Thread

Below is a 3-minute excerpt from a projection performance I did at "You Are Here" on May 19, 2007. You Are Here was a maze that was built at the chashama art's space in midtown Manhattan, then artists and musicians were invited to perform or make installations. The musicians playing with me were from the August Sound Coalition.

The plan for my projection piece was to put screw-eyes through out the maze and then with a single line of yarn thread a trajectory through the maze. The projection performance began when the musicians began their improvisation. I then began winding the yarn through the maze, through the screw-eyes, and down through the gate of my 16mm Bell and Howell projector and onto a reel. The projected silhouette of the yarn appears, section by section, on the wall having first passed through the solid construction of the maze.

It is often not an open discussion with Street Artists

I originally wrote this piece in September of 2006 to pass out at a talk that Marc Schiller, from the Wooster Collective, was giving at Conflux. A month later I was in a position to again make the piece public during the opening of the 11 Spring St show, an exhibition curated by the Wooster Collective in which many graffiti artists and street artists showed their work. At that time I published the article on NYC's Indymedia.

The Shill of Marc Schiller or
A little background info on the Wooster Collective

Marc Schiller, Wooster Collective's co-founder, is the CEO for an advertising corporation. His company, ElectricArtists, works with other corporations including Warner Bros., Microsoft, and CNN.

http://www.electricartists.com/corporate/clients/ *

The following is a description copied and pasted directly from the ElectricArtists website:

"
Overview
ElectricArtists is an innovative marketing services company that
develops and implements unique "community based" marketing campaigns.
Led by a team of seasoned marketing executives, ElectricArtists
fosters and nurtures relationships with a client's most influential
audience by providing the tastemakers with brand information that
triggers consumers talking to each other and spreading the word. Since
1997 ElectricArtists has seen 100% growth in PROFITS EACH YEAR while
serving a diverse list of blue chip clients in the global media and
entertainment sectors including Ralston-Purina, Levis, Sony Pictures,
and BMG Entertainment. ElectricArtists success has been given
extensive media coverage with features in Forbes, Time, Billboard,
Variety, ABC's World News Tonight, and others. The company has
expanded FROM its New York base with offices in Japan and England,
thus enabling ElectricArtists to develop and deliver GLOBAL MARKETING
campaigns.


"
Strategic Philosophy
By targeting the "ideal customers" and providing exciting brand
messages, from behind-the-scenes news to downloadable samples,
ElectricArtists converts fans into loyalists and ultimately, into
advocates. Meanwhile, clients gain valuable market research insight
and honest consumer feedback. EA manages the trust and credibility of
your brand so that your message is heard and believed above the
clutter. Yet, the success of our strategies has everything to do with
you. ElectricArtists considers our efforts part of the bigger
marketing picture-if the other marketing pistons are firing, our
efforts will be considerably more effective.

(www.electricartists.com/corporate/about/)*

-------------------


"Too much "space" in our urban cities is sold to advertisers and large
corporations. Street artists are trying to reclaim a bit of their
space, even if it means doing it without the approval of the people
who control that space."
Marc Schiller, co-founder of Wooster Collective

(http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews/marc_schiller.asp)


-------------------

I mean it is just kind of incredible that so many graffiti artists and street artists have gathered together to get on board with this man. On the one hand it makes loads of commercial sense to align yrself with Wooster, but how can it be considered in the vain of graffiti, or street art? How could it be considered anything but a marketing strategy?

Unless we acknowledge the street artist as a self-interested paranoiac who wants to be seen (but not seen) plastering the streets with their wares. Who naively enters the market disgruntled by the value of production only to turn around and produce themselves. A somnambulist is a person who is too awake in the morning to put on a McDonald's hat, but too tired by the afternoon to stop flipping burgers. Is this the situation of the street artists?

Street and graffiti artists you are smart enough to feel disturbed and want to change the commercialism of yr city, but you have becomes beauticians in a competition with capital. If you do well you will be paid with the whip of laughter, with murder on a garbage heap. With an offer made to sell yr style.

This is the recipe to extract profit. Collectors, museums and street art vendors make money off playing the art market with you. Of course a good collector will do their best to promote their artist(s). Selling their look to prestigious corporations and collectors, exposing their work on a global level with a website will get the largest revenue for the collector. This is the value of the huge show.
If you bought into Marc Schiller's idealism you have been sold more than just a paper.

The underground is important, you are important. This, look around, is the life blood of capital; where the collector's money places bets; the artist is a marker in a horse race, be new, and above the pace, and you will pay off -- if not in the short term, in the longer term with diligent investment.

Magazines, books, T-shirts, stickers, curated gallery shows, over the Internet, in museums, or through private purchase, the art needs to be bought and the artist sold. But everywhere it is the same and the pockets bulge.


*At the time that I published this piece all of the quotes were truthful to the URLs that I provided. As time has passed the pages have been updated and no longer iterate the same things.

~~

During the fall of 2006 there was a great deal of commercial street art being destroyed. While I have never claimed responsibility for the destruction, nor has there been a single sound piece of evidence to link me with street art destruction, I have been accused by street art collectives, streets artists, bloggers, and periodicals of being the "Splasher."

