Revolutions per Minute festival and Non-Event co-present a special double bill, featuring a live performance by percussionist Jon Mueller of his collaborative work with visual artist Tom Lecky All Colors Present and a special screening of short films by the late filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa, honoring Nishikawa’s unique artistic vision and enduring impact.

PROGRAM DETAILS

TOMONARI NISHIKAWA short films

sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014) | 2 minutes
Market Street (2005) | 5 minutes
45 7 Broadway (2013) | 5 minutes
Amusement Ride (2019) | 6 minutes
Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023) | 6 minutes

~Intermission~

JON MUELLER + TOM LECKY: ALL COLORS PRESENT
A sound and visual meditation

About Artist

Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. Paired with Tom Lecky's photographs, it becomes a deliberate focus on form, shape and detail. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.
Mueller studied jazz drumming with Hal Russell at Columbia College in Chicago, and singing with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York. A prolific performer, he tours extensively and has appeared at festivals and venues throughout the United States, Canada, England, Europe and Japan.

Tom Lecky

Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.

Tomonari Nishikawa

Born in Nagoya, Japan, Tomonari Nishikawa moved to the United States in 1999 to study filmmaking at Binghamton University, later earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He passed away in April 2025, leaving behind a remarkable legacy as a filmmaker, educator, and cherished member of the experimental film community. A regular contributor to RPM Festival, Nishikawa’s work was featured in the 2019, 2022, and 2024 editions. His incredible expanded cinema performance Six Seventy-Two Variations, was presented in March 2023 by Revolutions per Minute Festival in collaboration with Non-Event at The Boston City Hall.

Nishikawa’s films have been screened at major international festivals and institutions, including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival. In 2010, MoMA PS1 presented a selection of his work, and his installation Building 945 received a prestigious grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain in 2008. At the time of his passing, he was a deeply respected professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.

sound of a million insects,
light of a thousand stars
Tomonari Nishikawa | 2014 | 2 minutes
| COLOR | STEREO
Format(s): 35mm film to Digital File

I buried a 100-foot 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil.
This project is made possible with funds from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.

Market Street
Tomonari Nishikawa | 2005 | 5 minutes
| B&W | SILENT
Format(s): 16mm film to Digital File

As I am interested in the projection apparatus and human visual perception, I carefully juxtaposed images on Market Street by single-framing, in order to create certain happenings on the screen. By studying my super 8 films, Sketch Film #1 and Sketch Film #2, I made decisions for sequences of this film before working on this project. No re-photographing technique is involved. The result may look abstract, yet representative enough to show the characteristics of the street.
- Tomo

This film was commissioned by the San Francisco Foundation and the Exploratorium, for the event: A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005: An Outdoor Celebration.

45 7 Broadway

Tomonari Nishikawa | 2013 | 5 minutes
| COLOR | SOUND
Format(s): 16mm film to Digital File

This is about Times Square, the noises and movements at this most well-known intersection. The film was shot on black and white films through color filters, red, green, and blue, then shots were optically printed onto color films through these filters. The layered images of shots by handheld camera would agitate the scenes, and the advertisements on the digital billboards try to pull ahead of others.

Amusement Ride

Tomonari Nishikawa | 2019 | 6 minutes
| COLOR | SOUND
Format(s): 16mm film to Digital File

Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.

Screenings and Awards:
Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, & CODEC FILM FEST

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke

Tomonari Nishikawa | 2023 | 6 minutes
| COLOR | SOUND
Format(s): 16mm film to Digital File

The visual shows the alternation of the shots of fireworks filmed at a summer festival in Japan, producing a distinctive yet organic rhythm, as well as a gap in time between the visual and sound, both of which are produced by the photographic images on the 16mm filmstrip.