Electro-pythagorus is a portrait of Canadian computer music creator and Western Front co-founder Martin Bartlett, a student of Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage and Pandit Pran Nath. Created largely from unseen archival material (correspondence, his notebooks, still photos, music, film and video) as well as new 16mm film notes shot in Vancouver, Burnaby, Victoria and Amsterdam, the film addresses Bartlett’s life, work and the cultural milieu that he came out of. The film is a crafted consideration of Bartlett’s musical interests (minimalism and world music, early computer music languages, and microtuning). It follows Fowler’s style of building complex portraits as a form of meta-documentary and in so doing reclaims certain elements of the life of this figure, whose contribution has become largely unknown since his early passing from AIDS in the early 1990s. Co-presented by SFU Galleries and Western Front
Image: Luke Fowler, Electro-pythagorus (production still), 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute.
