2012

Thursday, April 5, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Monica Bill Barnes,Suddenly Summer Somewhere
Suddenly Summer Somewhere is a duet which follows the relationship between two performers, Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, who embody quirky, fallible, and familiar characters. This whimsical dance theater piece is set to live recordings of the Rat Pack and blends deadpan comedy, space-devouring choreography, and awkwardly strenuous partnering. Barnes’ work slips between comedy and tragedy as the performers struggle along their journey together.

Join us for a pre-performance happy hour starting at 6:30 pm. We are proudly featuring La Tour wine, along with music and time to chat with CAF staff members and fellow art lovers.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, March 1, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Sarah Paul Ocampo, Happy Foot, Sad Foot
The title for Happy Foot, Sad Foot, a piece written and performed by New York based artist Sarah Paul Ocampo, is taken from a rotating podiatry sign on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, California. Having lived in Los Angeles for five years without driving, Ocampo’s performance is inspired by the people and stops along her bus route, combined with a fusion of theatre, music and film. Channeling personas and locations, Happy Foot, Sad Foot explores the intersection of the magical and the mundane on Sunset Blvd.

Join us for a pre-performance happy hour starting at 6:30 pm. We are proudly featuring La Tour wine, along with music and time to chat with CAF staff members and fellow art lovers.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, February 2, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Christine Marie, Multiplying Spectacles
San Francisco-based, integrated media artist and director Christine Marie strives to break new ground in her performance Multiplying Spectacles. Based on the history of mirrors, her large-scale projected shadow theater performance is accompanied by a live score, incorporating video effects and 3D stereoscopic shadow work. Being intrinsically tied to ancient art forms, and metaphysical explorations of light, she creates images that invite one to remember a sense of being beyond the rational mind, where historic figures, dream sequences, and present day mix with thought processes and memory.

Join us for a pre-performance happy hour starting at 6:30 pm. We are proudly featuring La Tour wine, along with music and time to chat with CAF staff members and fellow art lovers.

ADMISSION IS FREE

2011

Thursday, December 1, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: casebolt and smith, O(h)

Founded in 2006, casebolt and smith are a Los Angeles-based theater duo that skirt the proverbial line between the profound and the absurd, often siding with humor and irreverence. O(h)evolves from demonstrations of what they can, can’t, and won’t do into intricate movement phrases layered with pop culture references.  Speaking directly to the audience while dancing and sometimes singing, they offer honest insights into their limitations as a duet company and their fear of becoming unoriginal. The result is a fast-paced, complex and hilarious glimpse into the minds and pants of casebolt and smith.

Thursday, November 3, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Peter Glantz, Being Impossible
Influential theater and film director Peter Glantz presents his multi-media solo performance, Being Impossible. With original unreleased music by Baltimore musicians Twig Harper and Dan Deacon, Glantz performs an ongoing, ever-changing show, featuring pure love, humor, colorful videos, and interstellar travel about a student’s journey to the sun. On both stage and screen, Peter has a signature whimsical visual style that combines a total commitment to fun and capturing the spirit and truth of the subject, story, or song.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, October 6, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Shana Moulton, I Lost Something in the Hills

Brooklyn-based video and performance artist Shana Moulton presents a new version of the multi-media performance I Lost Something in the Hills, first presented in May 2011 at New York’s Bard College. Moulton’s performances and videos unfold atmospheric, askew narratives that combine wry humor with a low-tech, pop sensibility. She integrates theosophical and anthroposophical theories into carefully orchestrated settings, while testing them as to their adequacy for daily life.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, September 1, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Kegan McGurk, Memory Drain
Performance artists Kegan McGurk and Elisabeth McMullin use a digital magic system mixing combinations of augmented reality, computer vision, and three dimensional programming to tell stories. This interactive video projection creates an immersive reality, allowing virtual objects, characters and animations to be placed, moved and dragged around the stage. Memory Drain incorporates a live drawing technique inspired by Vaudeville theatrics where the audience is drawn into the experience through interactive animations.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, August 4, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: FAST-FORWARD II: A Screening of Contemporary Video Art
CAF welcomes back art video jockey Annie Wharton, who has compiled a stimulating mix of short videos by artists working in the medium. The videos encompass a wide range of subject matter including hilarious slices of life; corporeal, action-based performances; stop-motion graphics; and computer-generated iconography. The artists for this series Brian Bress, Andy Cahill, Tyler Calkin, Kelly Cline, Phoebe Collings-James, Spencer Douglass and Gustavo Herrera, Zackary Drucker, Aaron GM, Jake Jones, Peter Harkawik, Micol Hebron, Justin H. Long, Clynton Lowry, Josh Mannis, Hazel Hill McCarthy III, Nikhil Murthy, Davida Nemeroff, Clover Oak, Tyler Matthew Oyer, Samuel Partal and Carrie Schrick, Carl Pomposelli, Pascual Sisto, and Mark Verabioff, were selected for their diversity of form and strength of execution. The videos run the gamut for video works being made today. (Note: these works may contain adult subject matter.)

