With opening acts Sleep Number and Kima Moore.

Negativland + virtual SUE-C come to Asheville for the first time ever with a Special Multi-Venue/Multi-Day Double-Feature: a documentary about the group, and a live multi-media performance!

📽️ On Monday, May 20 at 7pm, the Grail Moviehouse in Asheville will be screening the new feature film Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland (from director Ryan Worsley) with members of Negativland in person for the Q and A. Presented by Music Movie Mondays, and sponsored by 103.3 Asheville FM.

🎛️ On Wednesday, May 22 at 7pm, at the newly reopened Sly Grog Lounge, Negativland will perform their live show We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here, accompanied by SUE-C’s unique and immersive visuals. This is the latest audio-visual collaboration between Negativland and “real-time cinema” visual artist SUE-C, and it’s about the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions as we head onto our next election.

If you’re under forty-five years of age, there’s a good chance that you reference stories and life-lessons from video games more often than you do lines from films. Today’s generation gap comes in part from a schism of media consumption habits that occurred three decades ago, when gaming outpaced cinema and television as the state-of-the-art for narrative storytelling. Not only are the stories being told different — the way in which they are being told say different things about human agency, and the rules that govern the changing of the rules.

Power holds the status quo in place by pitting those who oppose it against each other. But trust between us prisoners grows when one realizes that all sales are not final, and that both sides have always been playing an Infinite Game. Join Negativland and the virtual SUE-C for a dangerous night of legacy audiovisual entertainment: We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here.

“An urgent show by Negativland and artist SUE-C calls time on a tech dystopia that is as malevolent as it is stupid… to meet the terrifying contemporary moment… as the world slides incrementally into meltdown.”

– The Wire Magazine

Negativland + SUE-C on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert: https://tinyurl.com/negativland-sue-c-tinydesk

👉 NEGATIVLAND

Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and “culture jamming” (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work in the USA and in Europe.

“Negativland have made a rewarding career out of being prodigious consumers of media who then digest it and recontextualize it, emphasizing mediated reality’s crazy-making absurdity and the infinite malleability of perception and ‘truth.’”

– Dave Segal, The Stranger

“Negativland are proud subverters of culture, causing trouble while having fun.”

– NPR Tiny Desk Concert

👉 SUE-C

Sue Slagle (SUE-C) is an award-winning artist, engineer and educator whose work in “real time cinema” presents a new, imaginative perspective on live performance. Her evolution as a new media artist began in late-90s San Francisco where she was an influential member of the electronic music scene, owning the experimental record label Orthlorng Musork, organizing audio-visual cultural events and teaching the first creative coding classes in Max Software. After finishing her masters degree in engineering at UC Berkeley she moved to Oakland where she became co-owner of the Ego Park gallery and helped launch the First Friday art walks.

Her performances blend cinema and technology into an organic, improvisational and immersive act, created from live cameras, light pads and video algorithms. She has always pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction, employing emerging technologies and inventing many of her own, both through performance and tinkering with hundreds of students in her well established teaching practice. She is currently a Video Designer at Meow Wolf.