Score & Script: Music in Video presents recent film, video, music and live performance works by artists and musicians, DJs and VJs, in which music is both the score and script. Taking cues from the pioneer multimedia work of Merrill Aldighieri, the original "video jockey" of Hurrah and Danceteria fame (popular 1980's NYC clubs), the exhibition offers alternatives to the ever-popular MTV-style music video format.

The progressive format of Score & Script is a cross between art exhibition and film festival. Gallery spaces are transformed into projection rooms for works on view throughout the run of the show, while special, one-time performances occur in the adjacent Freeport-McMoRan Theater.

Furthermore, the artists in Score & Script: Music in Video belong to a new generation of experimental multimedia and new media artists who challenge the way music is looked at and images are heard.

Artists in the exhibition include Edgar Arceneaux (USA), Christophe Chassol (France), Courtney Egan (USA), Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky (USA), Melvin Moti (Suriname/Netherlands), Storm Saulter (Jamaica) and Caecilia Tripp (Germany/France).

Works on View

On view February 7 - April 5
Courtney Egan - Early Spring (2009)
Early Spring is Egan's largest video installation with sound to date. Using the floor of the gallery space as a screen for the projection of her hallucinatory flower image compositions to a drone-like and beat-heavy musical accompaniment broadcast by low-fi speakers, Egan takes the viewer into the space of Digital Animism, an expression she coined to describe her brand of digital animation, inspired by the nature and spirituality.

Christophe Chassol - Ultrascores and Warm Re-Synch (2007-2008)
For the Ultrascores, Chassol uses the notes generated by the human voice to create musical scores out of reharmonized discourses. The Warm Re-Synch was born out of the repetition and harmonization of monophonic melodic patterns from a variety of found audio and video sources (a violin player in Paris, a boys' choir in Russia, etc.)

On view February 7 - 22
Christophe Chassol - Nola Chérie (2009)
For Nola Chérie, a CAC commission shot in New Orleans in June 2008, Paris-based pianist, composer, arranger and conductor Christophe Chassol recorded various sounds and melodies from the city, from performances by the Rebirth and the Troupe brass bands and Kalamu ya Salaam, to the night song of crickets and the melody of the Mississippi River boat's calliope. Matched by equally heteroclite accompanying images - the bright grass green wall of an abandoned warehouse, the Lower 9th Ward levee and passing trains - Nola Chérie, not unlike Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), is a musical ode to the city or fanfharmonization, a term Chassol coined from the French word for marching band (fanfare) and the word harmonization. Nola Chérie will be Chassol's first project presented in an art exhibition.

Nola Chérie is made possible by generous funds from FACE, the French American Fund for Contemporary Art.

On view February 26 - March 8
Edgar Arceneaux - An Arrangement without Tormentors (2004)
In An Arrangement without Tormentors, Edgar Arceneaux's former teacher and collaborator Charles Gaines, a professor at CalArts University plays on the piano in a studio on the West Coast a melody he composed that is played simultaneously by a professional musician in a New York studio. As much as Arceneaux's An Arrangement... unveils the individuality of interpretation as the two performers falls in an out of synch during the course of the performance, it also shows the range of each artist's physical and musical gestures with performances is as polyphonic as would be those of a full orchestra.

On view March 12- March 22
Melvin Moti - Top Legs (Miss Daisy) (2005)
and Storm Saulter - Inna di Dance (2003)
Melvin Moti's Top Legs (Miss Daisy) features 72-year old Miss Daisy, one of Jamaica's most famous dancers of the Ska era reminiscing the funky moves of her youth in her Kingston garden, while Storm Saulter's Inna di Dance shows an aerial view of the provocative moves of contemporary Dance Hall. The juxtaposition of Moti and Slauter's works not only reveals the filmmakers' contrasting stances in regard to their subject matter, one intimate and the other more distanced, but also puts into perspective the evolution of Jamaica's fertile music and dance styles, arguably among the world's richest.

On view March 26 - April 5
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky - Rebirth of a Nation
(2005/2008) and Caecilia Tripp - The Making of Americans (2004)
Filmmaker Caecilia Tripp and conceptual artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky reinvent history through sound and image studio editing techniques applied to various historical materials. In Rebirth of a Nation (2004), Miller sets apart scenes from D.W. Griffith's infamous Birth of a Nation (1915) onto which he overlays subliminal sounds and images to create a meta-narrative born out of the conflation of multiple perceptual fields. The Making of Americans by Tripp (2004), set to music by DJ Spooky and featuring rap diva Jean Grae and slammer Postell, is a freestyle opera inspired by Gertrud Stein's eponymous novel (1908) and opera, Four Saints and three acts (1934), in which "spectacle is a metaphor for the construction of American identity" (Anne Dressen).

Exhibition curated by Claire Tancons, Associate Curator, CAC.
(On view in the First Floor Galleries)

Score & Script is generously supported by FACE, The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art and Creole Gardens Bed & Breakfast.