After this year Optronica should firmly be established as one of London's leading festivals of cutting edge audiovisual art. This year's instalment comprises five days of mixed media delights ranging from state of the art live audiovisual performances to lectures and workshops from some of the scene's leading lights. Curated by veterans of the AV community, Addictive TV and Cinefeel, Optronica gives you the chance to see / hear / experience specially commissioned AV works in outstanding venues like the BFI IMAX.

Below are some of our picks (several events are now sold out so get your tickets fast):

Video In Demand
Thu 15/03 (8:20pm) NFT Studio / Fri 16/03 (6:30pm) @ NFT3
With the advance of technology allowing more creative music promos to be made cheaply and distributed, bypassing traditional media outlets, the music video is entering a golden age of experimentation and artistic merit. Curated by Cinefeel, the Video In Demand session embraces the art of the music promo, presenting several new and rarely seen cutting edge music videos.

Peter Greenaway (lecture + Tulsa Lupper Suitcases screenings)
Fri 16/03 (6:20pm) NFT1 / Sun 18/03 (3:50 - 10:30pm) @ NFT3
A rare treat is this sumptuous Peter Greenaway feast -- for starters, on Friday (Have We Seen Cinema Yet?) Greenaway plays devil's advocate as he questions whether we have taken cinema anywhere even close to its limits, and asks "What's next?" for moving image. But the real banquet is in the screening of the very rarely seen (outside of festivals) The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Part of a whole multimedia project, the three films (The Moab Story, Vaux To The Sea and From Sark To Finish) chart the history of Tulse Luper -- a longtime peripheral character of Greenaway's -- deconstructing his life through the contents of his 92 suitcases. Screened over three nights, the truly hardcore can also devour the full whack on Sunday. (For other Optronica talks click here.)

Optronica Lab (Rechenzentrum...)
Fri 16/03 (8:30pm) @ NFT1
Headlining the Optronica Lab this year are German producers Rechenzentrum, whose electronic audio collages on label such as Shitkatapult and Kitty-Yo have seen them play everywhere from museums and art galleries to full on raves. For their Optronica show the Berlin duo unveil their latest audio visual project, a combination of pen and ink drawings, photography and film all manipulated through their custom made software and their trademark electronica.

Optronica: Club AV (Jochem Paap and Scott Pagano)
Sat 17/03 (6:20pm) @ NFT3
Jochem Paap (Speedy J) has been one of the leading electronic music producers since the early '9os with critically acclaimed releases on labels such as Warp, Novamute and Plus 8. For Optronica he has collaborated with American artist Scott Pagano to produce Umfeld, an intricately composed audio visual experience that overwhelms and encompasses the audience. Both artists will be on hand after the screening for a Q&A session.

Big In Japan (with Ryoichi Kurokawa)
Sat 17/03 (6:30pm) @ NFT1
Few places in the world are as ready to embrace the future as Japan and this is backed up by the depth of talent in the Japanese AV community. After last year's event sold out Optronica presents a second Big In Japan with a round up of some of the country's leading artists and a live performance from Ryoichi Kurokawa.

NB: Optronica runs from 14/03 till 18/03.

Commencing this month, the Godfather of film magazines, France's Cahiers du cinema, has decided to thrown its hat into the Anglophile cinema magazine ring with the launch of their new English-language e-magazine version. The periodical of choice for generations of serious polo-neck wearing French cinephiles, Cahiers du cinema was started in 1951 by a group of filmmakers and critics that included Gallic celluloid icons Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Instrumental in developing film criticism as an art form in itself, as well as the auteur theory and the Nouvelle Vague, for over a half century it has been the intellectual cineaste's bible. To celebrate the launch, Cahiers du cinema's editor-in-chief Jean-Michel Frodon will host a screening of Philippe Faucon's controversial film La Trahison (The Betrayal), set during the 1960 Algerian War of Independence, and will follow with a post-screening discussion together with writer and critic Jonathan Romney.

It is no great mystery that communication technology has changed the way we relate to the world from the 20th century onwards. But has it changed the way we think about art and culture? Now that we can watch podcasts of our favourite artist's latest performance on our daily commute, that our mobile phones have become our privileged way of recording images for posterity and that our idea of a public space is best expressed by YouTube, we have to wonder whether organisations have followed the mutation of technology savvy audiences or whether it's the audiences who have adapted to the uses organisations have made of available technologies. If these questions give you headaches, we recommend that you let the panel of The Changing Face Of Art And Audience lead the way to some potential answers. After all, Jane Boardman, Talk PR CEO; Edward Morgan, BBC Executive Producer of The Culture Show; John Weich, ArtReview Editorial Chief; and Derick Johnson, Director of Revelation Arts & Media know a thing or two about the British creative industry.

