We just recorded an hour-long Stuart Maconie Freak Zone Playlist for BBC 6 Music. It will broadcast on 24 February 2019 at midnight (that’s Saturday night/Sunday morning) UK time. Info will be added to the BBC site nearer the date.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rwkjd
The Mirror will be shown (theatrical format, i.e. not a performance) at Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema in San Francisco on 6 April 2019.
We are pleased to announce a new audiovisual immersive cinema performance by People Like Us called The Mirror, performed (and screened in Theatrical form if in the US) from March 2018 worldwide.
The Mirror is a live a/v performance which splices together movie snippets with unique sample-based music exploring the masks that we wear represented through the lens, using parallel narratives across the screen to depict an ever-changing stream, rather than a singular, fixed being, narrative or moment in time.
“A feat of research and craft, this new work is a spellbinding inquiry into editing and juxtaposition; a collage one can unthread allowing the viewer to discover hidden stories through familiar images. The soundtrack is performed live, made up from hundreds of preexisting songs, as well as particular sounds from the original film clips.” — Flatpack Film Festival
18 March 2018 – World Premiere: Athens Greek Film Archive Foundation (as part of Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens, organised and produced by the Onassis Cultural Centre-Athens) – tickets/info
13 April 2018 – UK Premiere: Liverpool FACT – tickets
17 April 2018 – Belfast Film Festival at Crescent Arts Centre – tickets
20 April 2018 – London Cafe Oto – tickets
21 April 2018 – Birmingham Flatpack Festival – tickets
12 May 2018 – London Splice Festival, at Rich Mix – tickets
11 July 2018 – London Cafe Oto, double bill with Carl Stone – tickets
19 July 2018 – Gijón LEV Arenas Movedizas – free entry
26 July 2018 – MACBA, Barcelona – tickets
17th September 2018 – Theatrical Screening (not live) – Bryce’s Show on WFMU
19th & 20th September 2018 – Theatrical Screening (not live) – Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn – tickets
20 October 2018 – 100 Years of Copyright Festival, Berlin HKW – tickets
2 November 2018 – Spill Festival, Ipswich – tickets
10 November 2018 – Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo Norway – tickets
15 November 2018 – Brighton “Cinecity” Film Festival at Fabrica – tickets
30 November 2018 – Theatrical Screening (not live, we do not perform in concerts in the US) Recombinant Festival, Gray Area, San Francisco – tickets
9 February 2019 – Theatrical Screening (not live, we’ll not be there) – The Voix de Ville 2019 / ARTxFM annual fundraiser at Columbia Theatre, Louisville Kentucky – tickets
27 March 2019 – Musikbrauerei, Berlin – tickets
6 April 2019 – Theatrical Screening (screening – not live) – Other Cinema, ATA, Valencia St, San Francisco – tickets soon
Mid-June 2019 – Newcastle – The Mirror and Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear – (details tbc)
If you are a festival organiser with a budget and are interested in booking this, please get in touch by way of our Contact Form. If you are in a country requiring a work visa to perform we can in very special circumstances make this work into a stand alone movie, but generally this is only available as a performance with the artist present and you will need to gain necessary papers for us to agree.
SUPPORTING WORKS AND ARTICLES
3 artist commissions : we have commissioned new works by artists responding to The Mirror:
Reflects by Dina Kelberman (December 2018)
Abject Mirror by Porest (Mark Gergis) (January 2019)
The Mirror by Hearty White (January 2019)
(view all three on one url)
The Mirror CD/digital download contains music from The Mirror, and tracks from Gone, Gone Beyond
New Film for Improvising Musicians and Artists – titled Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. This is not the first film we have made of this type. Previous to this was Notations (which included a national tour in the UK (followed by further dates internationally) with a fantastic roster of improvisers, supported by Sound and Music), as well as some collaborations where we have made the film then made sections available to other artists and musicians to respond (Gesture Piece and CCCitations). You can enquire about performing with this movie by way of our Contact Page. Our first performance will be in Newcastle, UK in June 2019, as part of a collaboration with Newcastle University Department of Music.
Interview with Anne Hilde Neset on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, 8 January 2019
Listen to the interview
Interview with Robert Worby and full airy of performance of The Mirror (at Cafe Oto) on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now, 19 January 2019
Listen to the interview
Graham Duff – The Mirror a reflection upon the work and surrounding subject matter
Interview in The Wire Magazine in a phone conversation with Emily Bick of The Wire Magazine, Vicki Bennett reflects on The Mirror, Gone, Gone Beyond, and working with preexisting footage.
