And Now for Some Nomi:

Shell Rig Malfunctions at Posh Party (the Yes Lab Strikes Again)

This was a send-off for Shell's arctic rigs at the Seattle Space Needle. The actual rigs were visible outside the window. Incredibly, there was a malfunction of the model rig that was supposed to pour drinks for guests.

Per HuffPo,

The device which sprayed Rainey's face was a model of Shell's drill rig, the Kulluk, which is set to soon depart Seattle for the Arctic. The Kulluk was built-in 1983 by Mitsui, the same company that, two decades later, built the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. . . .

* * * * *
[T]he Yes Lab [also] sent out a press release on Shell's behalf, threatening [legal action against the activists and] attacking . . . the activists' brand-new ArcticReady.com website [, which looks like a Shell site, and] which includes a social media ad generator and a dangerously addictive children's video game called Angry Bergs. The fake Shell release generated additional media coverage.

Earlier this year, Shell obtained a legal injunction stopping any Greenpeace activist from coming within 1km of any Shell vessel. To thank the company, Greenpeace teamed up with the Yes Lab to plan a promotional advertising campaign for Shell's Arctic drilling efforts, which Shell prefers to keep quiet. Besides the ill-fated ceremony and the website, the campaign includes a number of other elements that will shadow Shell's summer Arctic destruction campaign.

(More at HuffPo and YouTube. For more Yes Men or Yes Lab actions, click on those labels below.)

The Yes Lab Strikes Again, in Dallas

Re- the Trans-Pacific Partnership "trade" agreement:



From the Yes Lab's press release:

DALLAS PARTY ENDS BADLY FOR U.S. TRADE REPS AND FEDERAL AGENTS
Dozens of rogue "delegates" disrupt Trans-Pacific Partnership gala with "award," "mic check," mass toilet paper replacement

* * * * *
Two dozen rogue "delegates" disrupted the corporate-sponsored welcome gala for the high-stakes Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations yesterday with a fake award ceremony and "mic check." Other activists, meanwhile, replaced hundreds of rolls of toilet paper (TP) throughout the conference venue with more informative versions, and projected a message on the venue's facade.

The first action began when a smartly-dressed man approached the podium immediately after the gala's keynote speech by Ron Kirk, U.S. Trade Representative and former mayor of Dallas. The man (local puppeteer David Goodwin) introduced himself as "Git Haversall," president of the "Texas Corporate Power Partnership," and announced he was giving Kirk and other U.S. trade negotiators the "2012 Corporate Power Tool Award," which "Haversall's" partner held aloft.

The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and "Haversall" continued: "I'd like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right."

At that point, the host of the reception took the microphone back and announced that the evening's formal programming had concluded. But Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.

Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed "delegates" (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted "TPP! TPP! TPP!" for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

Fifteen minutes later, another dozen interlopers from Occupy Dallas interrupted the reception with a spirited "mic-check." Outside, activists projected a message on the hotel, and throughout the night, delegates discovered that hundreds of rolls of custom toilet paper had been installed in the conference venue.

The activists disrupted the gala to protest the hijacking of trade negotiations by an extreme pro-corporate agenda. "The public and the media are locked out of these meetings," said Kristi Lara from Occupy Dallas, one of the infiltrators. "We can't let U.S. trade officials get away with secretly limiting Internet freedoms, restricting financial regulation, extending medicine patents, and giving corporations other a whole host of other powers allowing them to quash the rights of people and democracies, for example by offshoring jobs in ever new ways. Trade officials know the public won't stand for this, which is why they try to keep their work secret—and that's why we had to crash their party."

There is mounting criticism of the U.S. role in pushing the negotiations forward in secrecy, despite the public's overwhelming disagreement with TPP goals. ("Buy American" procurement preferences are supported by over 85% of Americans, but U.S. trade negotiators are preparing to accept a ban on such preferences. Two weeks ago, 69 members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama asking him not to accept that ban.)

Many are calling the Obama administration duplicitous: while the administration publicly hypes a plan to revitalize American manufacturing and create jobs in the U.S., U.S. trade officials push for new "investor rights" that would make it easier for American companies to lay off domestic workers and open plants overseas.

