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Zuckerman currently runs a studio based in Silverlake, Los Angeles, which specializes in film scoring and editing post-production on a range of projects from commercial tv/film to contemporary visual art. For inquiries visit:

studiodavidlouiszuckerman.com

The work archived on this page collects a range of selected projects as composer, director, film editor, actor and visual artist.


Projects

―   Ostrava Days Festival 2021

―   Hyle String Trio

―   Fissão – Ostrava Days Festival

―   Ismay: Guide To Ismay Vol.1

―   Aplauso: Os Olhos Escutam

―   Full-Contact Minimalism

―   Penny Film

―   Reading/Non-Reading

―   8 X 8 Composers/Choreographers

―   Bar Bar – Performance

―   Casa de Buonaguro-Foerster

―   Ontopo 2018

―   Magick City Residency

―   How I Pulled Myself Out Of Swamp

―   Capitalist Realism Surinomo

―   Good Samaritans-NYCP

―   Sister-Song Benefit Performance

―   Eyes_1

―   How About A Game

―   Cologne Of The Maghreb

―   Really

―   S.E.M. Ensemble, Emerging Concert

―   The Evening-NYCP

―   The Augur-Untitled Radio

―   Jiro, Digital Painting-Musical

―   Cordelia Film

―   The Harmers – LA

―   The Harmers – NYC

―   Icarus-Film

―   Milarepa Opera Benefit

―   The And Group

―   The Auger – David Lewis Gallery

―   End of The Night Café

―   Ariella Von – Film

―   Wolfe with an E

―   Phoebe Zeitgeist – 16mm Film

―   A Cool Breeze on the Back of the Neck

―   Ivan The Bloodburst -Cassette

―   Scores and Objects


Bio

David Louis Zuckerman is a composer, multi-media artist, writer and director. Before moving to Los Angeles, Zuckerman toured internationally with renowned American playwright Richard Maxwell’s theater company NYCP, and was a critic at Film Comment magazine writing about contemporary cinema. Zuckerman is an alumnus of the Skowhegan Residency, the Labyrinth Theater Ensemble and the S.E.M. Emerging Composers Workshop. He has made performance installations at David Lewis Gallery, JOAN Los Angeles, Anthology Film Archives, Kunstverein Cologne, Moma-New Director/New Films, The Dallas Museum of Art and others. He studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music and holds a BFA from The School of Visual Arts in Video Art and an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College. His work has been covered in Art in America, LA Weekly, Artforum, Cahiers du Cinema, Purple Magazine, Hyperallergic, The New York Times and Filthy Dreams. Get in touch.

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Eyes_1

EYES_1
Performance Installation
Opera Project by David Louis Zuckerman
Adapted from a poem/text by Owen Hutchinson
On Stellar Rays, NYC, Dec 15th, 2016

None of us imagine one at a time
A healthy anytime
To see this obituary
It’s informative after all
Years of service in the world
And one day while the labor goes quickly
No not in the way easy
My inner lover works out
Demolishing the universe
The truth is more joy
The truth is more joy than we know
And co-exist in NYC
Thank you same one
De Lafayette is our hero of two worlds
In memoriam

EYES_1 is a new live performance of songs by composer and artist David Louis Zuckerman, set to text adapted from artist Owen Hutchinson’s book Eyes_1. For the past year Zuckerman has been working on setting Eyes_1 as an ‘impromptu for piano and voice’. Hutchinson’s poems and journalistic musings reflect, through a contemporary and anti-nostalgic lens, themes of pastoralism, romantic love and protest, historically associated with the musical form of Lieder, or “Art Song”.

Sitting at a table in the center of the gallery, Zuckerman is put under hypnosis using a vehicle license plate with the engraving ‘EYES_1’. This object is a reference to the origin of the book’s title appropriated from the back of a car observed by the author, while the act of hypnotism is employed as a theatrical device situating the performance and its narrator within the realm of remote automation. There Zuckerman is incited to embody the voice of Peter Poppers, a figure who appears in Hutchinson’s text and speaks (in the author’s words) to “a vibratory world of brutal psychic forces alternating between the confined and the limitless.”

Zuckerman has chosen the musical form of impromptu, defined as a free-form composition with the character of an ex tempore improvisation, as if prompted by the spirit of the moment. Zuckerman’s recent work, such as chamber piece Per Diem, premiered by SEM Ensemble, and the opera The Augur (premiered at David Lewis Gallery) act as a kind of rejoinder to expressive romanticism. At once lyrical and favoring chromaticism over atonality, these works, including EYES, at the same time problematize the concept of drama and subjectivism through satirical interventions into our saturated and desensitized present.