Potter-Belmar Labs Live Cinema

IMPROVISED CINEMA Sample of live audio/video mix. Potter-Belmar Labs presents a live mix of music and video projection.  Both artists (Leslie Raymond & Jason Jay Stevens) perform from laptop computers augmented by external digital devices used to manipulate their palette of images and sounds. The duo carries the audience through an improvised collage experience in sound and image.  They build as they go, weaving field recordings with threads sampled from pop culture and their own rich sound and image compositions.  From deeply ambient textures to moments of turbulence, concrete imagery gives way to abstraction, and themes emerge and recede.  The results may recall a vivid dream, a visual symphony, or an abstract opera. Performing together since 2001, Potter-Belmar Labs is one part new media art, one part DJ and VJ performance, and one part experimental cinema. FORTUNE Trailer for our audience-participatory "Fortune" performance. What does the future hold? What follows us from the past?  What do we need to know about the present?  Multimedia artists and performers, Potter-Belmar Labs, will answer these questions and more in their audience-participatory live cinema performance, "Fortune." PBL probes the collective subconscious of the audience, and presents the results in a live mix of sound and moving image.  Each performance of "Fortune" is unique; the audience determines the selections and arrangement from a set of reconfigurable vignettes.  Original sound and image compositions are interwoven with samples from the culture at-large and field recordings, generating a tapestry of allusion, abstract narration, and dreamlike hallucination. Carrying their performance equipment on their backs, Potter-Belmar Labs bring the ancient tradition of the itinerant magic lantern show to the 21st Century.  In their ongoing quest to generate incomparable cinematic experiences, the duo utilizes laptops and other electronic devices, generally responding to site, audience, and the work's own evolving nature.  The result can be beautiful, intelligent, moving and disturbing, personal and immediate. Fans of live cinema, experimental film, participation theater, and new media art will enjoy "Fortune" by Potter-Belmar Labs! AMBIENT The visual and sonic backdrop for a party at the San Antonio Museum of Art.