Fusebox Schedule Plus a Few Faves So Far

The Schedule. I made a color-coded schedule designed to help me see as many different works as possible, taking into account some of my own time constraints. It's been suggested it might be helpful to share it; here it is. I'm planning to go to the yellow-highlighted items. (I'd have highlighted more "Maxi Geil!" except I happen to have seen more of Guy Richards Smit's work before than I have most of the other artists, so I opted for work less known to me.)

Some Faves So Far. This is in haste, so I'll mostly just quote the Fusebox website.

GuruGuru (2009) by Rotozaza:

Conceived and created by Ant Hampton, with Joji Koyama and Isambard Khroustalio.

Five participants (each receiving different instructions via their earpieces) talk together with a televised character whose role flicks uncannily between spiritual and marketing guru. Revelling in the absurdities of marketing technique and group therapy, Hampton, Koyama and Khroustaliov reverse the awkward history of consumer research by allowing their audience to create their own animated therapist – by means of a focus group!

Unleashing what Ernest Dichter called 'the secret self of the consumer' and allowing it to run about perhaps a little too freely, GuruGuru also explores the amusing yet complex notion of ‘wearing’ opinions and emotional reactions as one might a choice of clothes: as with 'Etiquette' (Rotozaza's earlier show in the Autoteatro series), audience members find themselves falling into a strange kind of dialogue by simply following pre-recorded instructions as to what to say and do.

GuruGuru (round-and-round in Japanese) is created by Ant Hampton in collaboration with acclaimed film-maker / animation artist Joji Koyama, and longtime collaborator Isambard Khroustaliov (Sam Britton - musician, electronic composer and one half of the group Icarus.)

More here, where you can make a reservation, which is recommended. (UPDATE: I've posted a more in-depth discussion of GuruGuru here.)

Keys to Our Heart, 24:18 min. (2008) by Kalup Linzy:

. . . a black-and-white narrative in which the artist stars as a misanthropic grande dame who dispenses advice to a trio of troubled young lovers. Linzy, who performs all of the characters' dialogue, shot and directed Keys To Our Heart in the style of a Hollywood Melodrama, which was created for Prospect.1 New Orleans in 2008.

Let me just add, watch out for aspects of this piece that are odd or incongruous with expectations created by his use of vintage visuals and clichéd cinematic devices. (UPDATE: I've posted a more in-depth discussion of Keys here.)

And I have to mention pink, though by the time you read this, it'll be over in Austin (but I think they tour). I understand the C.E.O. is Jaclyn Pryor.

[pink unplugged] is both a real-life courier service and an interactive, site-specific art installation.

Visitors are invited to visit pink’s temporary love [note] factory set up along Austin's City Hall plaza, where they can type a love note to someone in Austin. Notes are bottled on site by pink’s love factory workers and delivered by bicycle by pink’s love couriers anywhere in the city. pink [unplugged] celebrates not only human connectivity but human power. The factory is powered entirely by human & bicycle-generated energy.

[Click on the images for larger versions.] Among pink's other charming aspects, note-typers could use the hotel-desk-style bell to signal various matters including a request for help with inspiration.

UPDATE: You can see more visuals of pink here. I'd also like to mention a few more faves I've seen since this was first posted: Paul Villinski's Emergency Response Studio (2008), érection by Pierre Rigal and Aurélien Bory, and The Method Gun by Rude Mechs.

Fusebox So Far: Rubber Repertory's "Mr. Z"

Last nite saw Mr. Z Loves Company. Some of the many lascivious acts performed before our eyes I'd only read about; others reassured one that one was not there merely for fleshy fun, such as a declamation paraphrased from King Lear (see MIT's Moby Shakespeare and search "pent-up"), and the possible reference to "Z-Man" from that magnificent Russ Meyer/Roger Ebert collaboration, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Other descriptors or associations (at least some of which may be peculiar to me): doppelgangers (identity; the "other" who is one's double); narcissism; a song with no lyrics other than: "oooooh . . . uh huh uh huh"; relaxation, positive thinking, and "tapping" one's innermost mind (sought by the protagonists but perhaps, wisely, also directed at their audience -- they say colonoscopy only hurts if you can't relax); Phantom of the Opera; Queen for a Day; class war; class war as a variety of S&M; Alouetta; a mask is like a rubber for your face.

The hour went by quickly. Crisco, anyone?

Free, City-Wide WiFi, Brought to You by YOU

Another cool Eyebeam project:

"If everyone took the passwords off their wifi, we'd have a free, citywide wireless network. Sound like a good idea? Then help us make it happen!

"Eyebeam's Open Cultures Research Group will be running a two-part workshop in which participants will be trained on how to open up a wifi network so that it is free, accessible, and secure for others to use without losing any bandwidth. Participants will also work together on developing a "script" for spreading the knowledge in order to convert skeptical friends, family, and neighbors into open wireless ambassadors."

The workshop is at Eyebeam on April 18; hopefully they'll put the "script" online for the rest of us soon.

