Symposium: Filming Improvisation – Improvising with Film

Name: Symposium: Filming Improvisation – Improvising with Film
Start: 2025-02-01T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-02-02T15:30:00+01:00
Location: Zossener Straße 24, 10961

Schedule

Sat, 01 Feb, 2025 at 10:00 am to Sun, 02 Feb, 2025 at 03:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Zossener Straße 24, 10961 | Berlin, BE

10th symposium at the exploratorium berlin
Saturday, 1 Feb | 10 am–10 pm
Sunday, 2 Feb | 10:30 am–3:30 pm
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!! Opening Event on Friday, 31 Jan | 8 pm
Sound & Lecture N° 25: Film – Sound – Improvisation
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To open the symposium, we are happy to host silent film pianist Eunice Martins. Together with a quartet of her choice (Sofia Borges, Cecilia Caroline Tallone and Eric Wong) she will improvise to a total of five experimental silent films mostly from the 1910s to 1920s, followed by a talk with conference organiser Mathias Maschat.
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The Symposium “Filming Improvisation – Improvising with Film” deals with the relationship between improvisation and film and filmic documentation, as well as with the potential of the medium of film for improvised events and the interaction with them. The focus is on contemporary, free musical improvisation as well as on creative and experimental forms of filmmaking. The aim is to bring together scholars, filmmakers, musicians and artists to explore both the documentation of improvised musical events through film and the experimental possibilities of improvisation within the medium of film itself.
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With special appearances by Ebba Jahn (Idea – Miniatures By Improvisers), Helen Petts (Solo Soprano – A Portrait of Lol Coxhill), Jérémie Pujau (Go out and play) and Michael Vorfeld (Lichtton)
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• Conference Language: English
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• Call for papers: https://exploratorium-berlin.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/CfP_exploratorium-berlin_Symposium_Filming-Improvisation_Feb-2025.pdf
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–> Submissions accepted until 5 January, 2025
–> Registration until 26 January, 2025
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• Admission for participants: on a donation basis (not valid for contributors)
• Access: Entrance H (via the courtyard)
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Improvised art lives decisively from the shared experience of events in specific spaces and situations in real time. Its characteristics are attributed to its immediacy and an auratised quality of liveness. Temporal and spatial co-presence as well as the inclusion of all actors on site are regarded as powerful constituents of the process design. What can be saved from this into a sphere of the media? Can the recording of an improvisation adequately represent this?
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It has often been said that recordings of improvised music are inadequate or even inappropriate for the art form; one must witness the process of its creation live and experience it directly. But where would we be today – despite the difference between presence and representation – without the possibilities of film documentation? Where would we be without the recordings of improvised events and what treasures would not be available to us that would otherwise have disappeared from cultural memory forever?
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Sceptical attitudes towards the recording and documentation process seem to have largely disappeared in our extensively mediatised world anyway. The omnipresence and self-evident nature of audiovisual representations of events has also spread to the improvised arts. But how can a live event be successfully translated into the medium of film? How does this change the live event? What possibilities exist in the medium of film to act improvisationally and to capture or transform moments of the depicted in a special aesthetic way in one’s own formal language?
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These and many other questions will be raised in the symposium and discussed on the basis of examples.
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Livestream: We will try to stream live as many of the symposium presentations as possible on our YouTube page: youtube.com/exploratoriumberlin. However, due to copyright restrictions, we will not be able to show some of the presentations. Thank you for your understanding.