In 1995, a woman named Laurence called to ask if I would take part in a performance of hers, opening for the Seamen (a Survival Research offshoot) at a club in San Francisco. She had gotten my name from NY filmmaker Bradley Eros, a common friend. A few days later I met Steve Dye and Peter Conheim, who, along with David Sherman and Mark Gergis, had been hired as projectionists for an "act" she did called "ReInventing the Wheel", where she hung a few bicycle wheels from the ceiling and we projected wheel imagery loops. It was a small disaster. But I enjoyed meeting Steve and Peter, who'd known each other for some years and were discussing "what a projector band would be like" as we loaded or unloaded our projectors that day. As they kicked it around, I said: "OK, let's do it. I'll be in the projector band with you." Did we have any idea how much loading and unloading of projectors we would do for the next 10 years? Well, we did probably about 30 concerts, some excellent and others not perfect.
Wet Gate has occupied its own interesting niche as a film performance group playing 16mm projectors as musical (and image) instruments. Each of us has been obsessed by THE LOOP, the beautiful economy of a film (or audio) loop, turning one short filmic phrase into an endless or unlimited (duration) piece of film-time. We each brought our own personal attractions to working as a group. Steve Dye had done experiments with Press-on Letraset patterns and how they played when applied to the optical sound region of the film strip and brought that process to Wet Gate, which has been a major aspect of our performance since the start. (I forgot to mention that we agreed that Wet Gate's philosophy of performance would be playing sound which is generated ONLY by film passing over the optical sound head on the 16mm projector.) Steve also plays clarinets and homemade wind instruments and studies West African drum and dance. Peter Conheim was a serial-looper, working with Mark Gergis and friends as Monopause, a band of lo-fi post-prog anti-rockers out of Oakland. He started the record label Electro-Motive to release music from the underground Oakland music scene (get "Live From The After World" at www.electromotiverecords.com/). Peter also scored a huge archive of educational 16mm films when the Berkeley School System threw its collection in a dumpster and he was alerted of it. Today, Peter is the most obsessive 16mm collector I know and he has helped revive the Guild Cinema in Albequerqee, NM the last few years. He's also working regularly with Don Joyce and Negativland. Peter's Negativland contacts opened many opportunities for Wet Gate concerts. My own (Owen) contributions included experience with multiple projections from my Filmers Almanac project, building custom screens using artist vellum papers, an interest in mirrors as a projection tool (O'Toole) and a studio in Berkeley where we rehearsed for several years. We each found films and brought carefully clipped loops to show off to each other, like a kind of contest. We invented ways for projectors to speak together as an ensemble, learning how to segue from one sequence of images and sounds to the next. Projectors were adapted for line out audio, eliminating amplifier noise. Notes from rehearsal improvisations were hammered into setlists, often just prior to a performance. Bay Area filmmakers Gibbs Chapman and Maximillian Godino became some-time members of Wet Gate. The group enjoyed a type of artist-in-residency at Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema New Experimental Works shows. The Bay Area flourished as a center for experiments in multiple projector film art, now sometimes called "Performance Cinema" in university syllabi.
After peaking in the late 90's, Wet Gate gathered less often to invent new forest fires. We each had other projects and life turns. I moved to Mendocino County for several years. We did a performance for 2003's Faits de la Lumieres international projection day, projecting onto the satellite reception dish at KZYX, the radio station I worked at (see www.wetgate.net/ for documentation of that and other band history). And we started receiving calls of interest that took us to Australia in 2005, Rotterdam in early 2006 (see my review of that under Wet Gate at www.filmersalmanac.net/) and then a tour of Montreal, Toronto and Kingston, Canada in October of 2006. So Wet Gate remains a working group, even if that is occasional, the only 16mm projector optical sound band on planet Earth.