"The TPP has been branded as a trade 'negotiation' by its corporate proponents, but in reality it's a place for big business to get its way behind closed doors," said Pete Rokicki of Occupy Dallas. "This anti-democratic maneuver can be stopped if the public gets active—just look at the movement that killed the ill-advised SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) law a few months ago. That's why Obama's trade officials lock the public, the press and even members of Congress from the trade negotiation process."

"We're really happy to know that even in their most private moments, US trade reps are reminded that a vast majority of the public stands opposed to corporate-friendly, closed-door trade deals like the TPP," said Sean Dagohoy from the Yes Lab, who assisted in the actions.

Here's a summary of the provisions of the TPP; more at Public Citizen Global Trade Watch.

UPDATE: F.w.i.w., some people are starting to notice that maybe there's a problem with allowing 600 megacorps to write our treaties while everyone else including Congress is kept in the dark.

The Armory Show, and a Few Observations

So here, finally, are my photos from the Armory Show 2012 – the "Contemporary" pier only. I saw lots of wonderful work, although I can't say anything totally blew my mind this year, either here or at the other shows seen on this trip; but that may have more to do with my previously perhaps-somewhat-retarded state of understanding of contemporary art, and the fact that art in Dallas may be catching up with the bigger art centers, than with any deficiency in the art on offer in these shows. (In fact, it seemed to me that, on a per capita basis, there may be as much or more great contemporary art being made here as in NYC.) A few general observations. Admittedly, it may be that what I noticed had a lot to do with the interests I went in with, which lately trend toward big-picture, substantive concerns . . .  

1. Complexity. While minimalism gave us (among other things) an appreciation of how much info is actually embedded in or implicated even by sensory fields that appear quite simple, art now seems to reflect our attempt to process how complex our world has become and to come to grips with complexity itself. We're deluged with more info, faster than ever before, and must not only process the individual bits, but try to understand how info in different areas of experience interrelate – how things intersect or are layered, reflected or echoed, how that makes them appear from different points of view, and what kinds of over-arching order can help us interpret and manage them without over-simplifying them, etc. [My apologies that I failed to note the artist or other info re- the work shown at left; if you can enlighten me, please do, and I'll update this post.] 

In contemporary art, this seems to me to show up not only in the kinds of juxtapositions of various, often incongruous styles and subject-matters characteristic of post-modernism, but also in the presentation of lots of detail in ways that are very inter-related and layered, both substantively and often in quite literal, physical ways – often while evincing a retained, minimalistic awareness of how much info is actually carried by even the most basic elements within the work. In addition to the image at left, see, e.g., the mobile by Pae White starting here, at the Independent Fair. Many works that embody or refer to this kind of inter-relatedness, intersection, layering, and/or reflection also seem to me to refer to issues of dimensionality.  

2. Multi-Dimensionality. As some of you may be aware, I'm very interested in such questions as: what can exist in which dimensions; how are or might things that extend into higher dimensions be perceived in or otherwise affect things in lower dimensions, and vice versa; what are the relationships among the dimensions themselves; etc.? Art has in the past been concerned with the fundamentals of manufacture and perception; the pendulum's been swinging back, and/or has perhaps now come full circle, to concern itself with metaphysics. (Installation at right: Jonathan Schipper, Slow Room in Miami (2011); a related video shows an even larger roomful of furniture being slowly pulled toward a similar hole in the wall.) I think of time as the fourth dimension – I understand that's appropriate from a scientific point of view – but in addition to points, lines, planes, spatial volumes, and time, I'm also thinking of, e.g., virtual spaces, such as in imaginative or conceptual, mental realms, or in cyberspace, or in the realm of data generally – the latter three seeming like more or less the same thing. More of us are actually living our lives more and more fully and more collectively in these virtual realms.  

One artist dealing with both complexity and dimensionality is Mary Reid Kelley (mentioned in my post on the last Site Santa Fe biennial here), whose b&w videos emulate the look of slightly surreal graphic novels, i.e., 2-D, though obviously shot in 3-D and recorded in 4-D, with titles and settings that literally invoke the imaginative dimensions of ancient myth and somewhat more recent history, and with relatively wordy, rhyming scripts that remind one a bit of epic poems. Dimensionality was also explicitly invoked in the work shown starting here, at the Independent Fair. (Still at left from Kelley's The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011).)  

