Sue Costabile

Sue Costabile

Sue Costabile aka SUE-C is a visual and performing artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” Costabile synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, hand-made papers, fabrics and miniature interactive lighting effects. Dark, moody, textural, and physical, her live films inherit equally from the kinetic languages of Stan Brakhage’s abstract cinema and Nicolas Schöffer’s lumodynamic scuptures. She employs the same techniques in her recorded work to emphasize the beauty of the banal street corner, public parking lot, forgotten winter beach, torn remnant of a found photograph, cast-away super 8 vacation footage, and other half-forgotten, often-unnoticed, in-between spaces in her surroundings.

Costabile has collaborated with musicians such as Morton Subotnick, Luc Ferrari, Laetitia Sonami, Antye Greie (AGF) and Joshua Kit Clayton at a variety of international venues in-cluding the San Francisco International Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), Ars Electronica (Linz), MUTEK (Montreal), SONAR (Barcelona), the MonkeyTown (NYC), and Activating the Medium (San Francisco). Her solo performances combine live imagery with a live soundtrack using her own voice, small sound effects devices and assorted electronic instruments. She currently teaches “Math & Media” at the California College of Arts (CCA) in Oakland. Her recent experimental film FortyThousand3Hundred20 Memories had its world premiere at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. http://www.sue-c.net