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, July 7, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Extreme Animals: An Evening with Jacob and David
Artists Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman present a mash-up of live music, video, and staged theatrics, in a choreographed array of live shredding, extreme feedback, youtube bombardment, ecstatic dance moves, and Sunday morning cartoons. The short performance works range from absurd inspirational lectures, to musings on contemporary internet culture, to introspective meditations on metal guitar shredding technique, all couched within a lo-fi, intentionally awkward 'performance art' aesthetic. Their newest performance delves into the world of tween culture and the current obsession with the infinite hall of mirrors known as "forever young".

Jacob Ciocci is an artist and current Eyebeam Fellow notably regarded as one third of the American art collective Paper Rad. He is also a prolific producer of music, installations, websites, and animations. David Wightman is completing his Ph.D. in music composition at UCSD, where he teaches courses on popular and contemporary music.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, June 2, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Race, Sex, & Tattoos: The Kip Fulbeck Experience
Filmmaker and artist, Kip Fulbeck, traveled the country photographing individuals and having them hand-write their responses to the question "What are you?" In this multimedia performance, he shares these images and the stories behind them, weaving together spoken word, film, photography, and pop culture to explore multiracial identity, tattoo culture, and contemporary America. Fulbeck is the author of several books including Part Asian, 100% Hapa; Permanence: Tattoo Portraits; and Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids as well as the director of a dozen short films. He has been featured on CNN, MTV, and PBS and has performed at hundreds of venues throughout the world. Fulbeck is a Professor of Art and Affiliate Faculty in Asian American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA.ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, May 5, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Carmina Escobar, A White Room
Los Angeles-based artist Carmina Escobar explores the concept of identity in A White Room. The main source material for this performance installation is the performer's voice, its sounds and its memory, all of which are embodied through the use of electronics and found objects. Escobar's work involves, as part of her sonorous vocabulary, real-time processing of her voice and the use of concrete elements through electronic media.

Carmina Escobar is a singer and multimedia artist from Mexico City who has appeared in many international forums and festivals in the Mexican Republic, USA, and Europe, collaborating with artists of diverse disciplines.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, April 7, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Eric Lindley, with Chi-wang Yang and Yelena Zhelezov, The Live-Long Day
The Live-Long Day is a collaborative musical and object-play performance that traverses into bleak territory exploring the lives of submarine inhabitants who have lived underwater for generations. The performers highlight and include techniques of theatrical and popular music, abstract object play, experimental text, theatrical arcs of movement, and audience relations into the story. Eric Lindley is an artist, writer, and musician primarily active in LA and New York. His work explores the rammifications of scientific and social research on personal human relationships with other individuals, societies, and selves and has been performed internationally at venues such as The Knitting Factory (NYC), REDCAT, and The Royal College of Music (UK).

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, March 3, 7, 7:30 & 8 pm
Forum Lounge: Miwa Matreyek: Myth and Infrastructure
Myth and Infrastructure is a multi-media performance using projected animation. As artist Miwa Matreyek walks behind the screen, her shadow becomes an integral part of a fantastical world: She traverses oceanscapes, and cityscapes as she conjures magical domestic scenes with light and shadow. Matreyek's performance can be viewed as a cinematic experience taking place on a screen. What is seen on the screen is a collapsed product of multiple layers of animation, objects and body. Her work exists in a juxtaposition of illusion and non-illusion.

Matreyek is an internationally recognized animator, designer, and multi-media artist based in Los Angeles. She creates animated short films as well as live works that integrate animation, performance, and video installation. Her work explores how animation transforms when it is combined with body and space (and vice-versa). In her video project-based installations, animation takes on a more physical and present quality, while body and space take on a more fantastical quality.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, February 3, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Lucky Dragons
"Lucky Dragons" is a collaborative project facilitated by Los Angeles-based artists Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara. Lucky Dragons relies heavily on participation, openly engaging audiences and passersby in the creation of the artwork. An important aspect of Lucky Dragons' performance pieces is the publishing and distribution of multiples, in the form of books, recordings, and posters, low-cost and widely accessible to the public. With participation ranging from the intense intimacy of two people, to the public spectacle of several thousand people, to the internet's infinite capacity for exchange, at the heart of it all is playing together--building up social collectivities in both public and private spaces, and re-engaging, with wonder, the technologies that connect us.

