remember / this / feeling

I recently gave a talk in a classroom where I focused on my interest in liminality, or liminal space. Briefly, liminal space is the time between states of being, between one solid idea and the next. Any ritual experience transpires in liminality. Any transformative experience requires liminal space. I bring up this point because it is a common thread throughout all of the work I do: creating narratives, writing speeches, teaching, entertaining, overwhelming with light and sound: activities which induce or require liminality in order to be successful.

About ten days ago I orchestrated the largest showcase of my work to date at Conversations at the Edge, a weekly screening and lecture series curated by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where I studied) and hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center (where I work). It went very, very well. It sold out. People had a really, really good time, from reports.

The three videos above were conceived as interstitials, intended to knit together the three disparate performance pieces that made up the bulk of the show. They were written and performed explicitly for that experience - although now I am quite pleased to have some short digital work I can toss about indiscriminately, in contrast to the arduous, precious distribution and projection of analog films which is my typical burden.

You can see in my notes the development of these liminal videos. I began with a sense of what I wanted to accomplish, and an assessment of the tools at my disposal. (Skills in leading trance, an intern with access to DSLRs, metallic makeup bought on a whim from Kryolan, etc.) I listed the intents of my three performances, and hypothesized the best directions for transitioning from one to the next. I listed out all of the activities I could imagine an audience acquiescing to at the behest of a pre-recorded video.

I wrote three scripts, spoke them out loud to make sure they lasted about three minutes, then traveled to the Magic Hedge (my Chicago place of power) and recorded myself speaking, in three different environments. remember was recorded on a pier; this was recorded within shrubbery; feeling was recorded in a dirt footpath stone tunnel.

I edited the recordings and then performed along to them while my utterly fantastic intern Hannah Kim recorded my hand motions in front of a black velvet backdrop. Pro tip: applying an opaque layer of makeup to hands and forearms takes a considerable amount of time.

So how did it go? These videos were well received, and helped facilitate seamless transitions between performances during the show, providing uninterrupted liminality. They gave me time to take a breath, collect my thoughts, and change costumes between pieces. My audience responded eagerly to every instruction. I could hear people giggling when they were instructed to grab their crotches. You can listen to the live recording of this by playing the track below. I love it.

Cat Tongue

This comic is called Cat Tongue, and was just printed in The Lifted Brow, which is a superb "attack journal" from Australia. This is the first comic that I ever drew for performance first, and print second.

Here's how it looks printed in The Lifted Brow. I am so pleased! You should definitely check out this publication and subscribe if you like experimental fiction and pointed commentary.

Hey, look, my name is on the cover!

Cat Tongue is a story that came to me over a long period of time, and one that bundles several passions neatly together: lesbianism, power tools, beastial fantasy, hallucinatory psychedelia, and of course, color separation. It is also a conceptual follow-up to Go Down, the first (Cat Tongue being the second) in a projected trilogy of comics about female sexuality and oral fixation.

I drew Cat Tongue for performance at the last Brain Frame. I performed it last. It was the last Brain Frame performance ever. (I'm performing it again this month, scroll down for info.) Here's the video:



In this performance, there are three rear-projection screens. The two on either side are illuminated by 16mm film loops. The center screen shows a shifting, CMY color-separated animations of the panels advancing. I am using my trusty vocal effect loop pedal, in combination with an audio feed from one of the 16mm projectors, which is broadcasting the sound of sprocket holes running through an optical sound reader. I am manipulating these two audio inputs (vocal and mechanical) to accompany the hallucinatory narrative. In this performance, analog film machinery = wood shop power tools. When my characters lick the saw and drill, I stand and lick the 16mm projectors.

I drew this comic in about four days, which is remarkable considering I had to draw each page four times. I had to draw each page four times because I needed each color layer to stand on its own as a compelling image, and match imperfectly with its corresponding layers, in order for the separation animation to feel organic and complete.

