Events

Nervous Magic Lantern

An Evening with Ken and Flo Jacobs

When:
Thursday, May 5, 2011, 7:00pm - 7:00pm
Description:

In Time Squared, a subway trip from the artist’s home in downtown Manhattan to Times Square and back lifts us into the realm of impossibility. The most advanced cinema rises from the simplest technology, as the Nervous Magic Lantern, an empty box with a single-element glass lens, a light and spinning shutter interrupting the light, casts images that conjure 3D illusions and other visual phenomena.  In addition to the Nervous Magic Lantern performance, Jacobs will screen and discuss recent digital works Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) and The Green Wave (2011). (Warning: a discernible flicker operates on the senses. Not for those afflicted with epilepsy or other unusual brain conditions.)

Ken and Flo Jacobs are central figures in post-war experimental cinema. A pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s, Ken Jacobs began the Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton in 1969, and taught there until 2002. He has received numerous awards, including the Maya Deren Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Coordinated by Artemis Willis, Ph.D candidate, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, in conjunction with Professor Tom Gunning's Seminar on the Moving and Projected Image.

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.