3. No Monopoly on Truth. There are many aspects of the dimensional inquiry that interest me, but, e.g., the virtual or conceptual realm sometimes seems to exist outside of time and space, even if we can only experience it from within time and space; e.g., clichés seem true at nearly all times, everywhere; ditto math. And my own insights and artistic inspirations sometimes seem to involve not so much my personal creativity as my somehow simply accessing stuff that already existed in some timeless, etheric realm; and I suspect many scientists feel the same way about their discoveries. (Image right and the following two show works by Michael Riedel; see also here et seq.) Until recently, intellectual property law recognized that, while you can copyright a tangible expression of a fact, or patent a device or process that deploys it, you cannot own the fact itself; in a quite literal sense, no one could have a monopoly on truth, at least not for long. Now, of course, over-reaching extensions of law permit corporations to patent actual gene sequences and lock up inspirations for lifetimes after the artists who expressed them died.  

Artists have been exploring these issues for quite a while now, but they remain unresolved and continue in evidence in contemporary works. Perhaps no one can have a monopoly on truth not only because expressions of it are to some degree relative to particular contexts, but also because there's a sense in which truth "wants to be free" – though we all also want those who provide useful expressions of it to be able to make a living. And of course, many of the efforts of governments or corporate management to hoard or otherwise control the flow of info seem to many of us tragically wrong-headed at best, and more often than not, as Julian Assange has suggested, evidence of corruption. As devastating as many of our wars have been, there's perhaps no greater conflict now unfolding than the infowar, the struggle between old and new power structures over who will control access to information (as evidenced in the ongoing efforts to shut down Wikileaks and whistleblowers, promote our reliance on the Cloud, and otherwise control the internet). These issues seem part of Michael Riedel's concerns in his large images (resembling crosswords and QR-type codes; and consider the actual texts {as usual, click on any of these images for larger/more legible versions}, including the way they were installed (look at their "reflections" in the purple "surface" – something's wrong . . . ).  

4. Our Interdependence Within the Virtual World. Other aspects of the virtual that I think we're wrestling with have to do with ways in and the extent to which our "real" lives are being supplanted, absorbed, and consolidated into our virtual lives, and our dependency on one another and on the technologies and organizations that make our virtual lives possible. In "real" life, even though you might not want to live as a total hermit, it can be done, at least in some parts of the world. But our lives in cyberspace can't exist at all without the many other people and organizations that make and maintain the necessary hardware, software, energy sources, etc.  

As you can see from the images within this post, some of my favorite works seem to address more than one of the areas mentioned above. With respect to our dependence on "clouds" of other people and technologies, some works deployed literal images of clouds; Leandro Erlich's Cloud Collection (2011) aligned 2-D layers to create clouds, while Philippe Parreno's Marquee, Atlas of Clouds (2012) similarly layered 2-D neon "pages" in a "book" – in both cases, the results could be interpreted either as 3-D but not 4-D or vice-versa; i.e., each complete cloud could represent either a set of 2-D cross-sections of a cloud in one shape in 3-D, all at the same, single instant in time, OR a series of images of a cloud captured in 2-D only but taken over a period of time, as its shape changed. In the case of Parreno's work, of course, the title suggests that what he had in mind was a series of images of different clouds; yet the book format seemed to me nonetheless suggestive of a flip-book, with the possibility that the images might in fact be of one cloud that morphs to become something different at each moment in time. 

 5. New Media. In another vein, forgive my complaint that, while there's been an explosion of exciting video and other new media work during the last ten years and more, we're still getting to see very little of it. The Armory and the Whitney tried to address the problem by offering seated screenings of compilations of videos. This does not put the videos thus shown on par with works in other media, since the videos were shown just once or, at best, a few times, while works in other media were shown continually for the entire duration of the exhibition. The arrangement seems esp. paltry given that video, by its very nature (≥ 24 FPS, with audio), can encompass more info than works in other media – i.e., good video can require as much or more viewing than works in other media, not less. The Moving Image Fair is commendable; but much more needs to be done. You can find my posts on the other 8 fairs or shows I saw on this trip (with links to photos) here (scroll down to get past a repeat of this post).

