see list of illustrated lectures here

The Exploding Digital Inevitable

Live Essay (video/PowerPoint). 90 minutes including restoration of Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS.
Premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2017
 
CROSSROADS is legendary artist Bruce Conner's masterwork, and arguably the singlemost important artwork on the nuclear era extent. THE EXPLODING DIGITAL INEVITABLE integrates live narration with an array of movie and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival documents. It tells the riveting story of CROSSROADS' unique production, while simultaneously deconstructing the massive cultural spectacle of the original Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests themselves--the single most recorded event in human history. Along the way it chronicles the extraordinary collaboration of Conner with composers Terry Riley and Patrick Gleeson, including new interviews with both composers. It ultimately looks at the Atomic Era as only one incarnation of the human race's ongoing mad journey to destruction, a journey that apparently continues through the present moment. see more information here
 

The Book of Paradise Has No Author

Live Essay (video/PowerPoint). 55 minutes.  Premiered at Other Cinema (SF), 2010
 
In the summer of 1971 Ferdinand Marcos announced the discovery of a tribe of primitive cave dwellers who had lived in complete isolation for thousands of years in the rainforest of Mindanao, the easternmost island of the Philippines.  Modernity as we knew it was uprooted.  The Tasaday represented a chance to witness firsthand the origins of civilization, and investigate the very essence of humanity.  They also—seemingly—offered Marcos a number of rather unique political opportunities.  This live documentary essay integrates rare ethnographic footage, vintage television broadcasts, recordings, and still photographs to look at the unexpectedly tragic, haunting, and provocative tale of our encounter with the Tasaday—and their elliptical encounter with us.  The result is a meditative sensory experience that questions the nature of reality itself. see video excerpt here
 

The Cropping of the Spectacle

Live Essay (video/PowerPoint). 25 minutes. Premiered at Orphan Film Symposium (NY), 2008.
Also distributed as single channel video through CFMDC or stream complete work via Fandor .
 
The Cropping of the Spectacle is a 25-minute live essay investigating the birth of the Television Spectacle in 1954 McCarthy’s America.  Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary Point of Order (Emile de Antonio/Dan Talbot, 1964); a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary strategies -- the performance integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange temporal evolution of our understandings of recent history. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process that traces to the first broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings; a primal scene of American trauma. see video excerpt here.    

No Way Out But Onward

Still image/PowerPoint performance by the Disembodied Theater Corporation. 45 minutes. Premiered 2006.
Velaslavasay Panorama (LA), Sixpackfilm (Vienna), ATA (SF), Anthology Film Archives (NY).
Written and narrated by Ross Lipman
Suite for Bass, Viola, and Trombone by Laura Steenberge
Photos by Leigh Evans, Ross Lipman, Nina Mankin
 
An adventure in psychogeography through New York's High Line.

On June 8th, 2009, the High Line, an abandoned elevated freight rail that runs through the west side of Manhattan’s old meat-packing district, was re-opened as an aerial park. Between its days as an industrial railway and public leisure space, the High Line was a haunted paradise above the city -- a verdant wasteland inhabited only by occasional taggers, wanderers, and police.  Sneaking onto it became known among renegade urban adventurers as “Walking the High Line.  In October 2004 a ragtag group of us ventured up to explore.  Some experienced trespassers, others neophytes, the group discovered that the High Line was a space with its own internal logic, interacting with its visitors in a way unique to each.   see video excerpt here

The Starving Artist

Live cinema presentation by the Disembodied Theater Corporation of a film by
J. Stuart Blackton.  Music by Laura Steenberge. 9 minutes, 1907/2007.
Bedlam/1947 Project (LA),  2007.

 

Enter Godot:  A Thought Experiment

PowerPoint performance by the Disembodied Theater Corporation.
45 minutes.  Presented as work in progress at Pioneer Theater,
Public Opinion Laboratory, NY, 2006.   

        

Keep Warm, Burn Britain!

35mm slide performance by the Disembodied Theater Corporation
Music by Thoth. 10 minutes, 2005. (live excerpt from feature film-in-progress). San Francisco Cinematheque, Oblivio Series (NY), LA Film Forum, Sixpackfilm (Vienna).
 

 

Kali Beheaded                      

Dance/Theater Performance (creator/director). In collaboration with choreographer/performer Leigh Evans, and musicians Peter Whitehead and Elaine Buckholtz. 35 minutes (excerpt from three-act scenario), 1995.   Based on the Hindu myth, as adapted by Marguerite Yourcenar.   Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco.
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Yn

Theater/Performance (writer, principle director, stage/lighting designer).
In collaboration with Theater Oobleck/Streetlight Theater.
60 minutes, 1987.  Based on the works of Thomas Pynchon.
Performance Network, Ann Arbor.