Noise & trip / champs de bruit & voyage en Italie
(Ben Russell, Woody and Steina Vasulka)

La Centrale, from Wednesday, September 10 to Sunday, September 14, 2025 / 1:00-6:00 PM

For three months, a program of films and videos offers a journey through half a century of moving images, exploring some of the possible articulations between sound, music and image. Through a series of thematic "bouquets" or ones centered on a particular filmmaker or video artist, the program presents the work of emblematic or little-known artists, video art pioneers or film thurifers.

In a dialogue between projected works (room 1) and works on cathode-ray monitors (room 2), between formal, ethnographic and political approaches to sound, the program highlights the uses and practices of the musician's portrait, performance and soundscapes.

Each week, the films and videos disseminate discreet touches, apparitions and motifs, connections between bouquets and nods to the Biennial program: Paganini, a Sony Walkman, Jean-Luc Godard revisited by John Zorn, salt deserts, the Bachmann / Ceresole couple, brass bands and more.

A proposal by Maxime Guitton.

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Room 1

Ben Russell, Black and White Trypps Number Three ‍

2007, 11'30'', digitized 16mm film, color, stereo
Collection du Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC)

Between 2005 and 2010, Ben Russell explored psychedelic phenomena in a series of experimental shorts entitled Trypps. From this series comes Black and White Trypps Number Three, filmed from the stage during a concert by noise band Lightning Bolt in Providence, Rhode Island. Caught in a halo of Caravaggesque light, a few young people in the front rows seem alternately lost, worried, then carried away by a collective trance, or even a spiritual impulse. It's a feeling that Ben Russell hopes the film's audience will share, if the image and sound are large enough to envelop them in turn.

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Ben Russell

Born in 1976 (USA)
Based in Marseille

Ben Russell is a filmmaker, artist and curator whose work takes an experimental approach often described as psychedelic ethnography. He is interested in how the moving image can be a tool for identification, immersion and transformation. His favorite subjects include altered states of consciousness, the representation of post-colonial societies, forms of utopia and resistance, community and the relationship between observer and observed.

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room 2

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Woody Vasulka, The Commission

1983, 39'16'', video, color, sound
Collection LI-MA Amsterdam

This video opera features violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini (played by video artist Ernest Gusella), and composer Hector Berlioz (played by composer Robert Ashley). The work is based on the story of how the former commissioned the latter to write a viola concerto, the inspiration for the opera Harold in Italy. The violinist did not attend a performance until shortly before his death. The unconventional structure works in layers, with cropped images and recompositions propelling the narrative progression. Audio and video signals have a controlling function, so that sound and image have equal status. Steina Vasulka, herself a violinist, is at the camera. 

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Woody & Steina Vasulka, Noisefields 

1974, 06'00'', video, color, sound
Collection LI-MA Amsterdam

A field of video snow, or noise, flickers in a rhythmic pattern. This experiment with "video flicker" produces a mesmerizing image with a dense texture defined by a succession of circular shapes in the rectangular screen. The work is an important example of early attempts to visualize the materiality of an electronic signal. The sound is modulated by the video's energetic content.

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Woody Vasulka

(1937-2019)
Resided in Santa Fe

Steina Vasulka

Born in 1940 (IS)
Based in Santa Fe

Steina and Woody Vasulka are pioneers of video art. Steina trained as a violinist, Woody came from experimental cinema. They left Prague for the United States in 1965. They explored the potential of the electronic signal, manipulating it as an autonomous material in the manner of a composer with sound, hijacking the tools of television production to develop a new visual language. Their joint work, as well as their individual research, combines performances, installations, music and generative video. They participated in the development of new tools (video synthesizers, audiovisual interfaces, vocoders) and new practices, such as live audiovisual and generative arts. In 1971, they co-founded The Kitchen, a New York space that was to become a mecca for the avant-garde.