Between Science and Garbage

From San Francisco and Montreal - Everyone loves playing with garbage, but leave it to professionals to come up with fabulous new techniques.

Living Cinema, a collaboration first undertaken in 2000, marks the intersection of two remarkable artists. Montreal's Pierre Hébert is a longtime animator, first with the National Film Board, later working independently with artists like Fred Frith and Robert Lepage. He is a master of the unusual craft of scratch animation, making cinema by engraving directly onto film. Bob Ostertag, meanwhile, has been at the cutting edge of new music for two decades, an influential pioneer in digital sampling and recording who has produced over twenty CDs and worked with such new-musical luminaries as the Kronos Quartet and John Zorn.

Between Science and Garbage, they say, is “difficult to describe but easily grasped.” Essentially the pair creates a live film. Hébert makes images by drawing marker on paper, chalk on chalkboard, blowing dust on mirrors, and manipulating piles of garbage. Ostertag records the sound of the detritus while also spawning shapes on a digital drawing tablet. Although technically intensive, the piece doesn't celebrate technology but questions it. After all, today's cutting-edge technology is little more than tomorrow's trash. Ostertag and Hébert are merely trying to make sense out of science and garbage-a more explicit rendition of the situation we all live with every day.

Jan 28 - 29, 2005 at The Big Secret Theatre
Tickets: Jan 28, 7:30pm - $20
Tickets: Jan 29, 3:00pm Matinee - $16

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