Towards A New Architecture

DeKam Vs Nalepa could not have happened on a more perfect night, it was almost 70 degrees in downtown Houston. The skyline was beautiful and a mixed crowd of a few hundred came out for the performance. Some sat on blankets with picnic suppers & drinks, while others stood front and center watching Johnny and Steve work their laptops. Johnny utilized the architecture of the site as projection surfaces and it was amazing the see video that at one moment was bouncing off the cement pilings of the Sabine Street bridge and at the next moment reflected back up from the water in the bayou. This was a true site-dependent installation and very cool! I am excited to see upcoming public projects from the Buffalo Bayou Partnership.
-Here is the article in the Houston Chronicle about DeKam Vs. Nalepa
-Thanks John for posting this clip. The last song is my favorite.


DeKam vs Nalepa from John Carrithers on Vimeo.

Houston: Join us this Thursday for a one-time-only, site-specific spectacle on the Buffalo Bayou. This environmental light and sound installation is the creation of video artist Johnny DeKam and composer / laptop musician Steve Nalepa. The show utilizes a special multi-moving mirror projection system, adding a new dimension to the visuals. Stroll beneath the bridges of the Sabine Promenade to experience DeKam's abstract moving geometries and architectural juxtapositions against Nalepa's electro-ambient "Left Coast Liquid" music. Here is a peek at the site

Produced by the good folks at The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts

Nato Thompson, Matt McCormick & Rich Pell- locating themselves

Last night You Are Here was kicked off with Matt McCormick's performance Future So Bright: Live. Todays events begin at 1:00 with Nato Thompson's talk about Experimental Geography, followed by a talk by Rich Pell from the Institute for Applied Autonomy. There will be a coffee break around 3:00 that will be followed by Matt Coolidge from CLUI with his talk Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region. See you at The Aurora!

Heading back to Texas for two projects that we've been working on

NOV 30 & DEC 1
Aurora Picture Show


DEC 6
Steve Nalepa
Johnny DeKam
Mitchell Center for the Arts

Last April at the C6 Symposium Creative Time Director Anne Pasternack mentioned an upcoming project with artist Paul Chan that took my breath away. Together they were working towards presenting Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward & Gentilly neighborhoods of New Orleans.
I was thrilled to read that Waiting for Godot debuted on November 2 in the Lower Ninth Ward and is being performed tonight in the Gentilly neighborhood. "More than a play, the work is a socially engaged performance at the heart of a national crisis" said curator Nato Thompson. For more about this inspiring multi-phased project go to the Creative Time website.

This statement is taken from Paul Chan's statement about the project:
I have seen landscapes scarred by disasters of all sorts. In Baghdad, I saw kids playing soccer barefoot on a wide boulevard and around the concrete rubble that came from US troops shelling the buildings near the Tigris River. I thought I saw the same kids playing in the ghost town known as downtown Detroit on a side street during an enormous labor demonstration in 1999—with shoes but no shirts. Life wants to live, even if it’s on broken concrete.

New Orleans was different. The streets were still, as if time had been swept away along with the houses. Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science fiction movie. Waiting for a ride to pick me up after visiting with some Common Ground volunteers who were gutting houses in the Lower Ninth, I realized it didn’t look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times. It was unmistakable. The empty road. The bare tree leaning precariously to one side with just enough leaves to make it respectable. The silence. What’s more, there was a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope. It was uncanny. Standing there at the intersection of North Prieur and Reynes, I suddenly found myself in the middle of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Untitled 17 (hotel)
This is one of my all-time favorite photographs & I have a print of it hanging on my wall at home (when I am there). The photographer is Lucas Blalock, who recently relocated from the wilds of North Carolina to concrete & steel of New York City.

Mark Dion's segment in the Ecology episode of Art21 Season 4 will air Nov 11, check your local PBS station for the time.
Other new episodes organized around the themes Romance, Protest and Paradox will air on Oct 28, Nov 4 & 18

To help ease homesickness and domestic urges, I have the blog 3191 set as my homepage. Each day Stephanie and Mav post a new set of images, although they live 3191 miles apart.

