Electro-fying the Midwest.

On July 23, 2005 Text of Light, a rotating ensemble of musicians that improvise while simultaneously projecting films by Stan Brakhage, performed in Kansas City, Missouri. The music is not meant to be a score--Text of Light is more focused on their sounds than responding to Brakhage's imagery, which always accompanies them. Local filmmaker and educator Ben Meade was the event's film curator and projectionist. He selected three career-spanning Brakhage films: Window Water Baby Moving (1962), The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1971) and The Jesus Trilogy and Coda (2001). Approximately 100 people attended the event, average for Kansas City's Fahrenheit Ballroom on a sweltering midwestern summer night.

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Kansas City has a thriving arts community where thousands of people attend gallery openings on the first and third Fridays of every month. The city supports a regional, non-profit arts journal called Review and is home to several prominent collections like that of the Belger Creative Arts Center and the Kansas City Art Institute. In the fall of 2003 the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's screening program, Electromediascope, presented an entire program devoted to Brakhage's films. So Text of Light's performance was not unusual for its locale. What stood out instead were decisions made by Meade. As curator and projectionist he repeatedly inter-cut between The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, a grizzly collection of autopsy footage, and The Jesus Trilogy and Coda, an embarrassment of rich, hand-painted animations. Meade was as improvisatory with a film projector as Text of Light was with guitars and drums.

Surrounding the experiment (in newspaper articles, on radio interviews, by those in attendance) was a central question: why append the screening of Brakhage's purposefully silent films with music? Those who had known Brakhage such as Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer wondered, "What would Stan have thought?" Clancy and Widmer are the curators of Electromediascope, which presents experimental film and video, sound, performance and new media at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Since 1993 the program has provided access to keystone filmmakers such as Brakhage and Ken Jacobs as well as more recent auteurs like Matthew Barney. It has offered rare occurrences in the field--a screening of Lothar Baumgarten's film Der Ursprung Der Nacht (Amazonas-Kosmos) (1978), for instance--and has been a vanguard host, providing the North American premier of NN-891102 by Japanese filmmaker Go Shibata in 1999 and These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here) by Israeli/US artist Irit Batsry in 2000. Each year Electromediascope develops a three-part series touching on a vast range of topics including: memory, irony, identity paradoxes, the virtualization of bodies and surveys of Native American, African and Japanese artists. Once a year Electromediascope brings an artist-in-residence to Kansas City for a screening of their work. On one occasion Electromediascope provided a public forum for typically private, web-based art by projecting artists' web sites in a traditional proscenium auditorium.

The gathering of an audience around artists for the purpose of watching and listening, questioning and debating, is something that curators Clancy and Widmer are most devoted to. Clancy said such a forum is ageless and vital to the appreciation of contemporary work. What he and Widmer have created contribute as much to Kansas City artists as audiences. A festival called Filmmakers Jubilee was established locally after the pair began their program, generating greater awareness of new media. Both Clancy and Widmer are artists who create innovative, inter-media: Clancy makes interactive simulations and photo-scrolls with writings while Widmer makes films and books. Clancy also chairs Kansas City Art Institute's Photo and New Media department and has been an established curator and scholar for 30 years. He organized "Video As Attitude" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1983, which remains one of the largest installations to have been exhibited in the United States. Widmer also teaches courses in book arts at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Cooperatively, Clancy and Widmer arrive at their subjects through a constant process of reviewing the new work they receive. As a testament to their process, piles of bubble-wrapped packages, videotapes and DVDs with self-addressed stamped envelopes are stacked between their leather lounge chairs and "entertainment" center. After viewing comes the arduous task of summarizing the complex ideas that motivated the curators' choices. But Clancy has a talent for writing to the limiting space of a program of events. In the notes for their most recent film series entitled "uncanny Bodies of Darkness and Light," he writes:

   Cinema is a shadowy place haunted by people and events of the past
   that come alive through this medium's multidimensional realities.
   Part memory, empirical impression, critical engagement and dream,
   every movie brings luminous presences back to life through heightened
   sensory experiences involving cognitive, emotional and reflective
   processes of mind and body. Cinema is a place of return that is never
   the same, capable of extending human perception beyond normal sensory
   limits.

Statements like this testify to what makes Electromediascope a forthright, effective program. By fusing such intricate assertions with the results of their private research into experimental film, video and new media works, Clancy and Widmer have given audiences many-sided views to discuss for the past 13 years.