Oh, Canada

I'm about to take off for the lovely city of Banff. I'll be attending the Refresh conference, much of which will be streamed here. I may have limited email and cellular access, but I will reply to messages as quickly as I can--when I'm not hiding from the bears!

Update: I'm back in one piece and ready to catch-up on sleep. The conference was very stimulating and it was great fun to see so many friends with whom I never get to spend time. I also met many new folks whom I've long-admired. I will be writing-up a little conference report for Rhizome, along with a Net Art News piece on this show at the Banff Centre's Walter Philips Gallery, so I will post links to both when they become available.

it's bliss o'clock

It's been another long, fun week. I've been Rhizoming, teaching, working on music, writing, the usual... I also hung out at my grandma's house, met up with my friend Kyle Stephan (a very cool film programmer/producer), met with Kate Pocrass to talk about her work in our upcoming Artists Space show, and met with Steve Dietz, Wanda Webb, and the boys of Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) to discuss organizing a radio/podcast program for ISEA 2006 & the Zero:One San Jose Festival.

Now I'm off to work really, really, really hard here. But not before stopping here.

A Week in Progress

This has been one of those weeks in which it may have appeared that nothing happened, but then again it's a representative sample of how my life is mostly about the behind the scenes. Aside from my usual research, Rhizome work, and teaching, I've been working on art (finishing a piece for MTAA's podcast project, To Be Listened To, and working with Abe Linkoln on our collaborative performance project for which the Whitney is commissioning an Artport gatepage, in November); tightening-up the details on the show I'm curating for Artists Space, in December; reviewing the submissions for my CAA panel; and preparing for a trip to this conference at the Banff Centre. Incidentally, I spend a lot of my time editing Rhizome's Net Art News and coordinating the Rhizome Artbase. Both are worth checking out, if you are into new media art--in fact, you should become a member! (You know I love my job if I'm pimpin' memerships on my blog!) Anyway, there were lots of random things, squeezed into my week (like having my moPod returned after the New Museum show, and finding that audience members hacked the settings! Darn hackers!), and the highlight was probably being taken out to dinner by my awesome friends, Lynn Hershman, Kyle Stephan, and JD Beltran, to celebrate my new job--or rather its one-month anniversary. Time flies!

P.S. I think that, whenever I have no appropriate picture to post, I'm just going to post a pic of Mr T. Untill I run out... Which won't be for a while... :)

football season is over

I'm having one of those days where the juices are really flowing, art-wise, and yet it's totally hard to blog about. If I had a show up, I could point you to the show, but all I can say for now is that I've got an idea forming. The idea is for an installation, to be called "Football Season Is Over," after the title of Hunter S. Thompson's apparent suicide note. It's a weird conflation of my thoughts about HST and my thoughts about Tiffany, and specifically her performance of the song, "I Think We're Alone Now." (Ok, ok, so there's a lot more to it, like football vs choir and masculinity/femininity in the south, cover songs vs cover stories, cassettes vs print/ written vs spoken word and HST's relationship to speech, gonzo fetishism, authorship and fame, yadda yadda... Would you like to read my manifesto?) Should I actually be given the space to do this (please, people, let's form one, orderly, single-file line), it would sort of look like Carrie's prom took place in her bedroom, if her bedroom was also the site of a low-fi Nightmare On Elm Street (cf Johnny_Depp!) dream sequence and Carrie was a pop music/TV-obsessed feminist in the making.... I don't want to say too much more about it, right now, except that it would include a music video with me singing to a midi interpretation of Tiff's song and the heavy use of sparkly materials, red liquids, and black markers--the writing utensil used in Thompson's eponymous note. Any takers?

Time Capsule Cassettes hit Portland

If you happen to be in Portland for the Time-Based Art Festival (Sept 9-18), keep an eye out, in and around the Portland ICA, for my Time Capsule Cassettes. If you find one, and you can find a microcassette player (!!!), you'll hear a special message from me to you and instructions for letting me know about it... Enjoy!

art_research : : research_art

So, first of all, for anyone who's keeping tabs, the teaching is going very well. I've been lucky to have some good students in the past, and granted it's only the second week of the semester, but I think this is the best {collective} group of students I've ever had. Yay! Anyway, in addition to teaching, today (which I do every Tues/Thurs, at 8am!), I attended a roundtable headlined by Dick Hebdige, entitled, "When is Art Research." I went because Hebdige's Subculture had quite an influence on me, in my younger days, and also because I do struggle with the contentious relationship between the art world & the academy. It was actually Anne Walsh who got up and said that asking when art is research is like trying to justify art practice, from the perspective of an academy that sees it as a lesser practice, rather than asking when research is art. I'm very intrigued by research-heavy creative practices, right now, and I suppose I'm doing much of that myself. I used to try to forge such a separation between my art practice, curating, and academic work, but now there are so many areas of overlap. I'm not sure if I've finally seen the light of interconnectedness between the things I'm into, or if I'm just becoming a one-trick-pony. All I know is that I would be into doing what I'm doing, whether or not anyone ever ratified it as 'art' or 'research'...

Happy Anniversary, MTAA!

It seems only fitting that, on the one year anniversary of the launch of MTAA's One Year Performance Video, I should record the voiceover for the optional audio commentary track for the Aspect DVD Magazine on which documentation of their piece will be included. I tried to do it justice, but that seems a doomed enterprise, considering what an important and engaging piece it is. Usually I head into the studio and mumble for a couple hours and then Aspect publisher Michael Mittelman makes me sound smart, in the editing room. (This worked well with Tony Discenza, Jim Campbell, and Lee Walton.) Fingers are crossed, coast2coast, that he can work his mojo this time. Meanwhile, shout outs and congrats to MTAA. If you weren't already, you've become total freakin art starz (say that with a Dr Evil accent!), in the year since the 1YPV has been up. You deserve it! I can't wait to hear and view your karaoke antics! p.s. Have you ever used Google Image to search for images for 'MTAA'? There's some very interesting stuff out there...

Cryin Over Katrina

If the question is "What am I doing with my life," then the answer, this week, is certainly "Crying over Katrina." --More like crying for our country, which has been stabbed in the back by "our employee," as Cindy Sheehan smartly puts it. Check out the articulate points that LA's Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard made, on Meet the Press, about how FEMA is screwed and "bureacracy is committing murder," as the US abandons its people. (Video via MTAA--thanks, TWhid!) It kind of makes Kanye West's comments about GW's sentiments for African Americans seem spot-on. P.S. Just found this. P.P.S. And this.