Sunday May 23, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Potter-Belmar Labs: Improvised Cinema

A combination live DJ/VJ performance with experimental cinema!

Potter-Belmar Labs (Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens) bring their brand of handcrafted audiovisual illusions to LA. One part new media art, one part DJ and VJ performance, and one part experimental cinema., they will cook up a fresh new batch of live cinema for you right before your eyes. PBL's experimental cinema performance at Filmforum will touch upon new and recurring themes, including the writings of Borges, educational films about time and space, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Using mostly their own footage with some found footage thrown in for spice, PBL's performance will be a dynamic conversation full of intention and apophenia. Both artists perform from laptop computers augmented by external digital devices used to manipulate their palette of images and sounds.  Their experiments with compositional forms include audience participation, thematic collage, and narrative deconstruction

PBL fashions their cinematic tapestry as they go, weaving field recordings, braiding threads of media heritage, through a lacework of their own rich sound and image compositions.  Deeply ambient textures emerge as well as moments of turbulence; concrete imagery gives way to abstraction.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.  Click here to purchase!

More about Potter-Belmar Labs:

Potter-Belmar Labs is Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens, collaborating artists since 1999, with internationally exhibited work including live cinema performance, single-channel video, and installation art. They were awarded Best Video Installation at Orilla '06 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santa Fe, Argentina, and first prize in three performance competitions, including the Unreal Tournament at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Their latest video short, Double Thunder, won Honorable Mention in Experimental Moving Image at the Fargo Film Festival. In May 2008, Potter-Belmar Labs took their audience-participatory live cinema performance to cities throughout the U.S. Southwest and West Coast, with stops including San Francisco's Other Cinema and Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. In the spring of 2009, they traveled to upstate New York on an Artpace travel grant to conduct research on the rich media art ecology there. Their latest short, "Double Thunder," won Honorable Mention at its debut at the 2009 Fargo Film Festival.

Potter-Belmar Labs specializes in audience-participatory, multimedia spectacles and curiosities. Their installations offer means of interaction, like unique switches, sounds and peepholes, and their live cinema performances often involve direct audience participation. The subjects they deconstruct, shuffle, and reorde are as varied as the American crow, baryogenesis, the myth of Pandora, and story-telling itself. Through exhibition and performance, novel uses of technology and media, and their consideration of site, PBL invites the audience into cinematic escape.

To view PBL documentation and events schedule, click here.

Leslie Raymond produces work in expanded cinema forms including installation, site-specific and public art. She also performs as vjFutureWorkerGirl alongside DJs and sound artists, and organizes exhibitions and events of new media art. Leslie teaches video and digital media at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she founded the New Media Program in the Department of Art and Art History.

Jason Jay Stevens is an artist, designer, and a maker of music and sound. His 3-D work includes interactive museum exhibitions, furniture, and sculpture. A member of of punk rock and noise ensembles throughout the 90's, today he composes on laptop computer for sculpture and scores for video.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.