Special Forces

Living Cinema, an internationally renowned collaboration between San Francisco composer Bob Ostertag and Quebecois animator Pierre Hébert, maximizes the performative aspects of live cinema events, bringing immediacy and topical relevance to astute and biting cultural commentary. Special Forces, a pointed and urgent view of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, exemplifies this approach. Ostertag and Hébert presented its world première at the Irtijal ’07 Free Improvised Music Festival in Beirut, Lebanon in early April. The project is a meditation on, and critique of, the relationships between war, video games and technology.
To that end, Ostertag and Hébert have customized standard game pads (like the ones that come with Nintendo) so that they will trigger sounds and images from a variety of sources, including video games, war footage and original images filmed during Living Cinema’s travels. Ostertag creates a score and soundscape comprised entirely of video game sound clips, while Hébert creates animations on the spot that will interact with original and altered images and sounds.