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry

Photos of some of those with whom she shared stares here. (Thanks, Julie!) From Abramovic's 2010 exhibition at MoMA, The Artist is Present.

The Whitney Biennial

The show was mobbed, though I went on a weekday. I left with fewer photos than I'd have liked; you can see 80+ here.

Pieces I wish I'd shot but didn't include LAST SPRING: A Prequel, by Gisèle Vienne with Dennis Cooper, Stephen O’Malley, and Peter Rehberg; Green Room by Wu Tsang; Sarah Michelson's Devotion Study #1–The American Dancer; and RP47 by Lucy Raven. I also really enjoyed Werner Herzog's video installation, Hearsay of the Soul, with its powerful audio of music from his film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

My photos also don't do justice to many of the works, e.g. Sam Lewitt's "self-organizing" installation comprising magnets, fans, and a pool of sticky-looking ferrofluid; or Nick Mauss's installation, which included, in addition to the twin-doored vestibule he built and "painted" with sewn fabric, a number of not-obviously connected objects: a small projection plus works by Andy Warhol, Gary Winogrand, Ellsworth Kelly, Charles Demuth, Ira Delaneaux [sp?].

Additional informative audio and bits of visuals re- the exhibition are available at the Whitney's site; more images at PaperMag.

(Image left: detail from installation/performance set by Georgia Sagri.)

Roberta Smith has a glowing review in the NYT, with an excellent slide show here. A couple of aspects she identifies are that (1) the biennial includes lots of modes of art, including an impressive array of time-based works in video, music, dance, and performance as well as painting, sculpture, and installation – without particularly privileging any of them (although I don't recall much photography, unless you count photographs used in larger works, such as Dawn Kasper's installation, which comprised the entire contents of her living quarters/studio); and (2) the show is artist-centric, in that it focusses to an unusual degree on artists' processes and in some instances had them curate other artists into the exhibition.

These aspects seem so sensible and right that I confess I didn't notice them 'til I read Smith's review after seeing the show; and I'm glad she praised them. (Now that I think of it, even the cover image for the biennial {above right} seems to reflect an ambition to make the museum a more transparent vessel for its contents.) And I did notice, as I think Smith also mentions, that the written explanations of the works were unusually helpful.

I personally wish that more of the video had been easier to see. With respect to most of the videos as well as performances, each was only presented at certain times and for only a few days during the run of the exhibition, making it impossible to see all unless you can return multiple times over a 13-week period.

I saw only a few minutes of Wu Tsang's Wildness in his Green Room installation (video embedded below), which was packed.

I also saw the dance performance choreographed by Sarah Michelson. The set and costumes were relatively simple (you can see a few images and another review here), and for the vast majority of the near-90 minute piece, four or less of the same 4 dancers walked rapidly backward in mostly counter-clockwise circles, all more often than not tracing the same basic movements and path while separated by a more or less fixed distance, with occasional pauses that seemed necessary in order to give the dancers much-needed breathers. During the latter part of the performance, a 5th dancer wearing a (race-?) horse's head strolled through, lingered briefly – observing? – and left. The audio consisted of the same, musically interesting but short loop throughout, without any variation in instrumentation, tempo, or volume, etc. – except that, at the beginning of the piece, there was additional audio of a relatively brief conversation, seemingly between Michelson and a male artist, with the male doing most of the talking, mostly about feeling uncertain whether he'll manage to come up with anything much for his current commission; plus other bits of Michelson's voice near the end, enjoining the dancers to "make it very beautiful" and then relating a story of God's other child Marjorie, in which I'm afraid I got a bit lost, between acoustics that were, for me, less than crystal clear, plus being by then fairly stupified by the monotony.

(Image right: detail from collage by Robert Hawkins.)

All in all, I enjoyed this biennial and found it well done and rewarding of time and attention, though it could perhaps have been more exciting.

Here's the trailer for Wildness:

The Wedding Project

You may have seen an earlier post in which I warned I'd be on hiatius for while in order to work on a big project.

