My friend Don (a.k.a. No-Carrier) got sick and asked me to sub for him this Friday at Lit Lounge, playing with Nullsleep, Anamanaguchi and Cheap Dinosaurs. Feel better, Don! Here’s the show flyer and info.

The Blue and Red 3D Spectacular
Nullsleep
Anamanaguchi
Cheap Dinosaurs

Friday, 9 pm
Lit Lounge (2nd Ave between 5th and 6th St)
$6 cover (I think)
Ages: 21+

How can you argue with this video? These kids are cool.

Kids Connect is going very well. Our students are learning a lot, they like us, we like them, it’s an avalanche of busy and all good. Tomorrow we’ll open a window (read: video conference) with our counterparts in Amsterdam; we put the above video together in VJ-U today with Benton Bainbridge, who thought it’d make a great welcome when they join us on the Kids Connect island. More later, stories and pictures now:

Josh Ott invited me to draw with him last night at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg. Josh has written a phenomenal live visual drawing program called superDraw which, surprisingly, I’ve never posted about before. At base it’s a drawing program: the performer draws with a Wacom tablet and the lines are transformed with beautiful effects, the list of which keeps growing and growing as Josh adds to the program. For some time now, it’s been capable of two performers drawing simultaneously, which is what we did last night, playing along with a phenomenal DJ (whose name I didn’t catch) and Mad EP — of Psychasthenia Society — who (dammit) I haven’t posted about before, either. It was thoroughly engaging and fun, like every time I’ve played superDraw with Josh. After much persuasion, it looks like I’ve talked him into considering porting superDraw to Max/MSP/Jitter. Anton discovered a relatively easy way to port Processing code to Jitter and we’re going to do a test port with part (all?) of superDraw — so clean up that code and send it over, Josh.

The ever-engaging and delightful Chika played with the reggae/dance group after our set, with her increasingly engrossing textural, psychedelic visuals. Bravo, Chika.

I bumped into Matt Moses last night, a very funny and genial improviser and playwright. Our groups Gunshow and Stockholm Syndrome used to do a lot of shows together and we had the same coach, the venerable Dan Goldstein, improv teacher, decision studies psychologist and marketing genius. Matt’s moving to Yale for a 3 year stint in their graduate playwright program. Yay, Matt! I hope you’ll find grad school as much of a growing experience as I have.

And speaking of great playwrights, I got an email from the UCB Theater, telling me that Anthony King’s funny, charming, ridiculous musical comedy spoof GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! will have a free show tomorrow night. You can hear some songs from the show on its very own myspace and read the show’s very! enthusiastic! website!. Anthony (book) and Scott Brown (music), play the parts of the show’s chipper, clueless creators, Bud Davenport and Doug Simon, who did all their research about Johann Gutenberg using Microsoft Encarta. My favorite part of the show was the hats: Bud and Doug have dozens of cheap mesh hats with the names of the show’s characters painstakingly spelled out in serif Sharpie. At any given moment in the show, each of them will have 6 hats in his hands, doffing and donning them again and again. It’s deadpan, dead-on musical satire from end to end and joyfully silly. UCB’s site says it’s sold out already but there’ll be some tickets at the door.

Tonight, I’ll be performing at Bunker at SubTonic, the 2nd show of a developing performance called Idle in the Saved Night, inspired by the writings of Deborah Levitt. It’s a mixed piece for live visuals and acting. In a nutshell, I’ll be playing video (of mental patients from the 40s) from my laptop to the projector, standing in front of the projection screen …acting funny… and capturing my strange behavior and gestures with a live camera, which’ll then get chopped up and spit back out to the screen on top of me. It will be divine. And since the music at SubTonic is curated separately from the visuals, I’ll be doing it mute. Instead of speaking the texts I’ve gathered for the videos, I’ll run them on the screen as text. ‘Twill be an interesting challenge.

By the way, I highly recommend EyeWash tonight. Most of the visual acts will be getting physical: from performance art to burlesque to unique interfaces. This is good. For did John not say, let’s get into physical/ Let me hear your body talk? Should be swell. I’ll be there if I get my patch ready in time.

This just in, a great show to see Saturday night featuring my Gunshow-mate Ryan Sturt:

Have you ever seen Showgirls? Pretty crappy right? What would make it better you ask? If it were done with sockpuppets! Yup. I’m in a sockpuppet version of Showgirls. It’s been running for a few years in Chicago and played in New York in 2002, and now it’s back in our city with fresh jokes and extra filth. It’s every Saturday night at 8pm until the end of June.

It’s super raunchy. The puppets will dance your face off! I’m playing a couple different characters in it, and the character voice stuff has been a lot of fun.

