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The Sync’d series takes shorts works without sound by local filmmakers, then screens them for an audience with a band that improvises soundtracks live. On July 1, Michael Maraden’s brainchild receives its third incarnation, this one on the tent-topped Pittsburgh Center for the Arts patio.
Sync’d III features shorts by nine artists or teams, and music by Bigg Slurpp and Imperial Earth. Last year, Bigg Slurpp’s accompaniment ranged from heavy-riffing psychedelic guitar rock to washes of spacey keyboard arpeggios.
This year, the bands will complement work like Keith Tassick’s “Hot #7,” a five-minute abstract that suggests a journey to the center of the earth as interpreted by a cubist collage artist. There’s also Justin Crimone’s “Afro Mood,” manipulated footage of an exotic dancer; Chris Smalley’s split-screen “Self-Portrait”; and Michelle Senko’s “Time Frame,” an oddly moving collapse of past and present through video.
Mike Bonello’s expressionistic “Lonely Trail Frack Out” explores the damage to nature wrought by gas drilling, while Kristen Lauth Schaeffer and Andrew Halasz’s “Museum” riffs on a famous Godard sequence, except in the Carnegie in lieu of the Louvre.
SYNC’D III 8 p.m. Fri., July 1 (films at sundown). 6300 Fifth Ave., Shadyside. $5. 412-361-0873
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 6, 2011.