NB: this talk is organised by the ever thought-provoking Revelation Arts & Media in the context of their four-day cultural extravaganza British Creative Exchange. Other highlights include the talk Talent: An Exchange Or A Collaboration? at the Whitechapel Gallery on 17/03 and the intriguing exhibition Artistic License at La Viande gallery featuring the gems of cross-over talents such as Femi Adegboye and Antonio de Campos (pv on 16/03 from 6 - 10pm).

Modern life is tough. In yesteryear, you worked, procreated, raised that family, and it was enough. It may have been a hard life, even a just one, but no one said nothing 'bout having fun. Now pleasure, living for one's own satisfaction, is where it's at... ahh the pressure; have a family, while living that Wallpaper* lifestyle in a Sex And The City kinda way. It seems like everyone now has to have Hollywood sex with great orgasms. Is this how we want to live? Susie Orbach, someone you'd expect to be great fun at a dinner party and a media don (no less), is going to hold forth with fellow psychoanalyst and founding member of London's Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, Darian Leader, about the current state of our intimate lives. And if that sounds a bit too much to ask of two shrinks, then anthropologist Henrietta Moore is on hand with Slovenian theorist and sociologist Renata Salecl (she probably hangs with Flash fave Zizek) to flesh out the arguments for our current horizontal unease.

Contrary to what Oscar Wilde would have liked us to believe with The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, the secret to eternal life lies not in art, but in science. Some scientists -- the kind who work with the Wellcome Trust as opposed to the mad kind -- predict that by the middle of the 21st century, medical research will have found a way of defeating and reversing the ageing process in human cells, allowing us to live forever. But isn't the spice of life a consequence of the inevitability of death? Do we really wish to live forever and what would that entail in terms of the way we lead our lives? A Matter Of Life And Death, a unique evening of film and music, offers an uncannily playful opportunity to ponder these metaphysical considerations. Have a look at Abake and Martino Gamper's design-based installation, watch a short film presenting three different interpretations of a near death experience -- Falling, Freezing and Faking -- from artists Onkar Singh Kular and Noam Toran, eat chocolate, sip vodka and enjoy life... while you still can.

NB: this event is free but to guarantee entry, email events@wellcome.ac.uk.

Director Paolo Sorrentino burst into European cinema with the effortlessly stylish The Consequences Of Love and he's returned with a new film saturated with the kind of flourishes that showcase cinema as such a succulent medium. On paper the story looks twisted. An unctuous and obscenely ugly money lender ingratiates himself with his pretty young clients by way of his grasp on their purse strings. Fortunately this thinly disguised homage to the Beauty And The Beast myth is rendered memorable by the sheer weight of Sorrentino's filmmaking acumen piling shot after shot into a stack of redolent images. Even a gratuitous Tinto Brass segue into nudity doesn't feel too cheap and unnecessary, while the surreal country and western sub plot merely extends your imagination into further fields. On this evidence he's building a reputation as an auteur bringing luxuriant storytelling to the screen. It's close to a masterpiece and it will keep you distracted right to the very end.

NB: The Family Friend is released in London on 16/03.

With the recent passing of Baudrillard the question of social reality in our postmodern age is ever more topical. Simultaneously futuristic and ancient, the very idea of re-enactment in contemporary art has recently been very much in vogue. We've had Jeremy Deller's The Battle Of Orgreave, Ziggy's farewell concert at the ICA, The Milgram Reenactment by artist Rod Dickinson and most recently German post-industrialists Einsturzende Neubauten's legendary 1984 performance Concerto for Voice & Machinery. This latter post-punk Dadaist experience is examined tonight in a debate with commissioned artist Jo Mitchell; Michael Morris, Artangel co-director and original ICA commissioner in 1984; and Chris Bohn, editor of The Wire music journal. Reconstruction, deconstruction, and the mythology of retracing the past will be open to discussion.