Processing

During the Spring Semester of 2007 I participated in David Reinfurt's (Dexter Sinister) Visual Studies Workshop at Columbia University. We used the open source computer code Processing as a spring board for understanding how interfaces are built with pieces from other programs.

Both of the pieces I designed were with code for two-dimensional space next to code for three-dimensional space.

This piece takes a few minutes to watch. What is eventually seen, once the viewer passes through the first sphere, is a square inside of a second sphere. This was meant as a technical joke played on space. The side of an embedded two-dimensional square extends out from inside the three dimensional sphere-- like a ball of yarn leading the viewer in.

This second piece illustrates what happens when a computer tries to run disparate algorithms. The screen appears partial, as though it is being bent; blue colored black holes bite away at the image where the algorithms weren't written to resolve into a unified space.

Note

This was a piece that was originally transmitted on free103point9. It was again going to be a part of a performance on March 24 during the Gigantic ArtSpace [silence] show, but something post-conceptual happened: Gigantic Artspace lost its lease.

As the announcer for The Hermit's Cave would say before each episode with an evil cackle, "turn out your lights, turn them out, hehe hehe."

XXXX

This piece was created for the Frequencies exhibition. " Frequencies is an experiential and holistic exhibition which captures facets of the DIY community and extends outside the physical bounds of the gallery -- referencing both "public art" and "life as art" movements."






The materials for this piece were tissue paper, yarn and balled up tape.


This was intended as a projection at the limits. It could be called a cinematic sculpture. The tissue paper serves as color planes, IE as individual frames that have light pass through them. The arrangement of the tissue paper could be seen as an alternate process to the linear, one frame after another frame, structure of film.

The window has an air vent(the two circles). The air vent can be opened or closed. When the air vent is open wind blows in activating the colored tissue paper. When the air vent is closed the tissue paper is still, the projector is turned off.

Restraint

Douser(Dowser)

In February I was invited to do projections at Monkey Town in Williamsburg Brooklyn, I was accompanied by Anastasiya Osipova and Lizxnn Bolger in setting up the projection and the musicians were Matt Mottel, Tianna Kennedey, John Debrosa, and Casey Block.

I wrote the following text to go along with the performance.



The boundaries of the mediums have been reaffirmed.
This accompanies the reaffirmation of success (fortune)
as the goal of art.
--The Crystallization of Concept Art in 1961
Henry Flynt


Monkey Town is a theatre dinner venue. In the back, where the movies are shown, there are four large walls of projection screens. During a performance often all of the screens are playing at once. It creates an absolute visual environment and the viewer sinks into a light enduced coma. This may also be due to the couches that suggest reclining and a waitress that suggests coctails.

This piece is designed, with Monkey Town in mind, to put off the viewer's predilection for a moving image. In-between the reoccurrence of dramatic scenarios played out on the screen and the habitual avoidance of time -- with our presence in silence visual media unites us.

The musicians will play a drone.

The projection I will make tonight will be a douser. I will set up a door frame turned on its head with the door closed, then I will string a light bulb from the top. When the light bulb is screwed in the light will be shut in.

This douser will be placed, more or less, in the center of the theatre. The musicians, as much as the space will allow, will be in the periphery. The audience will make out exactly what the piece is: A rectangle that stands 7'6" X 2'3"disposed such that the light is restricted to a narrow apogee of tone.

When the light fixture is unplugged there will be a deafening cacophony which will exhaust itself in the dark.

A Rest from Advertisements

And eyes toast!

Manipulated Projections

This is a projection improvisation done with three slide projectors and two 8mm film projectors. I was accompanied in projecting by Anastasiya Osipova. The music, when it comes in, is done by G. Lucas Crane VS. Non-horse.

Red Dalliance

This was a projection device I built using two turn tables, two slide projectors and a 1970 double LP of Jesus Christ Superstar. I glued broken mirrors shards onto cardboard ridges, and used Steve Reich's 'Pendulum Music.' The brief bit of cinema below is the outcome.

Shrine to a Condition

The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs.

What do I want?
Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life. Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your desires?

But what about the impossibility of living. What about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion?

Suffering is the pain of constraints.




The installation was assembled on the corner of Union Ave and Gerry St at an unused subway entrance in Bedstuy Brooklyn. The materials(beach ball, netting, paintings, tape, banner, etc) were scavenged on the night of the installation from piles of trash around the site. Only the paper with the quotes from Raoul Vaneigem were brought.

Dunces that Dream

A stroboscopic light sculpture built from Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville's plans. William Burroughs used this device, and had this to say about what he saw, "...elaborate geometric constructions of incredible intricacy build up from multidimensional mosaic into living fireballs like the mandalas of Eastern mysticism or resolve momentarily into apparently individual images and powerfully dramatic scenes like brightly colored dreams."


A person watches the flickering cylinder with her eyes closed.


I displayed the dream machine with Ira Cohen's The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda at Cynthia Broans on the openning evening of Ira's photo retrospective.

Slides

These are made with slides that were purchased at flea markets.






Five of my slides were published in the January 2006, issue #3, Ruby Mag and two more were published in the first Ruby Mag book.