Well, Phase 1 of The Wedding Project was a participatory/performance/screenings event, in which a real wedding occurred (my own).

I made two one-hour videos for the project, one for guests to watch and the other to be projected onto their backs, and I and my sig. other and 80+ friends made or scavenged costumes, props (including 200 wedding veils and more than 650 flat paper flowers) and set decor (including thousands of yards of used videotape), shot lots of video and photos of the event, and threw a big party.

I'm interested in, among other things, the blending of the real and the artificial. In this project, a real marriage between two individuals serves as a metaphor to explore larger historical, sociological, psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical contexts – including the bond that, for better or worse, has in some sense always existed among all of humanity but that now, by virtue of the internet, is becoming much more intense, or at least more quickly and thickly interconnected.

There's a website for the project with a lot more info here, and I've just put some photos of the event here.

I'm now engaged in Phase 2, which means editing the video shot at the event and otherwise mashing up product for an exhibition.

So I'm afraid I need to make myself sparse here again for the next month or two. Thank you for your patience!

NYPD Rendition of "Wikileaks Truck"

The “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” has no actual affiliation with Wikileaks; its owner, artist/activist/prankster Clark Stoeckley, just wanted to raise awareness about WL. But the truck had become something of an OWS mascot, when on Nov. 17, police impounded it – except the truck never made it to the pound.

Stoeckley was arrested for "Obstructing Governmental Administration" after he declined to allow them to search the truck without a warrant. All charges against him have now been dropped; but the truck is missing, and police say they have no record of it. More at Gawker and Animal.

In a recent interview, Stoeckler discoursed:

[W]hen the Secret Service pulled me over and searched the truck, they asked what would be the first thing they saw when we opened the back. I told them “records”. Their eyes lit up and they and they asked “What kind of records?” My reply was “Mostly classic rock, some R&B and folk.” The door goes up, and the first thing they saw was boxes of 33 rpm vinyl records. . . .

[Asked whether he'd been hit on because of his attractive vehicle,] It is not a Ferrari or a Porsche. I attract a lot of conspiracy theorists, but they are usually older men who need a bath, and they want to talk my ear off. Some of them actually think I work for Wikileaks and they wish they had something to leak. No I have not gotten hit on by anyone because of the truck. It is a former U-Haul truck with 200,000 miles. Luckily my girlfriend has a car.

More at Wikileaks-Movie.com.

UPDATE: The Wikileaks Truck was recovered and is now for sale on e-bay – apparently Stoeckley needs funds (update via Gawker).

As Ye Reap . . .

From the Yes Men:

Massive 24-hour DRUM CIRCLE and JAM SESSION party starting tomorrow, Sunday at 2pm, outside Mayor Bloomberg's personal townhouse: 17 East 79th Street.

Tie-dye, didgeridoo, hackeysack welcome! No shirt, no shoes, no problem! And if you don't have talent, don't worry: FREE DRUM LESSONS offered! Also on offer: collaborative drumming with the police!

Even though this is a 24-hour drum circle, don't be late! The mayor loves evictions. Who knows what'll happen? In any case, there'll be an afterparty in world-famous Central Park right afterwards.

Please spread this announcement (www.yeslab.org/drumcircle) as far and fast as you can!

Temporary Hiatus for Big Project

I'm working on a multimedia art/reality project that will consume my every waking moment for the next several weeks. I'll reveal more when it's done.

Until then, please bear with my silence; and check back here around the end of September! I promise, I shall return! With good stuff!

(And if you live in Dallas and would like to help, pls contact me.)

(And b.t.w., no, I don't believe the world's ending any time soon. It may be the end of the world as we knew it; but I believe we're on our way to re-creating a better version – I'm working on it, and send my love to all others who are, too.)

More "After Hours with George Quartz"

The artist sometimes known as George Quartz is a former Good/Bad Art Collective member and CentralTrak resident and shows at Cris Worley Gallery, and he also operates under the personas of La Maladie Tropicale and Jock Ewing.

I find his "After Hours with George Quartz" operation very interesting (previously, briefly blogged here) – he does a live-taped, "talk show"/ performance art -type of work that's like Dick Cavett meets The Twilight Zone. The next one is this Friday.