With a name like Raccoo-oo-oon, it's fair to expect something quite distinctive, and this experimental outfit from Iowa certainly provide. Creating huge walls of weird psychedelic noise with guitars and electronics, they resemble an intensely fragmented and more deeply improvised version of Animal Collective. Their live show has acquired a reputation due to its intensity and structural eclecticism, freely moving from improvised drone to funky free jazz via sprinklings of ethereal melody. Glasgow improv crew Tight Meat Duo and London based quirky-space percussive keyboard duo Clunes should warm things up nicely before the main event. Upset The Rhythm have a legacy of showcasing bands from the US underground prior to their rise to cult-popularity (see Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone), and it seems likely that Raccoo-oo-oon will follow a similar trajectory.

Ten years ago, Gallic types Daft Punk ripped a filtered disco sized hole in club music. Fast forward to 2007 and a new wave of French artists, lead by Ed Banger Records, are poised to have a similarly influential role in dance music. The Ed Banger release schedule is shaping up to crown them as the most important label this year. Justice are on the cusp of putting out one of the most anticipated tracks in "D.A.N.C.E." -- the blog heat on this track is phenomenal and the filthy mouthed equivalent of marmite that is Uffie is dropping her debut LP this year too. They are flanked by some of the most innovative producers right now in Feadz, Mr Oizo, DJ Medhi and SebastiAn. It seems like Ed Banger have taken roost in London of late, having thrown an intimate party in Soho last month, and will be celebrating their fourth Birthday in April in a London carpark. Most excitingly, hot promoters People Are Germs have roped in the entire Ed Banger family to toast the release of 1986, the new EP from French Teen Wolf enthusiast Kavinsky. And for once, such a must go to event isn't pre-empted by the words "secret, warehouse, east and London". Instead, the fun is being held at central London club Sin. An essential Friday night event.

PocketVisions will launch the first London International Documentary Festival (LIDF). In association with the London Review Of Books, and its partner the British Museum, PocketVisions will begin a unique collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. The screenings will include work from Serbia, Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Spain and the UK, all produced within the last 18 months. Three screens running all day will show 18 films plus shorts. The festival curators Patrick Hazard and Jessie Teggin have organised post-film conversations in which the filmmakers will be joined by academics, journalists, artists and other cultural commentators. Look out for The Seeds (Nasiona) (12pm), the work of Wojciech Kasperski, a fourth year student of the National Film School in Lodz (Poland), and Half-Life: A Journey To Chernobyl (1:45pm) which tells the story of the people who dealt with the world's worst nuclear disaster at ground level. Both are great examples of lyrical filmmaking informed by anthropological rigor.

This week is your last chance to see Lewis Amar's You Can Shout All You Like. Amar is a young London-based artist whose work straddles the disciplines of performance, video and sound. His compelling video installation was a hit at last year's Goldsmith's MAFA show, and Rachmaninoff's was clever to snap him up. Their intimate East End gallery provides the perfect setting for Amar's intense new work. You Can Shout All You Like is an 11-minute piece that features the artist and friends in various enigmatic scenarios -- eating fish with their hands at an atmospheric dinner party, wandering aimlessly half naked in a forest, making music and screaming with angst. It's inspired by literary works as diverse and cheerful as Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu and Moby-Dick and includes a soundtrack, which is deafening at moments, composed by Amar in collaboration with musician Dom Bouffard. The abstract dialogue, which is tantalising in its almost discernable pitch, was developed in collaboration with Dan Glendinning. Just what are these guys talking about? And for that matter, what are they doing? We're not sure but we are sure it's damn clever.

NB: runs till 17/08.

First performed in 1611, The Tempest was Shakespeare's most fantastical play; set on a desert island, the narrative is spiked with magic and sorcery. It also distils many of the Bard's favourite themes of political corruption, power, lust, vanity, masculinity and artifice. The Tempest pushes the limits of dramatic representation and demands some creative solutions; Thomas Ades' recent operatic version, back by popular demand for a second run at the ROH, does not disappoint. The set is dominated by a gigantic, modernist white slab, which opens and shuts like a giant seashell to reveal or conceal the action. Hallucinatory images are projected behind it, while the lighting, all fluorescents and neon, looks suitably otherworldly. Aerial, the impudent spirit constantly bargaining for freedom from our anti-hero Prospero, steals the show. Cyndia Sieden has developed an eerie, barely human-sounding voice for the role, which sent ripples of goose-bumps around the audience. In a literal interpretation of her name, Ades has her -- and her troupe of spirit-world clones -- performing aerial gymnastics between acts. Meanwhile, the romance between Prospero's daughter Miranda and Prince Ferdinand, on whose father Prospero seeks revenge, is raw and passionate. Ades has little time for sentimentality, revelling instead in the baseness of human emotions and the possibility of redemption through love and forgiveness. Shakespeare would have approved.

