City Symphony in 16mm: A New Work for Expanded Cinema is an interactive, multiprojection, expanded cinema project at the abandoned Fuji-Ya restaurant building on the Minneapolis riverfront. Viewers experience and interact with moving images captured in the city that offer new and abstracted presentations of our environment through live, original, hand-processed 16mm films. The artists engage audiences through improvised 16mm film multiprojection, which reflects and re-creates the simultaneous stillness, order, and chaos of city life. Projectionists invite viewers to participate by manipulating the analog films through rudimentary effects such as placing and moving prisms and gels in front of the projection lenses to obscure the images.
“Expanded cinema is a film and video practice that activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural ‘architectures of reception’ into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative, and nondetermined. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices, and the narratives of social space, everyday life, and cultural communication.”
—Stan Vanderbeek