Info sheet / teaching pack – collected insights on the making of this work by Vicki Bennett.
Shortcut for this url is http://peoplelikeus.org/themirror.html
“Hey, hey, have you ever tried… reaching out to the other side?”
Gone, Gone Beyond is an immersive a/v spatial cinema work by People Like Us, which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what’s behind. It uses appropriated edited collage sewn together in a giant patchwork. Pull on a thread and watch whole new narratives expand and unravel all at once on a 360 palette.
The initial 47-minute film premiered in San Francisco 11-14 October 2017 at Recombinant Festival at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. We have been making this movie for Recombinant Media Labs own Cinechamber for quite some time now – it is a stand alone piece that you watch and listen to from the inside. Stage 2 is currently in production through 2018 and we are looking for partners to present the hour-long piece from 2019 onwards.
Q&A with Hearty White: http://peoplelikeus.org/2017/gone-gone-beyond-qa/
Saturday 9 February 2019
Full event length: 6:00 PM – 11:59 PM EST | The Mirror screens approximately 8pm (check with them if you’re planning on going)
Columbia Theatre, 824 South 4th Street, Louisville, KY 40203, United States
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wxox-voix-de-ville-tickets-54715323004
As part of a larger program of performances, a theatrical screening (ie we won’t be there!) of THE MIRROR by People Like Us will take place at the grand Columbia Theatre at 824 S. Fourth Street in downtown Louisville for the Voix de Ville commemorating the 3rd Anniversary of WXOX 97.1 FM / ARTxFM! Enjoy food and libations from local vendors, and bid on selections from your favourite shows in the XOX themed Silent Auction. http://www.artxfm.com/
Many thanks to Leon for having us on Reel Rebels Radio on The Avant-Garde for Middlebrows: a Some Bizzare label special. You can listen here:
Here’s the track list (selected from a much longer list):
Soft Cell – Entertain Me (Richard Skinner session)
Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria
People Like Us – Feel It Steal It
Agnes Bernelle – Mother The Wardrobe Is Full Of Infantrymen
Dave Ball – Sincerity
Renaldo and the Loaf – Critical/Dance
Coli – Who By Fire
Marc and the Mambas – Untitled
Psychic TV – Stolen Kisses
The The – Perfect
Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel – Descent Into The Inferno
Swans – A Screw
Val Denham and Farmacia – As I Walked Out One Evening
Burmoe Brothers – Under The Blanket Of Love
Marc Almond and La Magia with Nico – Your Kisses Burn
The The – We Can’t Stop What’s Coming
On Saturday 19 January 2019 22:15 (UK) on BBC RADIO 3 Vicki will be guesting on Hear and Now, presented by Robert Worby. She will be talking about her work, then the show will air a recording of the full 35 minute People Like Us concert The Mirror, which was performed at London’s Cafe Oto in Summer 2018. Broadcast then archived for a few weeks: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00022k6
On 8 January 2019 Vicki Bennett joins Anne Hilde Neset on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction. Vicki will play one track from The Mirror and a couple of favourite picks of other people, namely Jacques Tati and David Lynch. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0001xwp
Live link then show archive (3 weeks) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001xwp
We have made a new film for improvising musicians and artists titled Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. This is part of our project The Mirror, which initially was and is an audiovisual performance by People Like Us, and the umbrella project also includes 3 new artist commissions and this film.
This is not the first film we have made of this type. Previous to this was Notations (which included a national tour in the UK (followed by further dates internationally) with a fantastic roster of improvisers, supported by Sound and Music), as well as some collaborations where we have made the film then made sections available to other artists and musicians to respond (Gesture Piece and CCCitations).
Much like the other movies, you can enquire about performing with this movie by way of our Contact Page. Our first performance will be in Newcastle, UK in June 2019, as part of a collaboration with Newcastle University Department of Music.