Arcade Fire's live video show looks great! I especially love those little video whales stationed around the stage. Does anyone know their video designer?


Power Out / Lies from casiotone on Vimeo.

After a day of the Affair at the Jupiter art fair, which included a little lunchtime conversation with blogger and Portland arts writer Chas Bowie, we headed over to Le Pigeon for a farewell meal. There was a photographer from the NYTimes there taking photos for their upcoming food section article on Portland restaurants. (UPDATE: Here is the article from the NY Times on-line)

For the next 10 days we will be posting from Portland, Oregon where we will attend the Time Based Arts Festival hosted by the Portland Contemporary for Contemporary Art and catch some of the shows that are part of this weekend's Musicfest NW

As we approach New York City and the end of this US tour leg, I am thinking alot about music videos. Maybe it is because I am a first generation MTV kid, reared by Martha Quinn on the "I want my MTV" slogan? Last year when we toured with Thomas Dolby, it was amazing to see the crowd react to his Blinded me with Science video-still fresh after so many years. Dolby is a first generation MTV rock star. But times have changed and MTV's recent shift to "reality shows" holds little interest for me.
Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry are today's masters of music videos. Also Warp Films, a digital film studio in the UK that is connected to Warp Records and Cunningham is working on some interesting projects. Closer to home, Portland-based filmmaker Matt McCormick has recently made good videos for some West Coast bands.
Perhaps the most interesting development in the genre is how YouTube allows us to mine this evolution in AudioVisual history. The first video to be played on MTV was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Here are a few others:
talking heads - Once in a Lifetime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYbUCvz1LYE
talking heads - Burning Down the House
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oVuLJS_Eok&mode=related&search=
aphex twin - come to daddy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0

This crowdsourced exhibition is coming to its grand finale on August 24 at the Houston Center for Photography. If you cannot attend the opening/ closing party, you can look at the photos throughout the month on the flickr site

Here are two articles that have recently appeared on-line:
from Live Design: DIY Video for Thomas Dolby
from Creating Digital Motion: Thomas Dolby Interviewed on CD Music; Johnny DeKam, Visualist

The second season on Big Love has finally started. For those of you who do not have HBO, you might want to come over and watch it! David Byrne is now the music producer of the show and thus far Season 2 has been as wonderful & odd as True Stories.

Last night Skip from A/V Geeks presented Daddy's Day at the Aurora Picture Show. The 16mm film program on fatherhood was culled from his archive of 19,000 education and industrial films. While the crowd loved it; heckling the actors and raucously laughing, my favorite part of the evening was bring home my own copy of To Skate.... an A/V Geeks compilation DVD that makes me long to be a teenager living in California during the late 1970's.

I love the narrator's burst of inspired poetry at the end of Magic Rolling Board, a celebratory film about skateboarding: "Magic Rolling Board, Magic Flying Wheels, Dance of Perpetual Motion"

Busy packing - here are two photos from Leila Grothe found on flickr

M.Ward is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. On Tuesday night he is playing in Houston, but the tickets are way too expensive because he is opening for Nora Jones & The Handsome Band. Oh well- I will have to live off the high of seeing him in Austin last fall.

I was first tipped off to M.Ward's music in 2002, when a friend sent me a copy of The End of Amnesia. He told me that he had come upon M.Ward playing on the platform of the Bedford Ave stop of the L train. If this story is true, then it is great to see that he has fully emerged and hit the big time.

Tonight Calvin Johnson performed at the Aurora Picture Show.
A reviewer for the Boston Underground did a great job describing what makes his show so special- "Basically, Calvin Johnson shows are for anyone who likes the things that make life worth living, whether it’s comedy, bass singing, pop, punk, dancing, love, sincerity, or hot guys over 40"

BLONDE REDHEAD: There was a period when the band Blonde Redhead was the soundtrack for my life. Thankfully that phase has passed, but from time to time I enjoy revisiting Blonde Redhead's music. Recently Fette's Flog- Aesthetic Los Angeles directed me to some "unoffical" Redhead videos made by Mike Mills.
Here is the LINK to the video for Top Ranking, which stars the one and only Miranda July, doing one pose a second!

