A selection of highly original works by artists who shattered the boundaries between visual and sonic through the creative use of optical printing, animation, electronics, and editing.

Films included a newly-restored print of Jud Yalkut’s Turn, Turn, Turn (1966); Scott Bartlett and Tom DeWitt’s landmark OffOn (1968); Robert Breer’s Blazes (1961); Storm DeHirsch’s Peyote Queen (1965); Barry Spinello’s Six Loop-Paintings (1970).

The program culminated with the purest and most intense of ‘60s visual music experiments: The Flicker (1965) by avant garde composer Tony Conrad, who conceived the film in explicitly musical terms and used alternating pure black and white light to create hypnotic impressions of paradoxically vivid colors.

A special late addition was a very rare screening of a 1940s Auroratone film by Cecil Stokes.

Part of Visual Music, Sensory Cinema 1920s-1970s (April 9-14, 2010), a series celebrating the history of Visual Music curated by Peter Lucas, and co-presented by the Northwest Film Forum and The Sprocket Society in association with the Center for Visual Music. The series was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment For The Arts.

Over the past century, there have been a number of prescient artists who’ve approached cinema as a tool for merging visual art and music in order to create a new synaesthetic art form and explore uncharted areas of experience. Through a vibrant history of cinematic experiments, these pioneers have been inventing the concepts, aesthetics, techniques and technologies on which our modern image-and-sound culture is based. Visual Music is a rare opportunity to see restored film prints of work by such master animators as Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Jordan Belson and Robert Breer on the big screen. In addition, we’ll host a panel discussion on Seattle’s own history of visual music in the 1960s and early ‘70s.