Ken Jacobs is the father of film-as-performance and one of the USA’s leading visual artists. His pulsing and intensely detailed Nervous Magic Lantern performances create flickering and abstract 3D tricks of the eye, which he calls ‘movement without motion’. It’s a celestial spectacle grounded by sound artist Eric La Casa’s manipulated recordings of everyday locations: lift shafts, ventilation ducts, car parks.

Photo: Bryony McIntyre
Ken Jacobs & Eric La Casa
Event
29 Nov–07 Dec 2008 • BFI Southbank; BFI IMAX; ICA, London; Spike Island, Bristol; CCA, Glasgow
Artists
Photos
Credits / licenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Extract
Ken Jacobs
Far from being a novelty revival of Victorian parlour entertainment, Ken Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern is astonishingly radical. Projecting hand-crafted, impasto collages with a bright theatrical lamp, Jacobs sculpts light into organic, abstract forms and uses flicker to propel them into deep space, conjuring 3D illusions and unimaginable visual phenomena. Often performed in collaboration with experimental musicians such as John Zorn or Aki Onda, his UK tour will be accompanied by Frenchman Eric La Casa, who fabricates sonic landscapes from the sounds of everyday life.
Credits / licenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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