I began by drawing the machines. Because they are an object of fantasy, they needed to have a different feeling, a different line than the organic materials (flesh, clothing, wood). I staged a photo shoot in an actual wood shop with two friends willing to model. (I captured the 16mm film that would loop in my performance during this shoot, as well.) Drawing on these reference photos and some machine manuals I have, I illustrated all the metal with clean lines, rulers, and high contrast shine and shadow. I penciled in the figures around them. Here's what my base layer page looks like:

Next, I drew three complete pages on top of each base layer, illustrating the cyan, magenta, and yellow parts of the scene. I used a brush pen and tracing paper. I drew each color layer without referencing the others, only the base page and pencil sketches.

I developed a schema to organize the colors consistently. For example: the jeans and overalls would only be illustrated on the cyan page. The shirts would only appear in the yellow layer. The white woman's freckles would only appear in magenta; her goggles, cyan. Here's a comparison of the color layers of two panels on page 3:

To complete the image, I scanned and aligned each layer in Photoshop (you can see my little triplet registration marks on the base page above). I added the machine drawings to all three color layers, so that in the fleeting instances that the animation aligned, the machines would become crisp and black while the rest of the image would continue to appear in flux.

Preparing this comic for print was a novel challenge. I ended up manipulating the text much more than I do in the video animation, for legibility. It was a delight to attempt to replicate the feeling of the cat-transformation on the printed page, by exploding the panels and totally destroying the previous implication of gutters (and thus, time).

I'll be performing Cat Tongue for a second time on April 21st at the Gene Siskel Film Center, as part of my Conversations at the Edge show. This show is a big deal: I'll be enacting three different pieces, one of which is a brand new performative-comix-reading, as well as debuting three short videos. You should come. Buy tickets here.

The West Wind

Jenna Caravello is an animator, filmmaker, illustrator, cartoonist, distributor, supporter of the underground, and giggler-about-town. I love Jenna! We recently finished working together on the Archive Project at Kartemquin Films. I miss sitting around, decrypting bad handwriting on archaic video copy. Or posing in cardboard boxes, finding giant lightbulbs, and going home by way of the frozen custard shop, taping sundaes to our bike helmets to ride in the cold.

Anyway, the point of this post is the music video Jenna directed for neo-folk artist Ryley Walker. The shoot came directly after production wrapped for Uzi's Party. Jenna enlisted me as director of photography, in roles similar to those we adopted for her Mines music video, months before.

Jenna set up three different backdrops: white, gold/animal print, and black. The black void shots were especially fun, building off our experiences emphasizing the void in Uzi's Party. We filmed over two days, on 16mm color negative. Kartemquin fellow, friend, and grip Ryan Gleeson took a few choice photos.

Working under a close friend can be a challenging activity. I value the opportunity to exercise those skills, especially in service to a project as beguiling as this. Jenna gets excited about video and digital effects the same way I do with film and analog effects. When we work together we each encounter our pride and bias; we each require the other's expertise. Jenna's video is stunning. I am proud to be her collaborator, and prouder to be her friend.

Uzi's Party (pre-production)

Welcome to the 21st century, where art funding comes from tireless self-promotion and constant solicitation of your friends and loved ones. When Kickstarter came on the scene I had misgivings, and even now, I would much rather win some big grant than crowd source a film budget. But my views have changed, a lot. I've seen plenty of friends start their own campaigns, and most of them succeed. Incredible things like my friend Sara teaching girls in Cambodia how to make comics, my friend Lale putting together the Chromazoid anthology, places like The Comfort Station earning air conditioning; these are all projects I was overjoyed to be able to support, and I've gotten some really great stuff out of it, in addition to my virtue rewards. I think a well run Kickstarter campaign is a blessing to everyone involved, and I'm very proud to be at a point where I feel I've earned my own.

I worked very hard on this campaign, but not nearly as hard as I will work on Uzi's Party once filming starts. Big gratitude to Jeff Perlman, Ryan Gleeson, and Aren Zolninger for helping me shoot my fundraiser video (it's all one take!); Tyson for mixing sound; mondo thanks to Christly LeMaster and everyone at the Nightingale for generous use of their space.