Our project The Mirror consists of an a/v performance (and sometimes stand alone movie), an album release, a film for improvisers, and 3 new artist commissions where they to respond to The Mirror with a new piece of work. All three artist responses by Dina Kelberman, Porest (Mark Gergis) and Hearty White are now available, so we’re putting them all together online here:
Reflects by Dina Kelberman (December 2018)
Media link: https://dinakelberman.com/reflects
Description: When I thought about the word “reflections” this is what my brain showed me. Something about reflects, reflex, reflection symmetry, shapes, walls, and now that i think about it it’s probably a lot to do with sitting in a tiny room full of corners all day every day. Also laptop symmetry. These might all just be portraits of my laptop.
Bio: Dina Kelberman is an interdisciplinary artist recently transplanted from Baltimore, MD to Los Angeles CA. Kelberman has created original web-based pieces for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute and has participated in numerous design and photography biennials. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art21, NPR, Known and Strange Things (Cole, 2016) and most recently The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2018) and Olia Liliana’s “An Infinite Seance 3”. In 2018 she was invited to speak at the UbuWeb conference in Athens and the Post-Photography Prototyping Biennial in London. She is currently ranked 5th in the world for Most Lines in Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
We’re pleased to release the last our 3 artist commissions made in response to The Mirror.
The first was by Dina Kelberman, the second was a 50-minute new audio piece by Porest (Mark Gergis) and now we’re presenting a brand new 50-minute audio work by HEARTY WHITE. You can listen here and download at bandcamp.
https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/track/the-mirror-2
(Please note, this is a piece of audio by Hearty White, and the link embed above lists it as People Like Us purely because it’s on our bandcamp page)
Bio: Hearty White lives and doesn’t work in Lexington, KY, birthplace of Richard Hell. His radio non-career spans decades. He loves you in theory. Listen to Hearty White’s WFMU radio show:
wfmu.org/playlists/HA
More info on The Mirror by People Like Us and these artist commissions:
peoplelikeus.org/2018/the-mirror-a-new-live-a-v-performance-by-people-like-us/
We’re pleased to tell you that Vicki Bennett will be Hallwalls Artist in Residence (HARP) at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY from 2019-2020. We will start making a new project for them later this year and keep you up to date once we begin. We are doing the residency remotely until Fall 2020, when we will be there to output and broadcast the completed new work.
Hallwalls Artists-in-Residence Project (HARP) is a successful multidisciplinary artists residency program, which is funded in most years (with the exceptions of 1996–97, 1997–98, and 2004–05) by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; in most years by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (for visual & media artists); and from 2008 to 2010 by the Nimoy Foundation (for visual & media artists). Some musicians in residence since 2010 (Roscoe Mitchell in 2010, Wadada Leo Smith in 2012) have been supported in addition or solely by the Jazz Presenting Program of Chamber Music America (CMA). The goal of the project is to support invited artists through professional stipends, materials and fabrication budgets, workspace, access to equipment and technical support, public presentations of their work in solo exhibitions, site-specific installations, screenings, and concerts, and interaction with local artists and communities through collaboration, lectures, master classes, workshops, and in-school residencies. Coming next year, three new HARP projects, made possible with major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Cullen Foundation.
HARP Artists 2019-2020
Douglas Ewart, George Lewis, & Douglas Repetto
People Like Us (Vicki Bennett)
John Oswald
NOTATIONS a film for live improvisers
(People Like Us, 2013)
Our film for live improvisers was performed at the School of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece on 29 May 2018, and it’s just been put online.
Watch other performances of Notations here: http://peoplelikeus.org/2013/notations/
NOTATIONS at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Excerpts from a workshop and improvised performance by σ.π.Α.Μ.*
*experimental and improvised music ensembles
Above is the trailer for the second of our 3 artist commissions made in response to The Mirror. The first was by Dina Kelberman, and now we’re presenting you this 50-minute new audio piece by POREST (Mark Gergis).
Available January 7, 2019 (free download)
https://porest.bandcamp.com/album/abject-mirror-2
POREST • ABJECT MIRROR
Porest is dragged through an inconvenient network of paranormal subterfuge after exposing something significant that may have happened 33 days from now.
Audio-drama with advertisements and musical accompaniment.
Porest, etc: Mark Gergis
Dr. Lumen / Mr. Fleckt, etc: Jake Rodriguez
Acoustic guitar on THROUGH YOU: Robert Millis
Recorded and produced by Porest until 2019
Thank you: Vicki Bennett
Published by Porestsound – 2019
(Porestsound 010-DI)