From Martha Colburn’s “Secrets of Mexuality”

Call it a blessing and a curse that the fourth annual San Francisco International Animation Festival coincided with Martha Colburn’s SFMOMA residency last week: a blessing for the two programs’ cumulative embarrassment of experimental-media riches, and a curse for the Sophie’s Choice imposed by their briefly overlapping schedules. Live-art aficionado and Animation Festival programmer Sean Uyehara, for one, counted himself “very bummed” that duty precluded him from attending all of Colburn’s events.

What he missed defies description: Not just Colburn’s diligently hand-crafted stop-motion collage animations themselves — each somehow jauntier, more aggressive, more sexually charged and more political than the last — but also the absorbing spectacle of Colburn as a real-time performer, flitting between Super-8 and 16-millimeter projectors, silhouetting herself against their spinning reels, molding her images with shadows and color filters, calling and responding to the musicians she’d gathered on stage in front of the screen.

“It’s an expanded idea of public events,” said SFMOMA’s associate curator of public programs, Frank Smigiel. “This is such a film town. So the question is: How do we make a signature? What we can specialize in is film as event. The museum can be a platform for creative communities to mix and mingle. A site of production, not just a site of contemplation.”

“Her films have helped me open up my artistic life,” said frequent Colburn collaborator Thollem McDonas, whose excellent piano accompaniment so deeply enriched her work during two of the museum shows. “I’m working off what you do,” Colburn answered. “It’s like I found my living Satie, or Glenn Gould. That’s hard to find.”

Colburn now lives in Long Island City, New York, but her Bay Area connection remains strong from a San Francisco Art Institute teaching stint several years ago, ongoing exhibition support from Other Cinema impresario Craig Baldwin and the Pacific Film Archive, productive collaboration with local musicians like McDonas and Deerhoof guitarist John Dietrich, and most recently the week-long museum residency. Smigiel first spied Colburn while working at the Whitney in New York. “Once I knew I was going to come out to San Francisco, she was on my short list,” he said.

“There’s two things that happen in San Francisco,” Uyehara said. “On the one hand, people come to these events with less preconceived notions, but on the other hand, they can be much more critical. Of course San Francisco audiences are much more astute. They recognize what they don’t like right away.”

Which may or may not account for the man and woman who exchanged glances just after that “I diddle with my gag reflex” moment during the Colburn show that Uyehara missed, then silently rose and exited the screening room, never to return. By and large, though, the residency went well. After each program, people lingered. On Saturday evening, after Colburn’s “Puppets of the Apocalypse” event, they lingered so long — chatting up the filmmaker and a few of her foot-tall paper stars — that a museum staffer eventually had to kick everybody out.

Uyehara had a similar vision in mind for his festival’s Wednesday kickoff at the Mezzanine nightclub, which paired mischievously dapper live animation by local avant-garde legend Lawrence Jordan with the reverby arpeggios and ethereal vocal harmonies of Pale Hoarse, then topped it off with “2 Blessed 2 Be Stressed,” a face-melting glitchcore madness-radness mashup confab between Paper Rad founder Jacob Ciocci and musician David Wightman.

And again for Saturday afternoon’s “duel” between the works of formerly local experimentalist Amy Hicks, whose “Suspended” series involves rhythmic abstractions from mirrored images collected while commuting across Bay Area bridges; and those of currently local experimentalist Nate Boyce, who specializes in vivid digital abstractions with no discernible narratives, usually, but with palpably musical structures. Boyce uses persistence of vision — the phenomenon by which our brains allow us to perceive series of still pictures as individual moving images — to fuse colors in the mind’s eye just as related musical tones fuse in the mind’s ear as harmony. He says he likes to explore thresholds — between synthetic and organic, pain and pleasure, depth and flatness, motion and stasis. And it shows.

So, all told, it was a good week. Both events featured works whose introducers were obligated to warn their audiences of potentially sickness-inducing stroboscopic effects. And both involved moving-image art so amazingly out there and vitally immediate that words almost completely fail to recapture it. Even Boyce’s own explanations of his work, though descriptively exact, seemed inescapably jargony: “Image timbre is a parameter that I’m pretty focused on orchestrating,” he said. “The brain-and-sword one, that’s just more of a subconscious rupture.”

OK, maybe, in the interest of mental health, missing out on some of MOMA’s event wasn’t such a bummer after all. When asked why he’d paired Boyce’s work with Hicks’, Uyehara said, “They’re both smart, aesthetically astute filmmakers that should be known.” Then he allowed that variation, and reprieve, are important, adding, “One hour of Nate’s work alone would kill you.”

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