VI. My own personal evolution.

My own personal evolution towards developing this idea of performance cinema should be examined, as full disclosure can sometimes be of some value.

Where I grew up in New Jersey, I was part of a very New Jersey phenomenon – a cover band. Most cover bands played the great hits of the time. At that time, the radio was filled with the Eagles, Cat Scratch Fever, and punk rock. The band I was in was special: a Progressive Rock Cover Band, called Solaris. Initially, I was the bass player, but my skillset at the bass was not quite up to the task of precisely replicating the extra-ordinary techniques of the likes of Chris Squire, John Wetton, and Mark Shulman of Gentle Giant. Although, I was able to do a pretty good Jon Wetton, and my Pink Floyd material was very good. Also, at the time I was becoming more interested in the works of John Cage, Morton Subotnick, Tangerine Dream, Edgard Varese and others. I also discovered Scriabin and was very much interested in his work "PROMETHEUS", which featured scoring for a light organ.

The band found a new bass player who was able to keep up with the likes of Squire and Shulman, and I did the sound mixing and visuals for the band. This included building a couple of colour bars which were triggered by momentary switches and dimmers – essentially, a light organ, a la Scriabin. With the lights and the slide show, we had a pretty good presentation for a bunch of kids fresh out of industrial New Jersey high schools. Unfortunately, it was the late 1970s and punk rock was the big thing, not ProgRock. Consequently, it was nearly impossible to find a gig. The band eventually split up, but the joy of playing the light organ was great, and I wanted to be able to do the same with slides, movie clips, and all kinds of effects.

Coming from extremely humble circumstances, I didn’t have the money to pursue such dreams, and left New Jersey for Washington DC, and pursued my art in the form of painting and electronic music.

While living in DC, I was involved with a work that reinforced my ideas and which eventually influenced me greatly in this consideration of Performance Cinema. Specifically, the work "SOCIAL AMNESIA" by the Impossible Theatre Group, which was performed in 1985. This "live movie" was highly scripted, rehearsed, and theatrical.

I remember talking with Kirby Malone and Bob Boilen about the work, this - "live movie". As a work of theatre, I thought it was quite a success, but, as a musician as much as a visual artist, I felt that it was too "stiff" and "theatrical" to really bring the audience’s emotional and affective projection (i.e. cathexis) into the performers to make this "live movie" a LIVE MOVIE. Also, the "Movie" aspect was mostly pushed to the background, forming backdrops and illusionary spaces or settings. The slides were all triggered by a SMPTE track on a tape deck – nothing improvisational about that…
It was some 13 years later that I started seeing how a truly "live" movie could be made to happen, when I was working at Apple Computer on the Final Cut Pro development team.

I had this weird dream of having a screen filled with clips, and being able to trigger them by touching the screen. About a year or so later, I began thinking very seriously about the direction of my creativity, and how I wanted certain things to happen, and felt I needed to consider what I was doing in a larger context, especially an historical and theoretical context. I looked to film Theory for Solutions, I looked at Video Theory. I looked at Performance Art Theory, reviews, ideas, books, examples – anything. Nothing really seemed to fit, and that’s when I realised they COULDN’T fit. At that point, I saw that these various and particular strains and directions of contemporary creative endeavour were coalescing around a certain few fundamental points:

1. live performance
2. audio and video digital technologies
3. image projection (cinema)

and thusly: THAT’S why we’re dealing with : a fundamentally different category of creative practice, and that’s when Performance Cinema came in as an idea, as it fulfils all the necessary points of discussion: it is performance, it is cinematic, it is immersed in digital technology. Therefore, I see Performance Cinema as much of a fait accompli, an historical necessity, as much as it is a conceptual frame or hypothesis. Very quickly this idea appealed to me as a kind of "DUH" moment – something so obvious that I can’t believe the dots hadn’t been connected before. Then I realised that some of the dots HAD been connected, but needed framing, naming, and connecting to other points and configurations of points; and hence the historical necessity of this symposium; the San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium.