Me @ Side Cinema (Newcastle, UK)

Sarah Cook curated "The One That Got Away," the fictional reenactment of my American Idol audition, into her super interesting-looking video program, RE-ENACTMENT & SIMULATION NIGHT, at Side Cinema. The piece will screen this Thursday:

Thurs 3rd NOV, 7.30PM
RE-ENACTMENT & SIMULATION NIGHT
Join Sarah Cook as she showcases artworks that engage in the practice of re-enactment or the technical phenomenon of simulation. Featured artists include: Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie, Ben Coode-Adams & Marcus Coates, Ulrike Kubatta, Iain Forsyth &Jane Pollard, Marisa S. Olson, and others. This programme is supported by the University of Sunderland and coincides with the exhibition “Once More… With Feeling” at the Reg Vardy Gallery - opening November 1, 6-8 pm.

My Spring 06 Class

I think the class is already over-enrolled (not because I'm popular, just because it meets a core requirement), but I thought I'd post the description for my next class @ Berkeley because I'm really looking forward to it:

[blahblahblah] Readings and screenings will be focused on the theme of "representations of technology" and we will contrast fictional works by George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson with films of the 1980s revolving around video games, including Tron, War Games, and Cloak & Dagger. Our discussions will be augmented by critical writings about the relation of video games to cinema, authorship, and agency. Toward the end of the semester, we will also look at works of contemporary software, internet, video, and algorithmic art employing video games as source material. The emphasis, in each case, will be on close-reading and analysis, but in the overall course of synthesizing these readings and screenings, we will come to consider the formal and narrative conventions of representations of technology, the political and cinematic contexts of our materials, and the history and theory of machines and machine culture.

At the beginning of the semester I'll also show some Chaplin, some early American train wreck and roller coaster films, and good stuff like that...

Shout Out: Cory Arcangel & Tom Moody

Today on Rhizome we published an interview of Tom Moody by Cory Arcangel. I admire both artists very much, so I thought I'd pass it on. Enjoy!

P.S. I just looked at Tom's blog and saw this comment, with which I so so identify:

One reason I started the blog was to create an umbrella for various activities and have them be seen as all coming under the art rubric. But people still want to you to be one thing. Unless you say your sole activity is being an artist--then people want you to be more than one thing (e.g., "artist and blogger"). The only way to be thought of as "just an artist" is to be like Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting all day and sleeping on the streets at night rolled up inside a carpet.

Super Shout Out: Tommy Becker

Anyone who reads my blog (wait, is anyone reading my blog? with the idol project I checked my stats obsessively, but with these blogger sites, I'm not sure I can--please, if you're reading, send me a love letter, some hatemail, anything to let me know you exist. If a blog falls in the woods and nobody.....) Starting over, it's no surprise that I'm a fan of Tommy Becker. He's a great artist and a great person and he's just earned the first two-time shout out on this blog! Yesterday he came to speak to my class of 18 Berkeley sophomores, none of whom are artists or art history majors. I think it's safe to guess that he's the first artist many of them have ever met and I think it's also safe to say that he blew their minds--or at least confused them in an exciting way... He showed a number of his videos, presenting their usual monologues live, sort of like he does in this video. Mind you, he did this at 8am on a morning they had a paper due, while we were all crammed into a lovely but tiny classroom on the top floor of the poshest library on campus. But the fun didn't stop there. He also distributed felt gloves with scripts inside of them and had each student (and me!) don the gloves and act out the scripts, in unison, kind of like you see here. If it didn't make them think about authorship, performance, genre, word-image relationships, or any of the other exciting themes of our class, perhaps it provided them with one of the few Tuesday mornings they'll remember five years from now, when they are wheeling and dealing Berkeley grads or deeply entrenched in finishing their PhDs in biochemistry... Tommy wrapped-up by giving an excellent talk about his process, as an artist. Though I've been talking to him about his work for five years, I came to see it in a new way, and I saw the confused looks on at least some of my students' faces melt into smiles and nods by 9:30. It was actually a pretty profound morning. Thanks, Tommy!

Update: I wrote this article about Tommy Becker's audio installation at Art in General a few weeks ago, but I just found a free slot to run it on Net Art News. Here it is.

Yesterday's News

I forgot to post info about my inclusion in Cinema-Scope London. Or, rather, I was confused about what week it was happening, since I'm screening the same video in the UK next week. Backing up........ Lee Wells included me in his ambitious video art show, "Tomorrow Was the Day Before," at Cinema-Scope London. He showed "The One That Got Away," my nine-minute fictional reenactment of my American Idol audition, and apparently it screened five times a day and got "really great response." Awesome! Pop Idol launched while I was living in the UK (all lonely with no friends, a far away studio, and not much to do but order curries and watch tv... it's glamorous!), so even though my American Idol Audition Training Blog dealt largely with American values (like, uh, democracy, Western beauty, and the liberty to supersize) and my own performance in the video is valley girl to the hilt, I'm excited that it translated well to a British audience.

too much fun

I just came back from another whirlwind trip to New York. Though I was there for ten days, I hardly got to see everyone I wanted to, and I spent most of my time trying to be in seven places at once. In general, most of my trip revolved around Rhizome, starting with an early meeting at the Guggenheim, on the first day, to talk about curating some fun collaborative programs for Rhizome's 10th anniversary. (Big thanks to Christina Yang for bringing coffee!!!) I spent a good percentage of my days working at the New Museum offices, and was lucky to see a good deal of Lauren Cornell, Cory Arcangel, and the boys of MTAA. I played phone tag, all week, with him, him, and this guy. (Though above is a photo taken by MTAA's MRiver, of his collaborator TWhid and myself sitting in Lee Walton's installation at Art in General, after our meeting at Artists Space, regarding the show I'm curating there--We Are All Together: Mediated Performance, in conjunction with the Performa Biennial--which includes MTAA, Lee Walton, Chris Sollars, Kate Pocrass, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Cat Mazza. More on this later...) I also seemed to keep running into the men behind The Thing. We had a fun time at the opening of the Disinformation show, at Apex Art, and later chowing-down at one of Steven Rand's famous upstairs dinner parties. These days, despite working in the arts, I hardly get to stop and see much good work. I did really enjoy the Omer Fast show at Postmasters, the Richard Anthony Martinez show at Foley Gallery, Multi Plex 2 at Smack Mellon, MTAA's Infinite Smile at Video Dumbo, and performances by BARR and Khaela Maricich at the Kitchen. I also had an informal studio visit with Dawn Clements and saw her amazing new work. (Dawn was in my White Columns show and I wrote the catalogue essay for her recent Pierogi & Feigen shows. I'm a huge fan! It's funny how I'm such a high tech girl and, yet, I'm so attracted to good old fashioned drawing!) Rhizome had a fun party at the New Museum, to celebrate the completion of the net art works we commissioned in 04-05. Speaking of parties, I had a great time at the Printed Matter book launch for Paper Rad's new book, and later at their EAI performance. (Check here for deets on their tour.) That's about all the news that's fit to print. Big props to Kurt Bigenho for letting me crash at his place for so long. (Kurt's one of the few people I know with as many jobs/identities as me. It's hard to decide which URL to link to for him. Trust me when I say he's working hard on fun stuff.) And, while I'm at it, more props to Francis Hwang for buying me lunch and generally making my job easier.

Magnetic Protestry during Spectator T

Beginning this week, and through November (while supplies last), visitors to select locations in the city of Sheffield (UK) should keep an eye out for my PSYOP cassettes, which I'm calling Magnetic Protestry. The top secret contents of these magnetic tapes include historic protest songs and first-person narratives related to bomb threats, strangers, motorcycles, postcards, and machine guns.

I also write

A vast majority of the articles I write are not available online, and the ones that are usually get bookmarked here. But since this is the month to pimp Rhizome, I thought I'd link to two recent Net Art News pieces written by myself. Net Art News is produced by Rhizome and edited by yours truly. Here they are, in all their bite-sized glory:

Big Baller on Lee Walton's Red Ball project.

The [New] Power Generation on the exhibition The Art Formerly Known As New Media, at the Banff Centre for the Arts

PS You can syndicate Net Art News on your site or blog and/or get it on your handheld. Details here.

Teaching and Talking

I feel like I work hard, all week, every week, and at the end of that week I think to myself that I should make some kind of blog post, if only to prove to myself that I got somewhere or did something. This was a longgg week, on a personal and professional level. Most of what happened won't be bloggable for a bit longer, not because it's exciting and top secret, but just because it can't be articulated or is best saved for a more timely announcement of a show or project, etc. Needless to say, the week was full of the usual: working, writing a few articles, making art, etc, and this weekend will be filled with fun stuff, like meeeting with the folks of Anno Domini Gallery and NPR to discuss plans for ISEA06 and going to see the first cut of Strange Culture, Lynn Hershman's film about Steve Kurtz.

But this week seems to have been dominated more by teaching and talking about teaching. This week, my students were required to give oral presentations on a work of new media art and I was so pleasantly surprised with the works they discovered and got into. They ranged from Nam June Paik to Spike Jonze, but in between there was Cory Arcangel, Ken Feingold, Mannfred Mohr, Mauricio Arango, Jim Campbell, Lee Walton, Vuk Cosic, Paul Pfeiffer, Jeanne Finley, and others. (Sorry I'm too lazy to find and code links, but here's one to Google.) It was pretty exciting.

But, also this week, I happened to speak to a number of friends who are "young" teachers and they all said that they are constantly trying to improve their teaching skills and styles, and that they are all constantly trying to overcome a level of insecuirty about their pedagogical methods, levels of authority, etc. It was interesting to know that while I'm worried about and almost overcompensating for fear of coming off as a dumb blonde, another friend of mine is worried about coming off as the "quiet Asian girl." One friend did admit what I'd suspected all along, though: men have it easier in the classroom, as people don't second guess their knowledge or authority as much. I mean, I bet Mr. T never had a problem with self-confidence.