Endangered Species

"Living Cinema," as Canadian artist Pierre Hébert and San Francisco musician Bob Ostertag call themselves, means live, digital filmmaking: Hébert and Ostertag sit at a table, surrounded by laptops, and spin a spontaneous movie from sketches, snippets of film, and digitally recorded objects like stones and rubber ducks. In the first of two pieces, Portrait of Buddha, Hébert's brush strokes on white paper (recorded on camera and instantly animated) have a quality of moving Japanese calligraphy that resolves into birds, faces, and running human shapes. Ostertag matches their movements with sound samples from his own computer. When the music and animations find a spontaneous harmony, the effect is dreamlike; when they don't, it's more like a bad idea on an Etch A Sketch. The title film, Endangered Species, is longer and more ambitious than Buddha, with a series of windup cows, toy planes, and drumming dolls recorded live on digicam and set spinning on-screen with Hébert's moving sketches of soldiers, explosions, and tanks. Most of the picture evolves over a map of the Middle East, so something dark and political is intended. On opening night Ostertag's on-the-spot synthesis of, say, a squeaking rubber ducky into musical birdsong or chattering toy drums into a rhythm of gunfire was skillful, but to me the show felt relentless: It kept spinning even after the vision was no longer much of a surprise.