NB: The Tempest is performed on 15/03, 17/03, 20/03, 23/03 and 26/03. For Thomas Ades fans the Barbican is currently celebrating his work with Traces Overhead: The Musical World Of Thomas Ades (runs till 22/04).

Thrill seekers -- pah, a dime a dozen. But panic and paranoia junkies? Less common. That special elite will no doubt find it hard to resist the gravitational pull of Christoph Buchel's provocative and unsettling installation. The gargantuan warehouse space has been transformed into a sweatshop seemingly housing and exploiting desperate asylum seekers. The operation room (filled with hundred of fridges, piles of computer innards, and mountains of junk-yard tat ripe for "revitalisation") lurks behind a scuzzy city hotel (the exhibition entrance) and a grimy cut-price shop selling row upon row of fixed-up fridges and VCRs. In the hotel, endless put-up beds are squashed into every conceivable spare inch of space -- corridors, bathrooms, the lorry out the back. There's a post-raid feel -- everywhere are half-eaten plates of food, work stations hastily abandoned, and ashtrays filled with cigarette stubs. But it's the secret room accessed by crawling through a hole in a wardrobe, the concrete bunker located beneath the freight lorry, and the subterranean tunnels with a disused deep freeze entrance portal that generate the most acute claustrophobia and bewildering paranoia. It's an unnerving meditation on the hidden hellholes lurking behind non-descript urban facades. Unmissable.

NB: we originally published this review last year on 25/10/06 but we decided to re-run it as this week is your last chance to see London's best show of 2006 -- and (so far) this year. Ends Sunday.

Mekon headed director Danny Boyle will forever be synonymous with the zeitgeist defining Trainspotting, a single legacy that far outweighs his canon, which veered from the genuinely thrilling Shallow Grave to the snoozy A Life Less Ordinary. His early work exemplified his flair for innovation; 28 Days Later was one of the first major films to experiment with the visual medium of DV (digital video), and now his new work Sunshine is back on such furtive ground. Any film that features the triptych of Cillian Murphy, a script by The Beach author Alex Garland and a final act that sees the cast discovering "the source of all life in the universe" must be worth viewing. Listen to Boyle talk it through in an on stage interview at the NFT.

NB: if you cannot make this special preview screening then catch Danny Boyle at the ICA on 01/04 (5pm) when he gives another post-screening Q&A. Sunshine is released in London on 06/04. A film of note released this week is The Family Friend.

Welcome to the delightful world of the Sounds Underground project, one of the only independent ventures supporting, commissioning and programming performances of new work by young composers in London. Run predominantly by Rose Hankey from her back room in South Norwood (in-between stints teaching English), it's a venture which celebrates the true spirit of British eccentricity, whereby would-be inventors, scientists (and now cultural practitioners) work feverishly on projects such as the Hovercraft or the lawn mower (also Radar and the World Wide Web), emerging sporadically into the spotlight to change our perception of the things around us and simultaneously dispel any confusion of what it means to be British. Tonight's concert is no exception, packed full of internationally acclaimed soloists (most of whom have featured and in some cases won the BBC Young Musician Of The Year award) and featuring new work by Dylan Pugh. This will be a rare chance to revel in the idiosyncratic vernacular of modern British classical music.

James Salter is one of America's greatest novelists and short story writers. He is praised for his succinct and impressionistic prose and ability to write about that most complex of subjects: human desire. His luminous first novel The Hunters charts the ambitions of a jet pilot at war in the skies of Korea. However, his literary masterpiece A Sport And A Pastime recounts the coming of age of a young American drop-out in France. Whereas that novel touches on erotic obsession and fantasy, his next book Light Years pierces the veneer of a happy marriage of a New York architect to uncover the cracks that fracture the inner world of the psyche. Salter was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1989. Now, he makes a rare visit to the UK to coincide with the paperback publication of his latest collection of short stories Last Night, a re-issue of his captivating memoir Burning The Days and new Penguin Modern Classics editions of The Hunters and Light Years. In this talk, he is in conversation with William Fiennes, gifted author of The Snow Geese.

A couple of years ago, around the time that Everything Ecstatic was released and everyone went Four Tet crazy again, Kieran Hebden and veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid (with ensemble) shared a bill playing in a hot, packed KOKO; the night turned out to be one of KF's gigs of the year. Hebden's blend of complex electronics and Reid's chops -- which had already earned him playing credits with a veritable "who's who" of soul artists -- married perfectly and since then, the two have been collaborating live and on record. Their third release on Domino comes out imminently and the two are performing again to promote it. Expect a night of loping, airtight rhythms from the drummer and swathes of mellifluously bubbling noise from Hebden's laptop, brought together in such a manner as to please jazz fans and electronica heads alike.

