Sonic Cinema: Loose Connection

A rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) alongside a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.

Shot in 1973 and revisited in 2011, Loose Connection is an experimental documentary of family life on West 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, where Tony Conrad lived with Beverly Grant and their son Ted. Using a specially designed rotating camera mount, Conrad interrupts the viewer’s spatial orientation with fragmentary, flickering images, anchored by the staccato noise of the street. The result is at once a snapshot of New York life in the early 1970s, now unavoidably nostalgic, and an interrogation of objectivity.

Perhaps best known for his stroboscopic film The Flicker (1966) and his music with the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, and German experimental rock band Faust, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) pioneered work with visual phenomena and sustained tone that helped shape decades of experimental film and music that followed. Moving just as freely between film & video, music, sculpture, and public access television, his multidisciplinary practice resists easy categorisation, often challenging the modes of production and relationships of power embedded within media forms.

Programmed by Oliver Dickens for Sonic Cinema.