'Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett)' at the 55th New York Film Festival

Luke Fowler's lovingly constructed biographical essay of Canadian composer Martin Bartlett, Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett), will be screened at the 55th New York Film Festival on 8 October. As part of the festival's Projections section, Fowler's film – a co-production by Sonic Acts and Stedelijk Museum – finds Bartlett at home, at work and onstage, telling an intimate personal history.

Luke Fowler, 'Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett)' at Sonic Acts Festival 2017. Photo by Pieter Kers.
With the film Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939–93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: ‘the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’. More information about the programme can be found here.

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