2009: Gilbert Guerrero & Kathleen Quinlan

Gilbert Guerrero and Kathleen Quinlan will perform Hypnodetonation; sounds and films, hand-made animations and field recordings. Using sounds and images from industrial films, television commercials, radio broadcasts, documentary and educational films, hand-made animations and field recordings, the project re-forms contemporary and historical media into a recombinant audio/visual mandala.

The media will be manipulated, layered, looped, and transformed live through a mixture of analog and digital devices, all with the aim of creating circular and repeating patterns like a traditional mandala. The sound and image memes that are retrieved from the media flow will build up, overlap and then be fed back into the process, providing an ever-evolving stream of new material for consumption. Inspired and fed by sources varying from Busby Berkeley choreography to Mayan astrology, the repetitions and loops will create a multi-dimensional meditation device aimed at freeing cognitive thinking by overloading the senses with dazzling displays. The project ultimately questions what happens when we become transfixed by the sounds and images that bombard us on a daily basis and how we can evolve spiritually in an age of information overload.

Gilbert Guerrero and Kathleen Quillian formed their collaborative team in 2003 based on their shared interests in technology and non-linear narrative. Their collaborative projects explore the cultural landscape through mapping and mediated movement through space. By re-ordering and overlapping images, narratives and settings and comparing the resulting intertextual sediment their work attempts to draw into question and propose alternative solutions to political, cultural and social boundaries. Their collaborative work has been shown extensively around the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Berlin, Germany and Dublin, Ireland. In between gallery exhibitions, they work together as co-directors of the non-profit multi-media art gallery Artists' Television Access. Gilbert is an artist, teacher, and designer of interactive media. His work in experimental cinema, interactive video, drawing, painting, and performance art has been shown in several galleries and on the streets in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. He recently worked in collaboration as a designer and programmer on the project "Strange Weather" which was the winner of Eyebeam's Eco-Visualization Challenge in 2008. He holds a degree in Mathematics from UC Berkeley. Kathleen received her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She is currently the Communications Associate for Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology as well as the Development Director for Artists’ Television Access. Her individual work in video and animation has been shown in San Francisco, CA, Baltimore, MD and New Brunswick, Canada.

Artist (photo by Photographer)