"Little Bits"

This really cool product is created by Ayah Bdeir; it's like Legos, only electronic: a library of tiny, pre-assembled circuit boards that can easily be connected. No programming, no prior knowledge, and no hardware or software set-up required; just snap and play!



(Thanks, Eyebeam!)

School of Perpetual Training . . .

for an exciting career in the computer game industry, here. Follow all instructions literally; it's horribly hilarious. The bottom pic shows my score after my first session in "Global Shipping" (click on images to enlarge). Created by Stephanie Rothenberg.

Police Tweets

here.

Name Unofficially Denton
Location Denton, TX
Web [Police Mugshots (working title)|Spring 2009]
Bio The unofficial Denton Mugshot twitter for Denton, Texas. Programmed by a UNT art photography student, drawing attention to how much public info we put online.

The artist explains further,

"When I stumbled upon the Denton Police Department City Jail Custody Report page, I was surprised to find that the name, age, charge(s), and mugshot of everyone currently in custody was available to the public. I got to thinking, what if someone I know gets arrested? I wonder if I could be notified of that somehow.

"At the same time, we had been learning about New Media in my photography classes. Projects like We Feel Fine and Listening Post especially caught my attention. The live nature of the work was especially interesting to me.

"So, when I found Twitter and TwitPic, I saw how they could be a good medium to connect to the Custody Report. Once operational, things started to change due to the increasing importance and power of social media (SM) platforms today, such as Twitter. Half a dozen friends following the twitter feed turned into nearly a thousand followers, and tens of thousands of page views.

"The project had changed from its original intentions to an illustration of the power and importance of SM today. It's clear viral marketing techniques and SM are giving the public an easy and powerful way of reading and creating news, in one centralized place for the first time."

YouTube Hilarity

David Lynch's Positivistic Relativism

Thinking about Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire . . . .

To oversimplify somewhat, it seems clear that each of those movies is a collection of versions of "reality," some of which are more "real" than others.

The main give-away to me was that some scenes are grossly clichéd in content or style, or over- or badly acted, while others aren't -- there seems to be a range. Also, some scenes clearly seem like fantasies in which certain elements from more "real" scenes are transformed and glamorized.

I want to say each of these movies is structured like a torus, although that's more hunch than something I've confirmed. But near the centers of both movies, we encounter one scene that seems perhaps more "real," at least in some respects, than the others: the center of the donut.

In Mulholland Drive, there's a scene near the center of the movie when the young blond actress auditions and meets The Director, an unprepossessing fellow who as I dimly recall (it's been year(s) since I've seen these movies and I saw each only once) was pretty much run over by his producer and investor(s). The Director and everything else in that scene seemed not at all glamorous but almost disappointingly pedestrian. It also seemed likely that the figure of The Director was meant to connect somehow to Lynch himself, or at least to his position in some version of reality. So I figured the info in that scene re- the other characters might be more "real." And that led me to suppose that the young blond actress really is struggling, and perhaps many of the more glamorized, melodramatic, or clichéd scenes were her fantasies.

There were also several versions of a blue something-or-other -- in one or more scenes, it was a very ordinary key, or a glamorized version of a key, or a box. And this "key" was itself a key to understanding that in someone's imagination (probably the blond's), an object in some fairly pedestrian, possibly more real scenario was being transformed into a similar object in some less real scenario (possibly serving metaphorically similar functions there?).

I found Inland Empire considerably more Byzantine, although maybe I was just more tired when I saw it -- but I saw similar patterns. Again, clearly, some scenes seemed more glamorized, melodramatic, clichéd (take that, Hollywood!) And again, somewhere near the center of the movie, there's a scene that seems closer to "reality." Jeremy Irons as The Director has a conversation with the guy doing the lighting. I'd never heard Lynch's voice at the time, but my sig. other said he thought the lighting guy's sounded like Lynch's. Irons was asking the lighting guy to change something, and the lighting guy kept getting it totally backward. (I hope I don't have to point out how hilarious and significant that concept is.)

In Inland Empire, the "key" object(s) is(are) red rather than blue: someone is stabbed (I think? or wounded -- again, it's been a few years) in the stomach; while in a more pedestrian, possibly more "real" version, someone accidentally shoots himself in the stomach with ketchup; also there's a red lamp, etc. (Sorry, didn't find any stills of these red "keys" online.)

So, the point.

I am a relativist. I don't believe there is any such thing as absolute truth. There can be no description of reality that perfectly represents it, at least not without perfectly and entirely replicating it.

But that doesn't mean some descriptions can't be more accurate, or at least more useful for certain purposes, than others.

If we throw up our hands and cry, it's all lies! we may be correct, but we're giving up on life.

Our task is to distinguish as best we can which fictions are more "real" than others, at least for our purposes; or more accurately, which work better, and for which purposes. (That is, as in science, which hypotheses provide greater predictive power.)

I'm thinking this is part of what Lynch is trying to shed light on (reference intended).