I'll write more about the film soon. It's an incredibly ambitious 16mm experimental teen drama with a supernatural twist. Right now all of my energy is devoted to promotion and solicitation. Luckily, I was born to live in the 21st century. I may not be able to pull a plough but I can lift 200 personal emails and three simultaneous event organizations on my back every day.

Help me out! Donate, and above all, spread the word! Please and thank you.

CUFF 2012 Poster

I was asked last fall to make the art for this year's Chicago Underground Film Festival. At the time, I was drawing Go Down, so anaglyphic crystals were really important to me. You could consider this mother-crystal to be the original psychedelic meteorite which yielded the chip the girl eats in Go Down. Or at least, that's how I think of it.

This design is already up on the CUFF Facebook page (like it!) and will be on the website soon. It will become a digitally printed poster, a postcard, a button, and a t-shirt, as well as a run of nice big screen prints.

CUFF is a fantastic festival and an important cultural institution. This year, there's a Kickstarter to help the festival make its budget. If you're interested in helping out, and you should be, do what this video says.

Go Down

 

Brain Frame 4 happened last month, and it was the last time I'll be performing at Brain Frame in a while. Partially because I need a break from simultaneously orchestrating an entire show and composing my own multimedia extravaganza to reveal at said event, and partially because I've kind of run out of comics. The piece I performed last month was Go Down, from Chromazoid issue 1. I built the slideshow into a video file using Final Cut, and added a second projection - an oval of light, shifting and flashing colors, to be projected on me as I sat on a ladder in a white dress. I had a V20 looping pedal, into which I programmed about 12 different voices, to create layered soundscapes as well as voices for each character and magic crystal sounds.

I've posted parts of the comic before, but I was holding out on showing the whole thing because I wanted you guys to support Chromazoid. Now that Chromazoid is a reality, I'm happy to share the entire comic, and hopefully you'll like it enough to go out and purchase your own copy.

UPDATE: Here is the video of a more recent (and superior) performance, at The Burlington on July 12th, 2012. The original video, from Brain Frame 4, is below that.

Lyra Hill reads Go Down at The Burlington 7/12/12 from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.

And, finally, here is the video (thanks Jenna!) of my performance.

Mr. Square at the Pit of Despair

 

When I heard that some of the crew that formerly produced The Skeleton News were starting up a new publication called The Land Line, I was totally pumped. When Grant asked me to make a comic for it, I was even more pumped. I saw this as an opportunity to try out some new things, namely: a more classic cartoony style, and a more complex, stylized one-page layout. Having previously completed Go Down, and riding high on the fumes of conceptual color comics, the fact that this comic would be printed in black and white on newsprint demanded that I find more in that limitation than mere limitation.

I read this comic at a benefit for The Landline. I used the opportunity to work through an analysis of the layers contained within Mr. Square which, at first glance, is pretty inscrutable. Here's a video of me doing the same thing, but alone and in poor resolution. (Analysis starts at 4:30, if you don't want to hear me doing silly voices.)

UPDATE: I can't believe I messed this up, and I'm even more upset that I'm losing so much math nerd cred over this, but check it out: a line is the easiest way to define one dimension, and a plane is the easiest way to define two dimensions. My puns are all wrong, and I'm really sorry.

Speaking of The Landline, they've got a Kickstarter up to cover the cost of printing issue 1 (which looks, as you can see, awesome) and to keep the whole production going. It's free, it's free of ads, it's beautiful and remarkable and full of high-quality, funny, sexy, interesting, gross things. They've almost reached their goal, but they need more help! Please consider donating, and if you're in Chicago, pick one up if you see one, because these babies are golden.

Compiled

This is really exciting. I've been meaning to complete this compilation for two years, since I produced the cover for these comics in Offset class. This is really my first full size comic book, and most definitely the first thing I've been proud enough of and confident enough in to send off to publishers, for example, or drop at Quimby's. That's right, I finally have comics at Quimby's.

This book contains five comics and one prose piece. Four of the comics are available in full to read on my blog; the fifth comic is not online, will never be online, and yeah, if you want to read you have to get the book. The written story is the version of They Glistened that I read at Brain Frame 3.