ADMISSION IS FREE

2010

Thursday, December 2, 7 pm
Forum Lounge: Marco Pinter, Gravitational Forces
Gravitational Forces is a multi-disciplinary performance work incorporating dance, visualization, technology, video and generated sound. The piece explores opposition in movement, both choreographically and visually. The range of emotions and struggles we face are experienced in a new and compelling way. The piece further explores technology as a medium for artistic expression through new media and dance by creating real-time multi-sensory experiences which express texture and subtleties of movement through light, shape and sound. The audience's "kinesthetic sympathy" with the dancers is greatly enhanced by the multi-sensory, interactive visual and aural production.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, November 4, 7 & 8 pm
Forum Lounge: Brody Condon, Without Sun
Artist Brody Condon will present the multimedia and live performance Without Sun: Modification (2009). Based on the 1983 Chris Marker film, Sans Soleil, Without Sun: Modification is an edited compilation of "found online performances" of individuals on psychedelic substances. Condon screens these various internet clips and overlays a live performance featuring dancer Linda Austin and actor Russell Edge, who will re-interpret the erratic movements and verbalizations of people in the throes of revelatory and frightening psychoactive experiences. Without Sun: Modification (2009) re-envisions the behaviors of these self-published trippers from Condon's film through the precision and expressivity of contemporary dance. Taking up where Marker left off, Condon creates a rigorous, exquisite set of gestures that explore memory, perception, and the effects of current participatory media and technology on culture.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, October 7, 7pm
Forum Lounge: sonicSENSE
sonicSENSE is an interactive multimedia art platform created by Barney Haynes and Jennifer Parker as an evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, digital media, collaboration, and participation. SonicSENSE uses the creative diversity of computational media and traditional visual art practices to cultivate space for sharing, questioning, and exploring interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies and experiences.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, September 2, 4 - 8pm
Forum Lounge: James Gilbert: Privacy is Dead Because We Said So
James Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based artist who works across mediums creating drawings, installations with video, and performative art. In September, he will set up a temporary sewing shop in the CAF galleries producing several hundred real size pairs of plastic, transparent underwear, which will amass to form huge sculptural piles around him. The sculptures become more present throughout the performance. This cumulative performance explores themes of privacy, anonymity, and identity particularly in relation to the considerable amounts of intimate, personal information posted daily on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, and other mass media.

Gilbert’s past work have also been concerned with social themes, including identity and anonymity in a media-saturated society, where privacy has been eroded by reality television, social networking sites, and 24-hour news cycles. Gilbert has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally in the United States and Asia. Recent 2010 exhibitions include a large scale, site-specific, solo installation at the Dallas Contemporary Museum and Platform4 in Aalborg, Denmark, with upcoming projects in Los Angeles and Colombia.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, August 5, 7pm
Forum Lounge: The Best of the Ottawa International Animation Film Festival
Forum Lounge continues its popular screenings of award-winning animated short films with selections from the 2009 Ottawa International Animation Film Festival. The Best of Ottawa program showcases many of the outstanding films presented in our Official Competition. The 2009 program includes such exceptional films as: David OReilly’s award-winning sci-fi drama “Please Say Something”; the innovative and mesmerizing “The Bellow’s March”, directed by Eric Dyer; Diego Maclean’s haunting student film entitled “The Art of Drowning”; and the crowd-favourite travelogue “Madagascar, A Journey Diary”, by Bastien Dubois.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, July 1, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Annie Wharton
Curated by Annie Wharton, FAST-FORWARD is a compilation of short length videos by artists working in the medium. Artists were selected for their diversity of form and strength of execution, and the videos encompass a wide range of subject matter ranging from corporeal, action-based performances, to stop-motion graphics, and from computer-generated iconography, to humorous slices of life. All of the videos are recent, and run the gamut for video works being made today. FAST-FORWARD artists include: Susan Lee Chun, Jen DeNike, Spencer Douglass, Adriana Farmiga, Dan Finsel, Jesse Reding Fleming, Christy Gast, Alexa Gerrity, aaron GM, Micol Hebron, Jiae Hwang, David Jones, Julie Lequin, Justin H. Long, Shana Moulton, Davida Nemeroff, Ali Prosch, and Mark Verabioff. In addition to the FAST-FORWARD screening of artist videos, CAF will show works on monitors and projections by Jen DeNike, Jesse Reding Fleming, Alexa Gerrity, Ali Prosch, and Margo Victor.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, June 3, 7pm
Forum Lounge: John Williams, a multimedia iteractive installation
Multimedia artist John Williams uses vinyl records, record players, speakers, effect pedals, slide and 8 mm projectors to create an ultra-sensory environment of small assemblage sculptures with projections and sounds created in real time. As Williams converts the gallery space into one giant kinetic sculpture, the viewer becomes an active participant in his improvised visual choreography. Support for Forum Lounge is generously provided by: Endevermusic Productions, the Franciscan Inn, NEA, KCSB, and the Santa Barbara Independent. Forum Lounge is presented in association with the Santa Barbara Downtown Organization's 1st Thursday.

