Friday August 2, 6:30-8:30pm
Scrapbook: Bradley Eros
Personal Expanded Cinema Performance
RSVP required to rsvp@microscopegallery.com
Image courtesy of the artist and Microscope
“It is home-made prototype of a Virtual Reality headset, like a primitive head-mounted-device; a do-it-yourself pseudo space-age immersion helmet; a visual isolation tank; a portable micro-Movie Dome; a prosthetic inflatable-skull Movey House; a solitary Invisible Cinema; an orgone box inaugurating a pleasure dome; an avant-garde stereophonic peepshow; a private sensaround camera obscura/intimate cinema that makes your head feel like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians.” – Bradley Eros
We are pleased to present MovieHeadBox, an expanded cinema performance by Bradley Eros presented for the first time since its 1983 debut at ABC No Rio, in New York.
In this individual and personalized cinematic experience the viewer is seated in a chair wearing a cardboard box with stretched screen material on its front panel. The artist then projects a Super 8mm film onto the box’s screen by holding a small projector from a distance. Sound is provided via headphones connected to a Walkman cassette player.
The viewer will be able to choose from a selection of 10 film reels with rare original footage shot by Eros, each approximately 3 minutes in length. Among the options are: “Coney Island, costumes & ocean” (1982); “Canary Islands, ritual w/ Aline” (1986); “New Mexico: Canyon De Chelly” (1983); “Key West: flamingos / Madison: Halloween party @ Cardinal Bar” (1978); “New York: Popo (@8BC), Kembra, Jack & Peter” (1985).
Additionally, the viewer will select a soundtrack from 10 cassette tapes containing original sound mixes by the artist, with themes including “World Music Mix”, “Spooky Films”, “Electronic Landscapes”, “Women’s Voices”, Witchcraft Music”, and others.
MovieHeadBox is a quasi-readymade, DIY, democratized version of a VR headset for the personal, immersive and concentrated experience of cinema.
RSVP is required for this event (to rsvp@microscopegallery.com)
Please indicate if you would like participate as a viewer and we will confirm your time slot in advance.
General admission $10
Students & Members $8
Bradley Eros
MovieHeadBox, 1983
Expanded Cinema Performance & Installation
Super 8mm film, sound from cassette tape, cardboard box, duration variable
From “There will be projections in all directions” by Bradley Eros, 2005, Millennium Film Journal:
Actualized paracinemA [N. 1]
MovieHeadBox (super-8, sound, color, approximately 10 minutes, 1983. BE)
‘screens in your own head. I am better than Transducer
for I show you own Interiour Space’.
~ Brion Gysin, Brion Gysin Let the Mice In
‘This appetite to penetrate, exceed, and ruin representation while filling the field-of-view through projection was appeased in inverse micro-fashion (to Stan VanDerBeek’s hemispherical, communal, ‘multi-plex’ Movie-Drome) in a one-on-one interactive assisted film performance called MovieHeadBox (presented as part of the Extremist Show at ABC No Rio in NYC in 1983) Simply a cardboard box that fits snugly over the head, extending approximately 12 inches in front of the eyes with a small translucent screen (an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white typing paper) used for rear projection; The viewer sits in a chair wearing headphones for the cassette soundtrack* played on a walkman, while a color super-8 film** is projected onto the immersant’s head-screen’s façade, thereby over-flooding with simultaneity as the images seeped into the box, overlapped, and were reflected off its inner sides.
~ Joseph Nechvatal, review of Dorthea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation
* electronically altered audio recordings of the nervous, respiratory & digestive systems
** an erotic chronicle of alchemy, mixed with medical footage shot inside the body, including x-rays, brain scan, EEG and endoscopic intestinal and coronary film
It is home-made prototype of a Virtual Reality headset, like a primitive head-mounted-device; a do-it-yourself pseudo space-age immersion helmet; a visual isolation tank; a portable micro-Movie Dome; a prosthetic inflatable-skull Movey House; a solitary Invisible Cinema; an orgone box inaugurating a pleasure dome; an avant-garde stereophonic peepshow; a private sensaround camera obscura/intimate cinema that makes your head feel like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians.
‘Mental booths brainwaves wrote the flickering message-new patterns headset immersive magnetized-sound and image flakes falling luminous.’
~ William S.Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
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Bradley Eros is an artist working in myriad mediums including film & video, collage, performance, expanded cinema, and installation. Eros has been a catalyst of the New York film community since the 1980s and his works have exhibited and screened extensively in the US and abroad including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (in “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art: 1905-2016”, “The Whitney Biennial 2004”, and “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000”) as well as at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), MoMA PS1, New Museum, The Kitchen, Participant Inc., Pioneer Works, Performa09, Exit Art, Anthology Film Archives, Parrish Art Museum (Water Mill, NY), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Camden Arts Center (London), Arsenal (Berlin), Museo Hermann Nitsch, Naples, Italy, and The New York, London and Rotterdam Film Festivals. His work has been written about in ArtFCity, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, among many others. Collaborations include the Alchemical Theater, the band Circle X, Voom HD Lab, and the expanded cinema groups kinoSonik, Arcane Project and currently with Optipus. Grants and Awards include: Acker Award, NYFA Fellowship, Experimental Television Center (ETC), and Issue Project Room’s artist in residence, among others. Eros lives and works in New York.
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).