Come if you can!

For more info, directions, and tickets, here’s the flyer and the ticket link:

http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/115654

vade// will play at the Bunker as well — he has been absolutely tearing it up lately with his visuals — just brilliant work. He played at {R} A K E at Monkeytown with Larry 7 on Wednesday, an unusual pairing that kept them both on their toes. It was gorgeous. The entire evening was, to be precise, ecstatic. Now you know I am often accused of hyperbole and over-enthusiasm and to this I would retort: wake up! The world is full of beauty and interest and commonality if you’re paying attention. I pay attention. Hence, I enjoy things more fully, perhaps, than the next human.

Joyful details of which I speak, of {R} A K E, the evening of electro-acoustic music and visuals run by Satoshi Takeishi, Shoko Nagai and Adam Kendall:

• the first act was Kato Hideki (solo bass guitar) and Giles Hendrix* (video). Kato was exceptionally sensitive to his instrument and the sound in the room. He drew unusual sounds out of the bass, from the lightest of touches with a bow to heavy slams of his fist against the body, punctuated with long, deliberate silences. Giles’ visuals were equally slow and exploratory. I must admit I went into a trance/fell asleep at some points, which sounds bad but felt great: I drifted lightly in and out of the sound and light. As I suspected, Kato uses a custom tuning system based on prime numbers. I suspected it was different — not that it was prime.

• How can I describe Vortex’s music? Words fail me. It was an ecstatic experience. Satoshi is a percussionist but not limited to struck instruments — he also played the waterphone with a bow that night. Shoko plays keyboards and (what I can only describe as) Pan pipes. They both do some Max/MSP manipulation and layering of the sound, which seems to run on auto-pilot mostly. Each time I’ve heard them play it’s been a unique performance, an environment of sound created entirely of the moment. Unlike many musicians, they respond to your visuals when you play with them; I feel honored that my first visual gig was with them at {R} A K E. Wednesday they played with visuals by Shimpei Takeda, who used only a video camera, a flashlight and a jar of water to make a truly beautiful light show. Chika whispered to me that it reminded her of my work with live camera, which is quite a flattering comparison. Seeing it gave me a shove to do a similar work with water and bubbles I’ve had in mind for a while.

• It was an evening of synaesthesia, the visuals and the music combined – to use the oft-abused word — in synergy. The last act was no exception. Anton (vade//) and Larry 7 played the room like a drum. Monkeytown’s back room, if you haven’t seen it, is a hard-walled cube with projections on each wall. A visualist can easily blind the audience and break the mood with the combined light from the four projectors and I’ve been thankful for my earplugs on several occasions when the audio artists have found the resonant frequency of the room and made it ring how I imagine the inside of the fuel chamber of the Space Shuttle must sound. (Alright, that last was definitely hyperbole.) However, Larry 7 and vade// did no such thing. Larry, who I’m told used to work for Andy Warhol, played with a bunch of analogue electronics, tube amps, a multi-stringed instrument with mics on it, and four mics arranged in a cross on a rotating turntable. Also quite difficult to describe. Let’s just say he succeeded in his aim, “to set up situations where he has almost no control over what happens, so he can be entertained along with the audience.” Anton’s setup is as digital as Larry’s is analogue — just a laptop — and he usually doesn’t take his MIDI keyboard along so it’s all controlled with the mouse and keyboard.

Again, beautiful stuff. I almost stayed home to program but I’m so glad I went. Time to program now: the patch for tonight is almost ready. I rebuilt it from scratch to make sure I got the order of operations right.

* note: I am very envious of Giles’ domain name.

Addendum

If you don’t bother to read my del.icio.us links in the spliced feed, you’ll have missed a great listening opportunity: an album of Radiohead covers called Exit Music – Songs with Radio Heads. I particularly recommend the cover of Just by Mark Ronson and Alex Greenwald, which reveals the hidden funk of RH with handclaps, djembe and sexy horn blasts. My Flickr photos are also in the spliced feed and I’m just about to upload a shitload of cameraphone pics featuring the flowers of which I spoke yesterday. Name the purple pom-pom, s’il vous plait.

My allergies started two nights ago. The allergen index is high and the predominant pollens are oak, birch and maple. I always forget this stuff so for future reference and so on and so forth. That is all.

In other news, I’m performing a work in progress at Share this Sunday. Writing the Max patches for it has been quite satisfying. The big challenge is writing the video step sequencer*. I’m finding the logical stuff just as fun as the video manipulation.

We’re hosting DrupalCamp at Poly this weekend. Anton and I are hosting/representing IDMI, but I’ll probably be spending a lot of time hiding and working on my patches. :-/

And furthermore, there’s great stuff going on at Issue Project Room this Friday but I can’t go. Perhaps you can go. Think about it.

