‘The Republic’ and ‘in the forest’: Film Screening with Live Score

Please join the Department of Fine Arts on March 28, 2018 at 7:00 PM in Meyerson Hall, Room B-1 for a film screening with live score accompaniment featuring two films by artist and PennMFA faculty David Hartt.

Hartt’s film The Republic, 2014 will be performed by Sam Prekop and in the forest, 2017 will be performed by Karl Fousek.  The screening will be followed by a conversation moderated by John Corbett.

The Republic is a film set in the speculative present.  Shot in both Athens and Detroit, the footage is montaged so that the locations become indiscernible and a hybrid city-state emerges.  Musician Sam Prekop composed the score and plays the role of the Engineer, both performing and tweaking the city’s parameters: how fast the traffic flows, how brightly the power grid burns.  

The subject of in the forest is Moshe Safdie’s abandoned housing project Habitat Puerto Rico.  Nearly fifty years after it was initiated, Hartt returns to the site.  Featuring long takes of the weathered modules surrounded by the encroaching jungle, and environmental recordings layered with a composition by electronic musician Karl Fousek, Hartt’s piece offers a study of this unrealized experimental project—and the optimism from which it was conceived— recontextualized within the political and economic struggles of contemporary Puerto Rico.

David Hartt is an artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.  He creates work that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. He explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.
He is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, David Nolan Gallery, New York City and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.

Sam Prekop is a Chicago based musician known as the singer and guitarist for The Sea and Cake.   He has also established himself as a modular synthesist, building his instrument meticulously to find the perfect combination of oscillators, sequencers, limiters, and filters to create a system that allows him to create sounds that are surprising and inviting. Prekop’s recordings can be found on Chicago label Thrill Jockey.

Karl Fousek is an electronic musician and composer based in Montreal, Quebec. His works explore the sonorities of modular synthesis and custom audio processing software in a variety of contexts from improvised music, to generative music, to drone and minimalism.  His music has been published internationally on labels such as Limited Interest (US), Phinery (DK), Spring Break Tapes (US), Adhesive-Sounds (CA)

John Corbett is a Chicago based gallerist, curator and music critic.  He was artistic director of Berlin JazzFest 2002, co-curated the Empty Bottle Jazz Series from 1996 to 2005, and was co-curator of Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968 (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 2006; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2009; Durham Art Guild, Durham, North Carolina, 2009).  His recent books include Microgroove: Forays into Other Music (Duke University Press, 2015), A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation (University of Chicago Press 2016), and Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (Duke University Press, 2017)

This program is presented by PennDesign, MUSICA PRACTICA / ELETTRONICA VIVA and Penn Department of Music