Negativland + SUE-C "We Can Really Feel Like We're Here" live perfomance
and Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland

co-presented by Sound Unseen

Legendary sound collage group Negativland and “real-time cinema” visual artist SUE-C collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance about our minds, our realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions.

We'll start the evening off with a one-time-only screening of director Ryan Worsley’s feature film Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland . Immediately following the film, experience a live stage performance of Negativland in We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here accompanied by SUE-C’s unique and immersive visuals.

“An urgent show by Negativland and artist SUE-C calls time on a tech dystopia that is as malevolent as it is stupid... to meet the terrifying contemporary moment... as the world slides incrementally into meltdown.”
- The Wire Magazine

“Negativland have made a rewarding career out of being prodigious consumers of media who then digest it and recontextualize it, emphasizing mediated reality's crazy-making absurdity and the infinite malleability of perception and ‘truth.’”
- Dave Segal, The Stranger

"Negativland are proud subverters of culture, causing trouble while having fun."
- NPR Tiny Desk Concert

SUE-C

Sue Slagle (SUE-C) is an award-winning artist, engineer and educator whose work in “real time cinema” presents a new, imaginative perspective on live performance. Her evolution as a new media artist began in late-90s San Francisco where she was an influential member of the electronic music scene, owning the experimental record label Orthlorng Musork, organizing audio-visual cultural events and teaching the first creative coding classes in Max Software. After finishing her masters degree in engineering at UC Berkeley she moved to Oakland where she became co-owner of the Ego Park gallery and helped launch the First Friday art walks.

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Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland

Since 1959 at the age of five, David "The Weatherman" Wills has been recording and reporting on his life, self, and anything he likes (such as the weather, toilets flushing, and intercepted cell phone conversations) and broadcasting it to anyone interested. Together with childhood friends Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler they formed Negativland, which quickly became an absurd and noisy multimedia world without boundaries, ownership or privacy. Negativland's complex chaos of plunderphonics poses both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, propaganda, power and perception in the Global Village. Is what you're hearing true or simply familiar? It's media about media about media. As we are massaged into the singularity, the medium reveals that any message is all in our heads.

reviews

“If you want to be inspired by individuals who dare to bust down the doors of art’s gatekeepers, then Stand by for Failure is the way to go.”
— Film Threat

“Few artists have logged as many hours on the battlefield of fair use, let alone questioned as persistently the associated legal constraints around intellectual property, as Negativland, whose sonic, visual and performance appropriations and parodies have challenged eyeballs, eardrums and moral standards alike since the late 1970s.”
— The Wire

“40+ years of Negativland metamedia, recontextualized into popular feature length documentary entertainment format by Ryan Worsley. You’ve seen and heard it all! But you’ve never seen and heard it like this!”
— Boing Boing