At the one I saw, the "guests" learned who they were supposed to be at the same moment they were announced to the audience, and none bore any physical resemblance to the celebrity they were to impersonate (e.g., "Joe Namath" was a black female). The "celebrities" were of the 70's-ish vintage emulated by the show.

The ensuing, improvised interviews were sometimes boring, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, usually opening with discussion of the celebrity's career and personal life (about which the guests, mostly young-ish, often knew little or nothing) and culminating with questions such as, "Liz, what is Beauty?", or "George, what is Art?"

Meanwhile, "Quartz" has most of the trappings of a live-taping tv show going on, including a talk show band and a monitor facing the audience that flashes "APPLAUSE" at the appropriate times. And the video actually produced from this performance is beyond-true to 70's or earlier production values (excerpts from the resulting "show" can be viewed on Quartz's vimeo channel).

In short, this is great, wacky parody; but there's a lot more than that going on.

The next Quartz taping/performance will be at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, Dallas, at 10PM; more details here (together with links to visuals). Be part of the audience, and you might end up on "tv."

Trespass/Parade

Looks interesting:

Trespass: First a Parade, Then a Party

* * * * *
On Sunday, October 2, 2011 the streets of downtown Los Angeles will erupt in a parade of local artists and residents, complete with music, dancing and performance. The parade is the culmination of Trespass, a collaborative project between Arto Lindsay, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and West of Rome Public Art (WoR). They have commissioned 40 Los Angeles based artists, including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Rubins and Sterling Ruby, to produce a statement—their call to action, pleasure and reciprocity. The statements have been printed on T-shirts in English and in Spanish, and will be worn as part of the parade and sold via the West of Rome website. . . . This project has been created to coincide with Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene, which begins October 2011.

On Monday, October 3, 2011 Trespass will reach its climax with a blow out benefit party for WoR at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Fantastic and transgressive Los Angeles iconic underground figure, Miss Vaginal Davis will shape our journey into the night. The rhythms of Trespass will permeate into the evening as musician Arto Lindsay will perform a unique piece composed for the occasion. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will engage the audience in a continuation of the collective experience of social awareness stemming from the parade.

More at www.trespassparade.org.

"Kill the Workers!" by Janice Kerbel

" . . . is a continuation of Kerbel’s interest in theatrical performance. There are no actors or sets; the dramaturgy and plot are portrayed solely through the various intensities, colours, light beams and directions of the stage lighting. The protagonist of the play is a spotlight that goes on an epic odyssey to abandon its serving role and be seen as a light in its own right instead."

Part of an exhibition of Kerbel's work July 1 – September 11 at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany.

AUDiNT: Dead Record Office at Art in General

. . . (NYC). This sounds really interesting; wish I could go. "The artists [Jon Cohrs, Toby Heys and Steve Goodman] relay the evolution of the project as follows:

For the past 60 years, AUDiNT have been conducting research, rituals, and experiments into the opening of the 3rd ear, a dimension that is opened when sound, ultrasound, and infrasound are simultaneously deployed in a precise schema of sequencing, duration, and amplification. The 3rd ear forms a conduit for the channeling of voices and frequencies allowing communication between the living and the dead, sanity and insanity and between disparate locations in space and time.

Ever since AUDiNT's defection from the U.S. military at the end of WWII, our mission has been to submerge the frequency-based phenomenon that had been accidentally discovered by the Ghost Army (when they deployed 3 turntables to fabricate deceptive soundscapes intended to deceive the Nazis as to the true numbers and whereabouts of the allied forces). Wishing to keep this powerful sonic weapon out of government and military hands, AUDiNT's founding members smashed the original battlefield discs, and split the waveformed content of the original master recordings into small packages of sound which were then discretely embedded into sound effects and stereo fidelity records.

Throughout the following decades AUDiNT were responsible for the mass production of the test tone record and special effects vinyl—a collection that ended up in flea markets, thrift stores and church bazaars, forming what is known as The Dead Record Network. It was through the Dead Record Network that we distributed these encrypted recordings as an open secret, ensuring that, in the future, the vital bits of analogue information concerning the ultimate vibrational weapon discovered during WWII would remain in a fragmented social circulation.