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, May 6, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Luz y Sombra (An Electro-Bilingual-Opera) by Y&S
Yahaira Ivonne Cardoza & Oscar Miguel Santos
Using video projections, original music, and live performance, artists Oscar Santos and Yahaira Cardoza present Luz y Sombra(Light and Shadow) an Electro-Bilingual-Opera, that explores love, loss and gender identity. Luz y Sombrawill be performed in English and Spanish. Y&S is a collaborative multimedia project consisting of Yahaira Ivonne Cardoza and Oscar Miguel Santos. These Los Angeles-based artists share roots in Central America and a love of cookies!

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, April 1, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Sanford Biggers, with special guests Gamelan Sinar Surya and DJ Jahi Sundance
Although largely known as a visual artist, Sanford Biggers uses sound and music as a central element in his work. Biggers will present a unique mash-up of his own music performance, featuring Los Angeles based DJ Jahi Sundance, live video mixing, and a local gamelan choir ensemble from Gamelan Sinar Surya. Drawing from ancient African and Buddhist musical traditions, stream of consciousness, hip hop culture, and projected images, he will offer a collective audience interaction relating back to the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness (in that many people have touched the work and with every new touch, each person becomes connected to one another in a real, but subtle way). Copresented by Gamelan Sinar Surya and The Brotherhood of Santa Barbara.
ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, March 4, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Cartune Xprez, CASTL CRNRS
Portland-based artists Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris are Cartune Xprez, a multimedia dance duo that use videos, music, and installations that capitalize on the abundance of digital information. CASTL CRNRS features a combination of animated videos and performance to unfold a three-part, mythical tale of a violent forest tamed and replaced with geometric systems.
ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, February 4, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Susan Simpson
Experimental theatre artist Susan Simpson uses intricate marionettes and unusual film projections to create captivating performances of puppet theatre. Simpson is co-founder of The Manual Archives, a micro theater and exhibition space devoted to the presentation of newly discovered and invented folklore of Los Angeles

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, January 7, Showings at 7pm & 8:15pm
Forum Lounge: The Amazing Animated Jukebox Vol. 2
Remember The Amazing Animated Jukebox Vol. 1? Tune in for Vol. 2 packed chock full of wicked awesome animated tracks compiled by Ted Mills! Starts at 7 PM sharp and rewinds for a second time at 8:15 PM! Kick the New Year off right with the second installment of the Amazing Animated Jukebox. Curated by local filmmaker and writer Ted Mills, the Amazing Animated Jukebox Vol. 2 screens videos from Menomena, N.A.S.A. featuring Kool Keith and Tom Waits, Death Cab for Cutie, Birdy Nam Nam, Lemon Jelly, Royksopp, Azeem, The New Pornographers, and many more. Don’t miss your fix of the latest wave in animated eye candy ranging from old-school 2-D line drawing to computer graphics and those that negotiate the subtle levels in between!

ADMISSION IS FREE

2009

Thursday, December 3, 7pm
Forum Lounge: Julie Lequin
Quebec-born artist Julie Lequin explores the construction of identity through role-playing and props, oftentimes with humorous results. Her work has a quirky Canadian/SoCal sensibility that transforms the illusory film staples of the prop, costume, voiceover, and fake hair, into unconvincing parodies. A participant in CAF’s exhibition Unusual Behavior, Lequin will present a performance related to her newest video work in progress Top 30 (en 30 temps), which traces each year of the artist’s life in narrative form – a project resulting from thoughts of turning 30 while traversing the art world with a suitcase in hand. Though her characters are often inspired by a pastiche of sources including family, friends, NPR personas, lip-synching performers, and video diary confessions, Top 30 (en 30 temps) shifts the focus onto the artist. During the performance, Lequin will read stories from several years of her life (28-30) while images of her drawings are projected. Videos of 4-5 amateurs, who sing a song from her Top 30 playlist, will run in between the storytelling segments. The song choices and vocalists’ ages match the year of Lequin’s life that is being chronicled. Join us for this rare experience with the artist!

ADMISSION IS FREE

Thursday, October 1
Forum Lounge: Jessica Findley Aeolian Ride
52 bikes in wind inflated suits stormed upon Santa Barbara in a mass participatory event with a sense of humor.
ADMISSION IS FREE