Recently artist Hasan Elahi came by for brunch. We sat around talking about life in Houston, mutual friends, art projects and silly YouTube videos. It was all very normal until he pulled out his camera to photograph our meal "for the FBI."

Hasan’s project Trackingtransience uses modern technologies to document every aspect of his life. The project is a reaction to the FBI accusation that he was a possible terrorist in 2002. He subsequently spent 6 months under FBI surveillance, including 9 polygraph tests. Now we are able to track Hasan’s movements via his ATM transactions and flight patterns which appear on this website. His hacked cell phone registers his location and with the help of GPS shows us an aerial map with his location pin-pointed. His meals and restroom breaks are documented with photographs. All this self-induced voyeurism helps us to imagine what life without privacy looks like. In his recent interview on the radio program Studio360 Hasan says: “if we do not take control of our own information, and define ourselves, other people will define ourselves for us.”

Glasstire has posted the article we wrote about the Aurora Picture Show Media Archeology Festival. Check out the article here

My friend Robert Blackson is doing some really interesting curating over at the Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland, where he recently opened the exhibition Harry Smith: Hobbies and films in collaboration with alt.gallery’s Harry Smith Anthology Remixed. Harry Smith was first brought to Rob’s attention by the writer David Levi Strauss.
 
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.

“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle

The Art Car Parade
Houston is known for leading the way on two visionary projects from the 1950s: the Interstate System and the Space Program. But anyone who thinks the contemporary residents of this car-city lack creativity, should come on down to the annual Art Car Parade. It is a total freak show for the whole family.

Last month there was a day of protest against the war in Iraq, but the protesters did not gather as pedestrians in the town square holding placards. In Houston they congregate on the Highway 59 overpasses during Rush Hour and drop their banners down for the commuters to read while they sit in traffic. Ingenuity abounds!

Art Car Slideshow

The “Contentment House” is for Sale

Desert Hot Springs Motel, located on the outskirts of Palm Springs, is composed of four intimate interlocking units, each with its own patio and cacti garden. The structure is gunite (sprayed concrete), steel, glass and redwood.

In 1927, Lucien Hubbard, a Hollywood writer and producer purchased property on the outskirts of Palm Springs in what would become Desert Hot Springs and began the development of a private Hollywood guest ranch, the B Bar H Ranch. The early Hollywood crowd would come out and spend time horseback riding, playing tennis, swimming and retreating from the movie industry out in the desert. Mary Pickford, Bing Crosby, the Marx Brothers, Tyrone Power, Lionel Barrymore, Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper were some of the guests who would frequent his ranch. Before World War II, Hubbard sold his ranch and went into the war as a war correspondent for “Reader’s Digest”. He appears as himself in “The Story of GI Joe” (1945). After the war, Hubbard commissioned John Lautner to build the Desert Hot Springs Motel, which was originally referred to as “Contentment House”. The original plans were quite extensive, with numerous spa buildings and retail shopping. Only the four rooms of the motel were built along with the swimming pools. The swimming pools, which were located across the street from the motel, were torn down in the early 1970s by developers. After many years of being closed to the public, Steve Lowe purchased the legendary Desert Hot Springs Motel in 2000 and, after renovating it, reopened the motel. He passed away in January.
Real estate listing

MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY FESTIVAL: BELOW-FI


Aurora Picture Show- April 19- 21
written by Johnny DeKam & Bree Edwards originally for Glasstire webzine

A relatively new April tradition in Houston is the annual Media Archeology Festival presented by the Aurora Picture Show. Now in its fourth year, this festival of live Electronic and Performance Art is emerging from the underground, and is now easily comparable to the mini-festivals and one-night events in cities such as New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. This year’s Media Archeology was guest-curated by New York’s charismatic Nick Hallett and featured three full nights of performances in several of the city’s hippest little venues. This year’s theme, “Below Fi,” featured “hackers, benders and overall fans of the analog” — artists definitively concerned with utilizing non-digital techniques in their work.

