Automata welcomes artists Laura Steenbergeand Madison Brookshire to Automata.  While each artist has presented work at Automata in the past, this is their first collaborative program at Automata. 

From the Artists:

Investigations of time and cross-modality are central to both of our creative practices. We have worked on many projects together over the years, as performers in each other’s work as well as others. In 2019, we instigated a more formal collaboration resulting in our video, can-fork-pedal-voice, completed in summer 2023. Double Double or Nothing, our first live performance collaboration, builds off a series of recent works by Brookshire, called the Number Series, that explore the different temporal experiences available in double projection, often creating an uncanny experience of color as both presence and absence. Similarly, at the heart of Steenberge’s performance practice is a meditative, repetitive practice that is influenced by the study of medieval chant, which is essentially the study of how circularity in music evokes eternity.

Program

Double Double or Nothing, 2024

Madison Brookshire and Laura Steenberge

Performance for two 16mm projectors, viola da gamba, harmonium, sine tone, and voice, 25 minutes

In Double Double or Nothing, a new collaboration between filmmaker Madison Brookshire and composer Laura Steenberge, two projectors, running without any film in them, each produce a low mechanical hum and a sine tone plays out of a nearby speaker creating a chord that quietly fills the room. Brookshire (harmonium and voice) and Steenberge (viola da gamba and voice) respond to this low chord with long tones that are tuned to the overtones to produce subtle textures that simultaneously feel ever-changing and invariable.

can-fork-pedal-voice, 2023

Laura Steenberge and Madison Brookshire

digital video, color, sound, 21 minutes

A series of performances created for the camera by composer Laura Steenberge become a new piece through superimposition.

No. 5, 2023

Madison Brookshire 

One 16mm film on two reels, overlapping projection, color, sound, about 11 minutes.

“Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.” —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Identical films, projected one on top of the other, do not change over time. Time passes in the viewer, not on screen.

Color by Fotokem; Colorist: Doug Ledin

Toile 2, for solo viola da gamba

Laura Steenberge

~10 min

With seven gut strings, there is a lot of sound to explore between harmony and noise. The Toile series has something to do with how harmonic patterns withstand repetition.