Adapting to the tactical battlefields of the 21st century networks, capitalizing on the viral dynamics of digital networks, we are systematically uploading our research archive that has been compiled throughout the past 60 years (while probing the hauntological power of sonic weaponry). This ritualized uploading of the spectral archive aims to create a prospective archive of waveformed affect that is propagated throughout the living dead networks of our communication systems. This tactical shift - to open up our archive to the public - relates to our new mandate of arming the mass populace with the efficacy of sonic weaponry so that it does not become the sole preserve of the military-entertainment complex. With its dark science and sonically dissonant content, AUDiNT's Dead Record Office is the enshrined location from which this viral transfer begins.

(Emphasis supplied. In an interesting line from Macbeth (Act iv, scene i), the eponymous protagonist exclaims to the three witches, "Had I three ears, I'ld hear thee.")

The installation will be on view June 17–July 23, 2011, at Art in General, 79 Walker St., with an opening reception Fri., 6/17 6-8pm and a special program, "The Martial Arts of Sonic Hauntology," on Mon., 6/13, 7-8:30pm.

Artsmarter at the Modern

. . . on April 29 and at William Campbell on April 30 (both in Fort Worth, TX):

Low Lives

First, I've been laying low, blog-wise – dealing with some family issues – thanks for your patience. That aside . . . .

The following vidi is one of a number of performance videos on Low Lives.



Low Lives describes itself as "an international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. . . . Low Lives is not simply about the presentation of performative gestures at a particular place and time but also about the transmission of these moments and what gets lost, conveyed, blurred, and reconfigured when utilizing this medium." Looks like the next exhibition/broadcast dates are: April 29, 2011: Low Lives 3 Exhibition-Day 1 - 8:00pm – 11:00pm (U.S. EST) April 30, 2011: Low Lives 3 Exhibition-Day 2 - 3:00pm – 6:00pm (U.S. EST).

UPDATE: You can find Low Lives 3 here.

Note to Moi: Find Local "Ratso" Equivalent.

"After Hours with George Quartz"

At CentralTrak last night; loved it. Impossible to do it justice in few words, but call it the Twilight Zone of talk shows. I think they really were taping it, and hope to see the results. You should definitely try to catch it if/when it returns.

More visuals here.

UPDATE: Edited "tv" taped excerpts from this performance can now be viewed on "Quartz"'s vimeo channel.

"Unsilent Night" and "Operation Paperstorm"

There'll be what sounds like a cool event in downtown Dallas, TX TONIGHT, Unsilent Night.

It's basically a performance that you can participate in, conceived by artist Phil Kline. The event has been held annually in New York City since 1992. As many as 1,500 eager partakers gather for a contemplative procession armed with boomboxes playing nothing more than the beautiful, mysterious sounds of echoing bells. The crowd slowly strolls along a designated route, drifting peacefully through a cloud of holiday sound, as each person experiences the event from their own perspective. Beginning in 2009, Dallas has joined 24 other cities around the globe who invite their citizens to come together and create this intriguing and inspiring performance art experience.

Unsilent Night is free and will be held regardless of the weather. It's recommended to arrive at least 30 minutes before the departure time of 7PM for the route through downtown Dallas and/or the 8:30 PM departure time for the route through the Arts District.

Gather at DART Rail's Akard Station, where instructions will be given before each walk begins. People are encouraged to bring one or more boomboxes or similar devices with them to broaden the scope of the experience. However, with or without a boombox, all are invited to participate in the experience.

You can download the soundtracks and find more info at www.UnsilentNightDallas.com.

And there's something else going on today: Operation Paperstorm. It's a protest in which people are distributing printed, paper info to help raise awareness of the facts surrounding the unfolding Wikileaks story (see links in sidebar at left, or info here).

Unsilent Night might be an excellent time to show your support of Wikileaks' unsilence. If that doesn't work for you, just do it some time soon.

You can download a flyer here (to be printed on legal-size paper); or see here for additional options.

EVERYTHING IS OK

(Thanks, Ben!) More here.