In San Francisco there is a time-honored tradition of pairing music with visuals, from Glenn McKay's psychedelic light shows for Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead to today's VJs and club visualists who enhance the environment of places like RX Gallery and 111 Minna. Over the past three years, a collective known as Sagan has resuscitated the art form by mixing glitch-driven electronic music with tongue-in-cheek video work in live performance, creating a hybrid cinema that moves well beyond its nightclub eye-candy roots.

The individual members of Sagan have both street cred and academic pedigree—one of them holds music degrees from Oberlin and Mills College. They have made a lasting impact on local and global electronic music scenes through touring and performing at festivals such as Sonar, Ars Electronica, and Music At The Anthology; releasing albums on Matador UK, Tigerbeat6, Deluxe, Illegal Art, and Staalplaat; and through collaborative projects with artists like Björk, Matmos, and People Like Us. Although they are blessed with a penchant for silliness, you should still expect to hear something way closer to Stockhausen than "Weird Al" Yankovic.

This webcast does not document a live performance. Presented here instead are excerpts from Sagan's first DVD release, Unseen Forces, a 40-minute film inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series. In a series of wryly subtitled vignettes that re-enact scientific breakthroughs, Unseen Forces fictionalizes and sexualizes our scientific history with a sense of juvenile slapstick—think equal parts of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle and Porky's. And like most art house films... Warning: contains strong subtitled language, and adult situations.

—RN