You can see me talk about and flip through Compiled in the video above; here are some closer images of the cover design.

ELSEWHERE: My mother interviewed me about Tumblr! I didn't know she was going to put the audio online, I just thought she was using it to take notes. Oh well, I guess the sounds of me eating and knocking over things in the background aren't that noticeable.

Join Me On This New Vision Quest

So  Brain Frame #1 was a huge success. Somewhere in the area of forty people attended, each and every performer blew the audience away, the event was met with resounding enthusiasm. It makes sense, then, that I've decided to continue Brain Frame as a bimonthly reading series.

Look, so legit: a website.

And here's a sneak behind-the-scenes peek of some moments between me and Nick Jackson reading. I'll have videos of some of the readings up on the Brain Frame site too.


Brain Frame #1 (behind the scenes) from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.

The next Brain Frame will be at 8pm, Thursday, September 22nd, at Happy Dog Gallery, 1542 N Milwaukee, 2nd floor. Stay tuned for a sweet poster.

Bong Hits for Voting

So I'm in a class right now called "Sound and Image" and for the most part I've been finishing soundtracks for House Fuck and The Mysic (both of which have been edited/altered since I posted them here) as well as another movie I'm working on called My Sister At My Mother's House. In the meantime, though, I still have regular assignments.

One of those assignments was to ADR some footage. ADR stands for Automated Dialog Replacement, and it basically means dubbing over something. So that's my voice that you hear in the video above. Actually, every sound in the video above is me doing something (the original video had a Tool song playing the background; I chose not to recreate that). I picked the original video because Marijuana Man seemed like a nice guy and I like his videos. I hope he's not offended. Thanks, Marijuana Man!

BUGEYE

I made this on Saturday morning in under an hour. My free (stolen) internet has disappeared so this happened instead.

I don't know why Apple doesn't use these kinds of videos in their ads for Photobooth and iMovie and Garage Band. That's all I used, in conjunction with the camera and microphone built into my MacBook.

Room Tone

I drew this poster last weekend in preparation for my upcoming screening at The Nightingale, Room Tone. I'll be showing two films: For My Psychopomp, a ten minute exploration into the origins and character of Llama Man, and an edited version of House Fuck, which will actually be projecting on real film. (Gasp!)

If you're in Chicago or visiting Chicago this Friday, please please come, it will be a great show! A lot of us helped each other make our movies, too. All the info is on the flier.

Hiatus

As you may have noticed, I have been absent and unreliable in regards to updates recently. Once a pinnacle of responsibility, I have now regressed into a vegetative state of almost complete neglect. I regret this! You must know, dear reader, that I care only and utmost for your happiness, and, since you are here, you must receive some pleasure from the warm sensation of viewing a new entry - a pleasure which I have been denying you.
I can only offer midterms and ridiculously high stress levels (and ridiculously low sleep levels) as an excuse. Additionally, a pace which was initially created in effort to catalog a lot of my older work, that being thrice weekly, has pretty much caught up to me, and it is overwhelming to capture new images of new work all the time.
Because of this I am announcing a new update schedule: Two times a week, on Tuesday and Friday, with attempts to make those updates happen in the morning. I will begin this schedule next Tuesday, the 17th, after my spring break, during which I will be in the freezing cold woods of southern Illinois, in a tent, probably drinking to stay warm. For now, you can see a Sherrif Cat cartoon from last semester, posted above. Sherrif Cat got a new haircut, and that haircut involved steps. Sweet!

Here is a video I recorded in bad judgement last Saturday, the seventh, to prove how tired I have been. I love you guys!

Video: Exquisite Corpse

In my Video 1 class last semester we had a series of exercise assignments. One of these was an exquisite corpse process where different groups went off to shoot footage, gave the tape to another group who shot sound, and the director from the third group got to shoot extra footage if needed and then edit it together.

Jordan and Matt are seen playing the guitar (the original footage), and Mark, my groupmate, is the one dancing.



(Should you want to watch this in higher quality, you can go here and click 'watch in higher quality' below the video. Pretty self explanatory.)