SHARE this Sunday, as I am wont to say, was nifty. I shared some vids with Fabian so he could play with them in Arkaos; he gave me a bunch of great photos. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that hard to access his PC over the network.

I like Fabian’s website — it’s slim, jumpy, and the little message pane is nifty. Plus I just love reading German, even though I can only decipher every tenth word. So heiss! This coming Sunday will be Fabian’s last SHARE for a while, unfortunately; his tourist visa is expiring and he’s going back to Germany. Happily, he’s got a new girl/friend to meet back in his hometown — they met online, just like Beth and me, soon after his girl back home dumped him — so it’s not a complete bummer for him. He hopes to return next year.

There were two featured artists, Kera Nagel (Axiomatic Integration) and Andre Aspelmeier (Gradient Communication). Each performed solo and then, together, as Incite/. Their handles are a mouthful but they were very sweet and their stuff was really good — syncopated, glitchy electronica accompanied by minimal, tense video work perfectly synced to each musical element. Kera’s second piece really demonstrated the value of setting a long, slow, inviting groove before breaking it. Slow pans across panoramic photos with two very subtle effects — a small wavy distortion and a narrowing of the letterbox, both perfectly Mickey Moused* again — it invited you into the image and made the eventual break even more powerful and entrancing (being as it was a rotating, diagonal bar of red shot through with gold cross-hatching). The medium (and the techno music to which it’s often set) lends itself to speed and disjunction — it’s good to slow things down and restrict your palette to a handful of colors.

Andre did his solo set entirely from samples of a tin box containing two springs and a contact microphone. It was very cool.

The video for their dual set had one section of simple diffraction gratings against each other, an idea I’ve had since college but never tried, sure that it would suck. I was wrong. The moral: fuck doubt.

I met a sweet woman named Angel, a friend of Daniel Vatsky (one of the SHARE regulars, who is also sweet). She liked my phys_plant5 stuff (my most developed video performance piece at the moment). She runs a monthy show out in Williamsburg called Dogs Blood Rising. She asked for my card — I might get my first gig!

This Sunday Eric, Isabelle (who’s in Amsterdam) and I will be collaborating in a Keyworx performance, working concept: figure/ground (me/Isabelle), floater/modifier (Eric), which roles will rotate. I am very excited.

Andre’s nifty little MIDI controller (by Faderfox).

I snuck a peek at their performance notes; either they’re mathematically inclined…or they’re spies.

Andre’s box. The lid was embossed, “STAR TREK: the Next Generation”.

Andre and Kera kicking it deutsche-style.

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p>* Film slang for scoring that’s synced precisely to the action of the scene, e.g., Mickey gets clobbered with a poker: bonk!**

** Sproing, fweet, vwip, schloop…you get the idea.