Albert Alcoz and Blanca Viñas: The invented night

The invented night is the title of a set of recent works where photography and analog cinema maintain a fruitful dialogue revealed through the static and the moving image, figuration and abstraction, forest and city, color and black & white, silence and sound. Films –on super 8 and 16 mm– and photographic slides exchange aesthetic properties and formal parameters in a dialectical proposal. (AA)

Filmmakers Raymonde Carasco (France, 1933-2009), Elke Marhöfer (Cuba/Germany, 1967-), Chick Strand (USA, 1931-2009) and Mark LaPore (USA, 1952-2005) work primarily - from different practices - with ethnographic and anthropological studies, field and archival work. These four programmes with ethnographic films offer a discovery and unveiling of places, people and meetings with social, political and cross-cultural differences in focus.

Camera positioning, image room design, the thermal profile (all of which are produced for and recorded by the camera), things outside the picture, sound, and political and cultural discrepancies are crucial problematics of these filmmakers' positions in the choice of representation. They deal with history and try to release from the binary opposition, I and you and us and them as something alien, an attitude also vital in the production of films.

Witness a collection of visual music from across time and from around the world that represent the spectrum of rationality. Order on the one side and chaos on the other.  Are they truly polar opposites? Is there order in total chaos or chaos in highly organized forms?  Tell us your thoughts in this night of films and discussion.

Salons are a signature component of the iotaCenter, the world’s first organization devoted to visual music.  These are wonderful nights where we get together as a community of artists, academics and curious onlookers to pontificate on the wild and abstract works called “visual music.”