* Mom and Dad, this means something that plays through a bunch of videos in sequence automatically. It’s trickier than it sounds, especially if you want it to be dynamic, e.g., play them in random order or with crossfades.

Written yesterday. I’m at the New School, doing an all-day webcast for the India China Institute’s big conference, which brings to mind Ross’s recent post about educational webcasts and archiving. The New School Online is a great initiative and it gets the job done, though I wish they’d chosen open source technologies instead of Real and the need for a CMS grows as each event gets added to the hand-coded archives. I’ve yet to learn how much traffic they actually get, but I figure it’s small yet growing. As each month (not year) goes by, more and more activities — economic and cultural — make use of telecollaborative tech like streaming video meetings, wikis and such. One of our selling points to parents for Kids Connect is that their children will have a leg up in the small, loosely organized, distributed businesses of tomorrow* by playing and experimenting with video performance and virtual (Second Life) collaboration. I’m going to get a prototype working environment set up in Second Life as soon as possible. I’m looking forward to Ross and other educators asking hard questions and shredding my assumptions so our workshops in SL can be truly valuable, not just buzzword inclusion.

Speaking of truly valuable places in Second Life, check out _blacklibrary, a cultural center slash micro-publisher. They host fiction, non-fiction, games, graphic novels, and art including sculpture. They’re going to distribute my comic.

* And no, that’s not THE LAND OF THE FUTURE with food pills and shiny jumpsuits — it’s…well, 10 minutes from now.

Sorry for the silence here — I’m spectacularly busy, as you might have guessed. I’ll try to post a few times a week: it’ll be brief, messy and the mundane will creep in but hey, doesn’t that describe everything? As I said 10 hours ago, my new thesis is Kids Connect, which brings together a lot of my interests: improv theatre, networked performance and collaboration, Second Life performance, teaching and has the added benefit of institutional support so more of the being-the-producer work is taken care of and I can devote myself to artistic direction and teaching. In other news, the semester is drawing rapidly to a close and I have a paper for Law, a presentation and a project for Media History, a project for Max/MSP/Jitter as well. Exciting stuff. I’m reading Deep Time of the Media by Siegfried Zielinski, key ideas of which can be found in this brief Rhizome interview — and I’m presenting on it and Spectres of the Spectrum (a messy, funny film collage — see this review) on Friday. Key thought from Deep Time for you before I get back to it: the present concentration of power is in control of time, not space. E.g., TV, pace Tivo. (Man, I hope someone gets that besides me.)

O, to be asleep instead of writing at 2:11 AM. O, alack this brain of mine.

The long and short, quickly: got back from Texas on Sunday. Four of us Share people went down to setup a Share jam at the Media Archaeology Festival at Aurora Picture Show. Went great, saw and met many wonderfully sweet people. Pics to come on the Share site.

The big news: my thesis has changed. A great opportunity fell in my lap; things folded together. I sat in on a net conference call two weeks ago and whiff-boom-bang! I’m suddenly co-organizing and teaching Kids Connect, a series of summer workshops for kids in theatrical and technological collaboration, sponsored by ZoomLab, the Waag Society and Polytechnic University. It brings together a lot of my interests and goals — it gelled quickly, a total no-brainer. One thing I brought to the table is the still relatively untapped potential for education and performance in Second Life and it’s that which is keeping me up brainstorming right now. What would make a compelling indigenous performance in Second Life? That is, one that is not virtual set dressing for a real life performance but a truly virtual performance that couldn’t be done in meatspace.

Wandering through SL, I’m struck again and again by how meatoid it is. Virtual human bodies walking on two legs and seeing with one eye. Houses with four walls as if there were a need for load-bearing members. It seems to me that an indigenous, exciting Second Life performance ought to be code-intensive (possibly generative), interactive, and transformative — literally body-changing — warping your avatar, multiplying and distributing its eyes and ears. Kaleidescopic eyes as big as houses. Think a live machinima of The Matrix: The Musical! with Vishnu as Neo, dance numbers choreographed by the mutant child of Busby Berkeley and Chris Cunningham). Hopefully this silly hyperbole sounds more exciting to you than listening to streaming audio while watching a jerky animation of a guy playing a guitar.

Not that I’m no longer into Real Life/Second Life performances, of course.

Maybe I can get to sleep now.

p.s.

Inworld I’m Dan Magpie and here’s a link to my land.

Been interested in the downtown music and visual scene but just don’t have a lot of time to investigate? Take a crash course for just $30 this Monday night as a phenomenal array of more than sixty downtown artists come together to benefit David Linton of UnityGain at Tonic. What, you’ve gotta work ’til nine? Then see the latter part of the show for just $10.