The festival kicked off with an “expanded cinema” program featuring performances by Ray Sweeten and Bruce McClure at the Aurora’s own converted church-micro-cinema in the Houston Heights. Sweeten’s set was performed with deft precision using an oscilloscope to visualize his electronic music compositions with generative Lissajous figures. Bruce McClure’s 6’s Two 8’s: Dopes to Infinity was a challenging structuralist performance employing heavily modified 16mm film projectors that sent much of the audience scrambling for their earplugs. The Q&A session following the performance provoked many questions about the artists’ hacked machines, fostering a dialogue ranging from the esoteric to the utterly geeky.

Night two took place in the courtyard sanctuary behind Domy Books, which shares backyard space with the hipster-haunt Café Brasil. As the audience quietly sipped raspberry margaritas, Dynasty Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) stunned us with her trashy get-up and amazing body language. Summoning feminist performance art tradition, Cameron sang, twitched, and gesticulated in conversation with her recorded voice and a homespun Electro-soundtrack.

The second set, by Nautical Almanac, represented the Circuit Bender movement. The artists brought an impressive array of “bent” instruments, off the shelf technology that’s been thoroughly hacked to produce new, unintended sounds. This performance was particularly anti-musical, involving percussive and explosive noise blips and bleeps. It appeared to be a largely unstructured improvisation intended to fabricate a visceral connection between the sound and the performer’s bodies. We noted an affinity with the early music of John Cage, but flavored with the baggage of new age politic... which we found to be distasteful in combination with the musical assault.

This evening also introduced us to the visuals of Mighty Robot, who supported both acts using an elaborate optical contraption to create moving images. Their setup can only be described as a mad scientist’s VJ lab, including a light-table, water, transparencies, motors, camera, LED lights, slide projector, and various other objects employed to create ‘interferences’ in the projection. Most notably, there was not a laptop anywhere to be seen. This very tactile approach to live visuals was most gratifying, in a Luddite sense.

We returned for the final night of the festival, which was held at The Orange Show, the spectacular folk-art monument in Houston’s East End. Just about any show is great at The Orange Show, because the place is just so uniquely weird and fabulous. Tonight was no exception; it was the perfect setting to end the festival with a bang. By this point a sense of camaraderie had emerged among the festival-goers, and we found ourselves greeting strangers like old friends.

Tonight’s show began with Tristan Perich, who exudes the sex appeal of a rock star with a video game / art damage slant. Wearing sunglasses and a vest created entirely of zippers, Tristan plugged in his limited ‘1bit music’ CD, which is actually a jewel case filled with various circuits that play 40 minutes of ‘live’ music. The sound is akin to a fuzz-boxed Atari, and as the coarse, electro-synth melodies began to pulse, Perich proceeded to play his drum kit furiously, creating a live drum-and-bass track. He plays in a style that emulates what typically only computers can accomplish, which was interesting in that there was always a sense of being ‘off’ – which in the end was actually quite charming.

The grand finale of the festival was a “Swamp-Tech” set by Quintron and Miss Pussycat (shown in the video above.) PopMatters has called them: “The baddest one-man band in America, sure to move your ass and make you laugh,” and they undoubtedly lived up to this claim. Quintron sits at a large organ+Moog trap, complete with Lesley cabinets and car headlights that he lights up on command. Casio-tone beats and a strange light-triggered circuit-bent synthesizer accompany Quintron’s Pentecostal-punk fervor on the organs. Miss Pussycat, dressed in baby blue with a pom-pom on her head, playing maracas while wailing the vocals. A spirited Mighty Robot broke out his film projector, fully keeping pace.

