Ken Jacobs is the father of film-as-performance and one of the USA’s great visual artists. Since the early 60’s his films have mapped out an indeterminate cinema, a cinema in which the temporal nature of film is examined and questioned: does it have to be and feel linear, is 24 frames a second really the best way to capture time, to examine detail and salvage meaning from situations?

Eric La Casa is one of Europe’s leading field recording artists and musicians. His work focuses on the recording of everyday occurrences, spaces and events: maybe the internal creaks of lifts in Paris, or of the most common natural elements and landscapes. He puts himself in I guess very privileged positions, from which he tries to capture not just interesting sounds or timbres, but the actual vibration of spaces or locations: the background hum of place, the musicality of invisible reaches.

Ken’s one of the great progenitors of film as performance; his Nervous System performances of the 70’s onwards took multiple, identical short clips of film (a static steam train, a few seconds of Laurel and Hardy), striped them from real time and projected themselves over each other allowing for a flickering and 4D investigation of details, movement and meaning.

On our tour Ken will be presenting his latest development on the Nervous System, his Nervous Magic Lantern, in which film itself is forsaken for an investigation of flickering, hypnotic and trancelike, crystalline forms.

In reaching for some celestial form, Ken is always keen to ground his work in the everyday, in life as it’s lived. In the same way that he salvages meaning from film time, Eric makes real the sense that, as he has put it, “there is somewhere else everywhere”. And so as Ken mines for meaning, and for your ability to determine your own relationship to image, Eric brings forward the sounds of everyday life, and allows you to relate to them on your own terms too; to find your own reality in them.

Because how many chances are you personally going to get to see Ken Jacobs perform in the UK. And if you’re reading this w/r/t the London show, then how many times on an IMAX screen the size of 6 double decker buses. And this is a specially commissioned performance too, developed in partnership with Eric as a collaborative, balanced whole.

Oh, yeah and we hope KYTN will present lots of different possibilities for the sound-image relationship: vertical montage, emotional congruity, film that uses musical techniques to structure itself, sound that approaches a kind of sonic landscape photograph, and so on and etc… What’s nice here is that the relationship is kind of allegorical, of one medium (image) reaching towards the celestial, and the other responding in balance, to tether us to the everyday, real. In tandem they both work to focus attention, to reinvigorate our reverence for the visual and audible world around us and to develop our patience for experiencing it fully.

But you don’t have to like the theory to get that it’s a major deal and a great experience.

¹We sincerely hope lots, but there is a distinct possibility that it might just be this one: IMAX's aren't ten a penny.