Tony Conrad, violinist and experimental filmmaker, stood prepared to electrocute a six foot strip of film Sunday evening. "Experimental filmmaking isn't like real experiments because you don't have to be careful," he told the crowd at Harvard Film Archive. "If you talk to an experimental filmmaker, ask if they know what they're doing."

It was a sentiment that seemed charming until a Tesla coil launched a quarter million volt arc of purple light across the darkened stage.

This weekend, HFA audiences saw an overview of Conrad's work, from his well-known 1966 structuralist masterpiece The Flicker (quite literally nothing more than a flickering screen) to his newer film and video work, including Film Electrocution, the performance piece with the Tesla coil. Along the way, Conrad gave a live musical performance, and HFA screened DreamMinimalist, Marie Losier's documentary about his career.

Conrad took a degree in math at Harvard in 1962, but quickly found himself at the center of the New York artistic avant-garde. Along with musicians like LaMonte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and Terry Riley, he established a body of uncompromising minimalist music. (Unlike Young, the mystic, Conrad takes a materialist, mathematical approach to his music. He once recorded an album called Slapping Pythagoras.) His friendship with John Cale was probably the reason that Cale's band, the Velvet Underground, droned the way it did.

In the medium of film, Conrad took the preoccupation of structural filmmakers -- form over content -- to its logical extreme.

The Flicker begins with a printed warning ordering epileptics to leave and advising others about the possibility of "mild symptoms of shock treatment." The film is an enthralling, varied, flickering rhythm of completely exposed and completely dark film. The film stock was exposed all the way to the edge, where the optical soundtrack usually goes, so the light you see on the screen also produces the sound you hear. It's a sound like an extremely loud film projector that also kills flying insects.

Imperfections in the film stock -- dark morsels scattered throughout the white field -- emerge and burst in miniature dramas. After a while, The Flicker inspires a series of illusions. Bostonist saw palm trees, for instance, and reeled at the sudden appearance of the image of a friend's face.

Descriptions of Conrad's work do not always convey his sense of humor. He arrived Saturday dressed in his trademark banded fedora, wearing a pair of lime green pants and a tie-dyed t-shirt featuring a scene of the solar system. He may have looked like a math professor, but his outfit was a visual joke, a response to advance press about how "psychedelic" his films were supposed to be.

Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals (1975), on the other hand, isn't very funny. A series of lines of varying thickness appear and disappear across the frame, displacing each other with a surprising violence. Conrad said that he had regarded the film as "a work of still art that happened to be two thirds of an inch thick and half a mile long." He didn't want to screen it, when it was finished, and, when it finally premiered, he pointedly left the theater.

"It was a purist gesture. It completely cured me of purist gestures for life," he told Sunday's crowd.

Bostonist, who had seen Conrad's musical performance the night before, was not convinced. It was a pure drone piece for violin, electric cello, and tape manipulations (the latter two handled by MV Carbon), the sort of thing where the musicians play the same handful of notes for an hour. The highlight came when two strings broke on Conrad's violin. He improvised, scraping his horsehair bow across the dangling strings like a man pulling sandpaper across an exposed nerve.

Sunday evening ended with the U.S. premiere of Film Electrocution, a performance piece that explored one of Conrad's aesthetic interests: alternative film processing. (His work includes films made by hammering, currying, and pickling.) Conrad wore an apron across his t-shirt and had his materials laid out underneath a darkroom safe light, the Tesla coil positioned on the other side. The plan was to electrocute strips of film with the lights out, develop them in a wastebasket and then project the final product.

As HFA director Haden Guest explained, "We have all watched films in a darkened room, but we have not, I imagine, sat in a theater as it became a darkroom."

Conrad set to work like the host of a cooking show, mixing conductive solutions made from glue and metallic dust, which he used to coat the strips of film. During the process he shared tips and tricks, like Julia Child explaining the science of soufflé. "Film itself will not conduct at all," he explained. "It's like plastic. It's annoying."

The Tesla coil had failed before the performance began, giving the event an air of improvisation and danger. And, while Conrad worked on the films, the coil failed again, causing him to attempt a repair in the near dark of the auditorium. ("We're all going to die," concluded one audience member.)

Ultimately, however, nobody died. Three strips of film emerged from the fixing bath exposed, and, after a few splices were added to ripped sprocket holes, ready to project. One strip looked like a slow motion flyover of the Moon. Another like a newsprint photograph viewed with a shaky magnifying lens. The most successful had the splattered, chaotic character of blotter paper.

The evening ended with two of the films screening simultaneously side by side, the two scenes unfolding in a protean relationship to each other, the soundtrack a soothing pattern of fuzz-silence-fuzz.

"We'll see it repeat after 36 hours," Conrad estimated.

Photos of Conrad by Sushiesque.