"sound is a character"

By sarahendren

Sep 22, 2012

Alison O’Daniel’s film, Night Sky, is touring in North American cities for the next couple of weeks—and in it, O’Daniel says, “sound is a character.” There’s an extraordinary amount of play with music, associative and abstracted noises, and descriptive captioning in the work, all while weaving in and out of canonical story structures. See dates and times for screenings below, as well as the trailer.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/12865622 w=500&h=281]

NIGHT SKY TRAILER from Alison O’Daniel on Vimeo.

From Alison’s “500 Words” feature on Art Forum:

SOUND IS A CHARACTER IN MY LATEST FILM, which features a story of two girls traveling into the desert. Their car breaks down and they encounter a small portal made out of a Hula-Hoop hovering in the sublime landscape of the desert. When they reach into it, they discover a dance marathon happening on the other side. Other narratives are at play—road movies, buddy films, sci-fi and queer narratives—but the language of the film emerges around the ambiguous relationship between these girls, one of whom is deaf.

The film is full of synaesthetic experiences of sound where, for example, a light flashes in the desert and is transferred through the sound of bells or water. There are also elements where sound either breaks down or emerges in strange phenomenological ways in a sort of reimagining of what sound is. For instance, a dance marathon features the Los Angeles–based duo Lucky Dragons, who often make music by having their audience members touch cords they’ve engineered. I wanted to work with Lucky Dragons as their work addresses the relationship of the body to making sound. In the film, their speakers break down, forcing the dance marathon contestants to continue dancing––but in silence. As they dance, the girls’ car simultaneously breaks down in the desert…. [more at Art Forum]

Sep. 22 | 7:30pm Plus Gallery’s Experimental Forum, Denver, CO 2501 Larimer Street, Denver, CO 80205 | (720) 394-8484

Sep. 25 | 8pm | $7-10 suggested donation The Nightingale, Chicago, IL 1084 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60642 no live accompaniment

Sep. 27 | 7pm | $5 Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI 48201 | (313) 832-6622

Sep. 29 | 9pm Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY Visual Studies Workshop Auditorium, 31 Prince Street, Rochester, NY 14607 | (585) 442-8676 | info@vsw.org

Oct. 1 | 5:30pm Tisch Department of Cinema Studies, in conjunction with The Steinhardt School, New York University, New York, NY 721 Broadway, between Waverly Place and Washington Place, just south of Eighth Street

[thumbnail: a still from Night Sky, in which two adolescent girls stand in the middle of a desert, hula hoops in hand.]