Negativland & SUE-C: "We Can Really Feel Like We're Here" [In-Person Only]
6:45pm | Stand by for Failure: A Documentary About Negativland
9pm | Negativland & SUE-C live: "We Can Really Feel Like We're Here"
$25 General Admission
$15 Member/Student/Senior
Tickets include access to BOTH the documentary screening AND the live performance!
PLEASE NOTE: Online ticket sales will close one hour before the documentary begins, at 5:45pm.
You will still be able to purchase at the door unless we update this page to indicate otherwise.
Visiting Artist
Legendary sound collage group Negativland and “real-time cinema” visual artist SUE-C collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance about our minds, our realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions as we head into our next election: WE CAN REALLY FEEL LIKE WE’RE HERE. Negativland performs with video designed and produced by SUE-C, who appears virtually.
Live Music
“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 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
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
The majority of seats in our main cinema are 21″ wide from armrest to armrest; some seats are 19″ wide. We are working on creating the option of removable armrests!
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at suji@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them. We are not currently checking vaccination cards. Recent variants of COVID-19 readily infect and spread between individuals regardless of vaccination status.
Read more about NWFF’s policies regarding cleaning, masks, and capacity limitations here.
This show is paired with a screening of STAND BY FOR FAILURE: A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT NEGATIVLAND!
(Ryan Worsley, US, 2022, 99 min, in English)
Everything people want is true even if it isn’t.
In 1978 David “The Weatherman” Wills, Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler formed Negativland, which quickly became an absurd and noisy multimedia world without boundaries, ownership or privacy. Negativland’s complex chaos of plunderphonics poses both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, propaganda, power and perception in the global village. Negativland continue to be pioneers of art in the electric age, and the medium reveals that any message is all in our heads.
“If you want to be inspired by individuals who dare to bust down the doors of art’s gatekeepers, then Stand By For Failure is the way to go.” – Alan Ng, Film Threat
Negativland live in Dallas 2023. Photo by Jennifer Bennett.
More video context:
Negativland + SUE-C at Unsound Festival 2023, Krakow, Poland. Photo by FILIP PREIS.
About 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.
About 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.