John O’Neill

GS70

existence decay

Tonight we welcome John O’Neill in from California for a solo performance, alongside Chicago artists GS70 and existence decay.

John will be presenting Optical Soundtracks, a project that features software-performed pieces that are yowls of playful mistranslation, interrogations of “machine authorship” before the widespread use of “AI,” rubbing up against the limits of the tools of archival preservation, extracting suspect meanings from meaningful objects and spurious meanings from meaningless ones. Personal photographs, PDFs of texts, detail scans of subtractive color prints are assembled into “scores” and fed to AEO-Light, an open-source archival software designed to translate optical soundtracks on film print scans into usable sync-sound wav files. These sequences of images are encoded (in their textures and contrast values, according to AEO-Light) with clicks and hums and idiot melodies that writhe against their arbitrariness. Assembled from PDFs and scans of the following texts: Living With Textiles by Elaine Louie, My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig, In The Blink Of An Ear by Seth Kim-Cohen, “The Stars Are Beautiful” by Stan Brakhage, “List of compositions by Morton Feldman” (Wikipedia); Photographs of: Josh & Jing’s Koreatown ceiling, New Years Eve 2016; campfire through a tent wall, Emerald Lake, 2017; window screen, Fountain & Poinsettia apartment, 2016; neon cross, Glendale (by Mika Kelley); desire path, Fog Lane Park, South Manchester (by Grace Marshall) & misc.

GS70 is the solo project of Anastasia Gladkova, an experimental musician based in Chicago, IL. Through processed vocals and modular synthesis, Anastasia drifts between ambient textures and industrial noise to share impressions of grief, trauma, and a longing for a sense of home that might have been lost.

existence decay is the primary alias of autumn culp. it makes emotional electronic music, usually with computers. themes of its music include love, entropy, and networks.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door