her experience working at previous Supernormals. Join us Sunday for the last iteration of the three works.
Melanie Clifford works in translation between moving image, sound, drawing, broadcast, material and site, with research interests bridging art and neuroscience. Her work includes silent film and constructing visual scores for variable sound interpretation – soliciting sensitivity to detail, to minor fluctuations and structural disintegrity. She also works directly with sound and its location: performing site-specific sound pieces and recording found sounds and her own slight interventions, to be edited, reconstructed and broadcast.
Her work is exhibited and broadcast internationally, and she co-produces a weekly live improvisational radio test transmission for Resonance 104.4FM, London.
Auto Bitch
To end the night we have the punker than punk, stripping away all harmony, leaving only vocals and percussion Auto Bitch!