Saturday, June 17th, 2017
Doors at 4:30 PM... Screening at 5:00 PM
@ The Mini - 1329 Main St.
2002 (2015) By: C. Spencer Yeh
Co-Presented with the No Response Festival
2002
Dir. C. Spencer Yeh, 2015.
USA, 53 min.
2002 is a "concert film" that collects together footage of approximately forty bands videotaped by artist C. Spencer Yeh during the year 2002, including Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Sightings, Sudden Infant, Cock ESP, Double Leopards, Caroliner Rainbow, Comets on Fire, and more. Acting as a survey, tribute, and foreshadowing of the contemporary American musical underground, 2002 captures not only the artists, but the audiences, spaces, and networks that remain incredibly formative and influential over a decade later.
A handful of the segments were originally posted to Yeh’s personal website, before the coming of YouTube and other media-sharing outlets. The average duration of the edits were kept short due to the storage and bandwidth considerations of that time – a strategy carried over in revisiting the footage years later. In a style similar to Yeh's Hair Police: 01-02, the accustomed musical documentary talking heads, voiceover meditations, and evocative b-roll were eschewed in favor of a more observational "vérité" approach. A loose narrative was already found in the sequencing of these short glimpses during the span of a year – audience members one moment are then found to be the artists on stage in the next. Some venues iconic in their moment are now long gone, while others were revived in recent times, activating a new history.
Special thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix.
C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well his music project Burning Star Core. Recent presentations of work include "Modern Mondays" at MoMA NYC, "Sound Horizon" at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis MN, "Closer to the Edge" in Singapore and "Crossing Over" in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, "Martha Friedman: Some Hags" at the NYU IFA Great Hall NYC, "Ed Atkins: Performance Capture" at the Kitchen NYC, "The Companion" at the Liverpool Biennial, “99 Objects” at the Whitney Museum NYC, the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, "Tony Conrad Tribute" at Atelier Nord/Ultima Festival in Oslo Norway, "Great Tricks From Your Future" at D-CAF in Cairo Egypt, Borderline Festival in Athens Greece, Kinomuzeum at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw Poland, the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, Music Unlimited in Wels Austria, and LAMPO at the Renaissance Society in Chicago IL. Yeh also collaborated with Triple Canopy for their contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 2014. He was a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room NYC, and was included in the performance program for Greater New York at MoMA/PS1.
Recent recordings include "Solo Voice I-X" (Primary Information), "Wake Up Awesome," with Okkyung Lee and Lasse Marhaug (Software Recording Company), “Long Pig” by New Monuments, his trio with Ben Hall and Don Dietrich (Bocian), and "Schlager" with Ken Vandermark.
Yeh also volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn NY. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. He is also a contributing editor to Triple Canopy and BOMB magazine, as well as contributing to The Third Rail and Personal Best.