The Shins have enjoyed a blissful career progression, seamlessly moving from cult indie band to curating ATP, crashing the US Billboard chart and selling out venues all over the world. Their cannon is a cherished example of strong, honest and meaningful songwriting, existing outside of the world of stylised genres and fickle trends. Third album Wincing The Night Away is undoubtedly one of the finest releases of the year so far, and they remain a life-affirming example of the potentialities of ultra-melodic indie-rock. In truth, due to the nature of their sound, they're not always the most compelling live band, but what they do offer is a very strong back catalogue. "New Slang", "Caring Is Creepy" (both featured in the Zach Braff film Garden State), "Saint Simon", "Australia" and "Phantom Limb" are ideal entry points to the band, but in truth they're a rare example of a band that doesn't release bad songs. Fans and newcomers are advised to catch them at this second date at the Forum (the first sold out very quickly) as, if the Shins continue their steady rise, Wembley Arena will be next!

Momentary Momentum is curated by the founder and Director of Parasol unit Ziba de Weck Ardalan, who, not for the first time, has invited another heavyweight to join her, Laurence Dreyfus, whose credits include the Lyon Biennale, the Fondation Cartier, Palais de Toyko and sketch here in London. The exhibition unites 20 animators, both those known in the art world and perceived as artists, and others whose work is more often shown in a cinema or TV context. Artists using animation today have informed and been informed by all the other tools in their artillery, from painting to programming, and their fields of reference are as diverse. The show proves that in the right hands animation is a sensitive, subtle and enormously demanding media; after William Kentridge, there could be no doubt that it could disturb as well as delight. Unfortunately the crowded and cobbled installation of the works has managed to defeat what is a stunning exhibition space at Parasol unit, but this is still a stellar show, significant in terms of artistic content and in the volume of material -- go with time on your hands.

NB: runs till 20/05.

A true renaissance man, Derek Jarman was one of Britain's leading avant-garde filmmakers whose rich and visually stylistic work continually raged against the establishment. Connecting the creative dots between Kenneth Anger and Jean Cocteau, Pasolini and Powell & Pressburger, whilst advocating for the rights and dignity of gays (he himself succumbed to AIDS complications in 1994), Jarman was a defiantly boundless creator, drifting from film to writing, scenery design to gardening. Acknowledging the logic of buses -- wait for one and three come along at once -- the BFI has generously released three Jarman films together -- The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993) -- all digitally restored and re-mastered for DVD and each with extensive and illuminating extra features.

Of the three, The Angelic Conversation is the most exploratory of Jarman's films, following on from his experiments with Super-8 film, and creating a soft focus evocation of Shakespeare's love poems. Lovingly soundtracked by occultist British duo Coil, the film expunges narrative structure for a dramatically luscious world -- romantic, pastoral and seductive, an eye-candy land populated by handsome young men.

Arguably his most popular film, Caravaggio, is a portrait of the 17th-century Italian artist Michelangelo da Caravaggio. With a seven-year production schedule, this biopic dramatised the conflicts between the artist's need for patronage, his religious beliefs and his sexuality, freely playing with film conventions -- contemporary sounds of typewriters and motorbikes in 1600 for example -- and starting Tilda Swinton in her very first role.

Shot in just two weeks, Wittgenstein uses a sparse visual idea, shooting the action in vibrant colours against a jet-black background. Written by radical theorist Terry Eagleton, this exploration of the philosopher's relationships with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes shows us a man utterly uncomfortable with any form of sexual expression. With a poetic intensity this is a bold, intelligent and playful film. These releases champion the work of an artist who has remained a visionary film maverick. Invest and indulge.

To buy The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio and Wittgenstein online click here.

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

If you want to tell us about an upcoming event please do so by sending an email to: events@kultureflash.net. We receive many emails and thus please realise that sadly we cannot reply to all of them. Every single email receives attention and we will contact you if we need anything further. Please note that KultureFlash is not a listings ezine and we do not receive any payment from venues, artists, managers or promoters.

Please send all press releases, invites, books and CDs to:

KultureFlash Ltd.
52 Cranmer Court
Whitehead's Grove
London SW3 3HW