Band Apart

"Projectionists," Craig Baldwin tells me, "get bored." We're sitting in the mod mad scientist's basement, among film canisters stacked to the ceiling and teetering piles of books, talking about the "all-projector orchestra" Wet Gate. Baldwin, curator of the Other Cinema's movie series, animatedly describes the three-man, 16mm-obsessed group as part of an age-old tradition in the cinematic world -- "re-mediation," he calls it, or making new forms from old media. "It's like a beatnik thing, the redeeming, the saving something worthless. It's almost transcendental."

Ken Paul Rosenthal

Getting Loopy: the Wet Gate trio.

Details

Pad McGlaughlin's Depth of Field (an exploration of ChromaDepth technology), clips from Baldwin's vast archives, found slide giveaways, and cakes designed to look like 16mm film reels ring in Wet Gate's birthday at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 26

Admission is $6

824-3890

www.filma rt s.org

Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia (at 21st Street), S.F.

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More About

• Craig Baldwin
• Steve Dye
• Peter Conheim
• Owen O'Toole

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But what does it look like, exactly? What will audiences see at "Performing the Perfs: Wet Gate's 10th Anniversary Bash"? I call Steve Dye, one of the projector-players (the other two are Peter Conheim and Owen O'Toole), and ask him. "The ingredients are three projectors, film loops, and simple electronics, used to amplify and distort the sound coming off the film as it plays," he explains. Further, the trio grabs any visual effect available -- rear projection, layered images, and odd backgrounds -- and uses several innovations like projections bounced off mirrors or hand-processed and shown through gels. And although the performances are rehearsed, the improvisational and unknowable aspects are key. "That's part of what makes it as exciting as it is," Dye says. The clips Baldwin screens for me are beautiful, slightly abstract moving-light collages, with complex soundtracks the original filmmakers probably didn't anticipate.

Back in the basement, Baldwin becomes emphatic when I suggest that Wet Gate performances might fall under the category of "experimental" film. "It's not academic and it's not elitist," he says. Instead, he compares the participants to musicians who play more common instruments: "It's amazing to see them play the loops at just the right time, like a band!" In fact, he says, the group's members call themselves a combo, like a jazz band. A bored projectionist combo.