German filmmaker and animator Lotte Reiniger made over 40 films in her career, predating Walt Disney’s animations by a decade.  She is famous for her Adventures of Prince Achmed, an alternate take on the story of Aladdin.  Her films are essentially grayscale animations on a solid-colored background.  Silhouetted shapes move whimsically across the screen and interact deftly with one another. […]

What I find enticing about Notes on Camp is the use of a variety of different overlapping sounds and sonic textures to create a unified whole.  The artist uses narration, ambient noise, quotations from the campers, songs, announcements over the loudspeaker, and other such “camp sounds” to weave a tapestry of the entire experience.  This technique makes the documentation more […]

How would you react to encountering a mirror for the first time?

John Cage’s performance, 4:33, takes anticipation to a new level: the artist sits at a piano in a public space (like Harvard Squre) and performs a “silent piece” with no noise whatsoever except the crowd’s chatter.  Cage’s interest in the extra-sonic qualities of music is evidenced by his book Notations, a collection of written music notation “chosen by circumstances.”  The […]

German dramatist Hugo Ball’s 1916 treatise on the new Dada movement contains playful language, contemporary references, and a critique of the bourgeois and their use of words.  First read at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the work shows Ball’s high expectations for the new philosophy: “tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it.”  Ball notes that “dada” means rather […]