As the guy behind Unity Gain, David Linton has been making video art and supporting video artists since before I was born. Come out and see a phenomenal array of downtown audio and visual artists blow the roof off Tonic. Come see Eric Bogosian and Kate Valk, Diamanda Galas and Shelley Hirsch, Koosil-ja and Lance Blisters and many, many more. If you saw these artists individually you’d probably end up paying a thousand bucks. See them all Monday for $30 (or $10 for just the Subtonic events).

David Linton’s New York 5.0

A 50-year celebration and benefit at Tonic (107 Norfolk St. between Rivington & Delancey, NYC)
Monday, March 20, 2005 8 pm till late
Full info at http://www.unitygain.org/benefit

part I : ‘PARTNERS IN TIME’ featuring live performances by

Diamanda Galas, Christian Marclay/Ikue Mori/Anthony Coleman, Lee Ranaldo, Eric Bogosian, Matthew Ostrowski, Shelley Hirsch/David Weinstein, Kate Valk (of The Wooster Group), Koosil-ja, Charles Atlas, Hahn Rowe with Raz Mesinai, and the Alien Comic. With Master of Ceremonies John Gernand and closing remarks by “Sally Rand”(Toni Dove).

part II : UnityGain

The legendary electronic soiree ‘UnityGain’ follows immediately in the Tonic main space @ 11:15 pm featuring live collaborative audio visual performances by:

Audio artists – Charles Cohen, Antfactor, qpe, Lloop, Warbulator (Jodi Shapiro), Doily, Bubblyfish, Glomag, David Last, Brian Moran, Gen Ken Montgomery, Zach Layton and Bruce Tovsky. Visual artists – Benton-C, Angie Eng, Bill Etra, c.h.i.a.k.i., feedBUCK GaLORE, Naval Cassidy, Andy Graydon, Giles Hendrix, Adam Kendall, Katherine Liberovskaya, Lu(x)z, Peter Shapiro, Caspar Stracke, CHiKA.

part III : Nought for Naught

From 9 pm on ‘Nought for Naught’ in the Subtonic Lounge offers a packed roster of DJ, VJ & live audio-visual performers into the wee hours, featuring:

Aerostatic, Darryl Hell, Danny Hamilton, DJ $mall Change, DJ Spinoza, Firehorse, Jason BK (Blackkat), Toshio Kajiwara, Lance Blisters (AV), LoVid (AV), Socks and Sandals;Chris Jordan, Eric Dunlap, Eric Redlinger, Dan Vatsky and Dan Winckler, and Jeremy Slater.

Background

In celebration of the fiftieth birthday of David Linton, downtown music pioneer, Tonic has donated its space for an entire evening of performances by musicians and artists who have worked with Linton over the past twenty-five years.

Unfortunately, David’s birthday has been darkened by a most distressing event: he was recently robbed in his home at knifepoint, emerging fortunately unscathed, but losing all of his equipment, which sadly contained much of his recent work. In order to recoup the loss of what can be replaced, and salute his talents and contributions to music in New York, his friends and collaborators through the years are joining together for a night of multimedia performances on March 20th. We hope you can join us, to both celebrate his work and help make it possible for him to continue it.

Tickets

Tickets are $30.00 for the full evening including: ‘PARTNERS IN TIME’, ‘UNITYGAIN’ and ‘NOUGHT for NAUGHT’. $10.00 for ‘UNITYGAIN’ and ‘NOUGHT for NAUGHT’ only.

Advance tickets recommended; available now at Tonic (107 Norfolk Street) and Other Music (15 East 4th Street). Cash only tickets will be sold at the door on March 20, 2006 subject to availability.

For updates check http://www.unitygain.org/benefit.

BENEFIT ONLINE ART AUCTION

Monday March 6th – Monday March 27th, 2006

In consideration of David Linton’s commitment to multimedia and video art, the Outpost, a resource for artists in new media and video, is sponsoring an art auction as part of the benefit activities for David Linton’s NY 5.0. Works will be auctioned online at http://www.unitygain.org/auction, and all money raised will be contributed to the David Linton Recovery Fund.

Participating artists include Laura Parnes, Michael Smith, Ralph Lemon, Javier Tellez, John Brattin, Robert Boyd, Oliver Herring, Barbara Ess, Johanna Malinowska, Andrew Sutherland and Caspar Stracke.

Private donations will be accepted at Tonic on March 20th by Stephanie Palmer. Questions regarding donations may be addressed to lintonbenefit@gmail.com.

http://unitygain.org/benefit/
http://unitygain.org/auction/
http://tonicnyc.com