“Everybody stand up!” Quintron yelled, and the audience collectively obeyed. Quintron later beckoned the audience to “join them in the pool”, and gleefully the crowd climbed “into the stage” (see Flckr photos) for some serious bopping. The Orange Show shook with new life tonight that would make Jefferson Davis McKissack proud.

When first reading Hallett’s essay for this years festival, we mis-read the title “Return of the Native” to be “Return of the Naïve”. Not in a negative sense, but rather in the sense of the hobbyist who toils away for hours in the basement. In a time exemplified by “user-generated content” such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, there is a naïve-tech revolution replacing the polished, specialized productions of the Mass Media (music, television and film). Hallett’s title suggests there is something inherently primitive about what we’ve seen here… or perhaps this is evolution. In any case, you should keep your eyes on the Aurora Picture Show: with this year’s Media Archeology Festival, they have cemented their place as headquarters of Houston’s growing new media scene.

See you next year!

THE STATION MUSEUM IN HOUSTON, TX


Written originally for Fluent Collaborative's ...Might be Good webzine

Frontera 450+ is the current exhibition at The Station Museum in Houston, a venue that has developed a reputation for being an edgy space that dares to wrestle with the political. Curator Rosalinda Gonzalez and Station Director James Harithas selected 14 artists as the result of their shared engagement with the sexual violence and brutal murders of young women working in Juárez, Mexico. Frontera 450+ does more than just reflect upon these injustices by effectively intervening and disrupting our apathy.

Juárez is located just across the border from El Paso and is infamous for factories, or maquilas, with abusive labor and environmental practices. Since 1993 over 450 young women have been reported missing or discovered dead in Juárez, and the exhibition takes it name from this heinous statistic.

Two artworks in the show distinctly resonated with me. Maya Goded’s photojournalistic portraits make visual the corruption and ineffectiveness of the authorities. Whereas Lise Bjørne’s poetic wall installation documents the social workshops she organized directly concerned with the violence against women in Juárez. Frontera 450+ is an intergenerational mix of mostly women artists, who are working with diverse mediums. The other artists in the exhibition are Coco Fusco, Carmen Montoya, Margarita Cabrera, Teresa Margolles, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Sara Maniero, Kaneem Smith, David Krueger, Angela Dillon, Teresa Serrano, Susana Plum and Elia Arce.

One photograph from Maya Goded’s series, Justice for our Daughters / Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, shows an older woman named Carmelita looking down at a worn snapshot of her son David. Her son was the only person accused in the limited murder investigation of his female cousin’s death. False conviction, often of a family member, is a tactic employed by the Juarez police who are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and internal corruption. In another of Goded’s photos, Daniel and Julia stand under a clothesline holding a framed portrait of their 15-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera who “went missing” while working as a domestic servant. There is an awkward familiarity to this image that provokes empathetic feelings.

Lise Bjørne’s Desconocida Unknown Ukjent consists of 1023 cotton labels, stick pins and string. The piece documents the extensive workshops she conducted where amateur embroiderers in over 15 countries gathered to act on behalf of the women of Juárez by stitching the names of the missing and murdered onto garment tag labels. The workshops draw upon the social activity of the quilting bee, layered with 1960s feminist consciousness raisings. The garment labels seamlessly connect to the economic realities of labor in Juárez, while the often crude stitching bears the distinct trace of each participant in the project. The threads are multi-colored, except those that record ‘the unknown’. The language of these labels changes based on the location of where the workshop was held; unknown becomes ukjent, desconocida, amas, and onbekend. The collection of labels, arranged in a morse-code musical score depicting the Mexican national anthem, is decidedly haunting.

This show demonstrates that these artists are willing to address a complex and difficult subject. The Station should be commended for orchestrating the exhibition which serves as a Call to Action on behalf of the women of Juárez. For even if art can only provisionally take-on social and political themes, this exhibition provides momentary address to a large and seemingly irresolvable conflict.