Monday, December 21, 2009
"Dance Like a Bug" in Utne Reader.
The Utne Reader--based in Minneapolis--has included a piece about my work, by writer Keith Goetzman, in their Arts blog. Read it here!
Friday, December 18, 2009
I'll call you back, Santa.
Tonight Eric missed a call from Atlanta, Georgia, and the caller left a message on his phone. Instead of being an invitation to interview with a certain research institute that Eric recently applied to, the message was from a little kid who was trying to reach Santa Claus.
Here's my rough translation: Kid: [... record it.] Lady: You have to tell him what you want! Kid: Hi Santa, I'll call you back when you get home, OK? I want a [stuffed bunny], and a tricycle, and a wooden tricycle and that's all. And I want my wooden tricycle [case].
Listen here:
Lady: Say "I love you, Santa!"
Kid: "I love you, Santa!"
Maxime posits that the confusion is due to Eric's unruly beard.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Coconut shelter.
Thanks to Aydin Örstan over at Snail's Tales for the heads up about the Indonesian veined octopus using coconut shells as defensive tools. More info here.
Experiments and Cross-Atlantic Daydreams.
I'm experimenting with a 3-channel video piece, using footage that I shot at Blue Mountain Center this last fall. Working with multiple channels is exciting, because I get to plan the visual and sonic relationships among multiple pieces of video rather than leaving it up to chance (like I did when I presented my pieces from The Timber at Art in General this past summer.) I'm letting a single soundtrack guide the 3 separate video channels, and creating intersections and synchronizations of movement.
I anticipate that this will be the beginning of a whole series of multi-channel pieces. What I need to figure out, though, is the best way to power a multi-channel HD piece that has to be perfectly in sync. I think it'll be an interesting challenge working out the details.
On a different note, Eric and I said goodbye yesterday to our very close friend Maxime who is making his way across the ocean and back home to France after living in New York for a little over 2 years. It was a weepy business, and Eric and I are already wistfully reminiscing about our many adventures and discoveries with our dear friend. On the brighter side (well, hopefully it will feel brighter when I feel less sad), now we've got a very good reason to start planning a cross-Atlantic excursion!
I anticipate that this will be the beginning of a whole series of multi-channel pieces. What I need to figure out, though, is the best way to power a multi-channel HD piece that has to be perfectly in sync. I think it'll be an interesting challenge working out the details.
On a different note, Eric and I said goodbye yesterday to our very close friend Maxime who is making his way across the ocean and back home to France after living in New York for a little over 2 years. It was a weepy business, and Eric and I are already wistfully reminiscing about our many adventures and discoveries with our dear friend. On the brighter side (well, hopefully it will feel brighter when I feel less sad), now we've got a very good reason to start planning a cross-Atlantic excursion!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Timber in Souvenirs From Earth
Videos from The Timber series will soon be included in Souvenirs From Earth, a TV broadcast that I have been involved with since Spring, 2008. The broadcast is devoted to video art and includes works by a range of international artists.
How to see it: Souvenirs from Earth TV is available on cable in Germany and France. Currently it can be received through UnityMedia, Kabel Baden Wuerttemberg and the French network FREE. The distribution includes North Rhine Westphalia, Hesse, Baden Wuerttemberg via cable, and France via ADSL TV. Extension to further cable and ADSL networks planned for spring 2009.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Buttercunt.
I wanted to share this little gem, which I found on the website of the artist Tobias Sternberg, whom I exhibited with this summer in Lisbon at Pavilhão 28, and who, like me, is part of the Souvenirs From Earth television project which broadcasts in Germany and France.
From the artist's website: "A site specific sculpture made for a run down mens room just off the main exhibition space in the Goldsmith's College Degreeshow. Placed as something you would run into by mistake rather than as an artwork, it is an ephemeral sculpture in cheap margarine garnished with human hair. It is both alluring and a bit revolting, a packaged solution for manly needs, but best used in imagination only. Buttercunt is softer than human flesh but sticky as a disease. Its delicately sculpted surface would leave traces and fingerprints of anyone daring enough to touch. It is a secret phantasy come to life in an unlikely and abject location."
Buttercunt
Tobias Sternberg
25cm x 15cm x 10cm
margarine and hair
2005
From the artist's website: "A site specific sculpture made for a run down mens room just off the main exhibition space in the Goldsmith's College Degreeshow. Placed as something you would run into by mistake rather than as an artwork, it is an ephemeral sculpture in cheap margarine garnished with human hair. It is both alluring and a bit revolting, a packaged solution for manly needs, but best used in imagination only. Buttercunt is softer than human flesh but sticky as a disease. Its delicately sculpted surface would leave traces and fingerprints of anyone daring enough to touch. It is a secret phantasy come to life in an unlikely and abject location."
Soft Science: The Human Animal at Video Data Bank
Two of my videos (Nightspider, 2006 and Mudeye, 2009) are included in the video compilation Soft Science: Human Animal, curated by Rachel Mayeri. This anthology was recently screened at the Antimatter Film Festival, and has just been selected by the Video Data Bank for distribution!
SOFT SCIENCE: THE HUMAN ANIMAL
Curated by Rachel Mayeri
A collection of ten short films from the intersection of science and art, Soft Science: the Human Animal investigates human-animal relationships and systems: allegorical stories, explorations in anthropomorphism, experimental documentation and interspecies collaborations.
Once Upon a Time
Corinna Schnitt | 2006 | Germany | 22:00
Corinna Schnitt’s Once Upon a Time is structured like a fairy tale. People leave their house for the day, and then animals enter one by one. First kittens and parrots arrive, followed by larger animals. They sniff each other, claw the furniture, and drink from a fish bowl. An unmanned video camera records what happens as chaos ensues. The effect is to tear apart the comfortable notion of domesticity—a term that suggests both taming and home—as shared between humans and animals, especially their pets.
Harmony
Jim Trainor | 2004 | USA | 11:00
In Harmony, Jim Trainor’s darkly comic voiceover contrasts with his cartoon drawings of charismatic megafauna. The lions, dolphins, and bonobos depicted in his felt-tip pen animated films speak with brute honesty about their crimes, at least as they would be defined by human social standards: infanticide, gang rape and incest. Dubbed the “Walt Disney of Sexual Anxiety” by one film critic, Trainor’s film strips the warm fuzziness from the nature documentary genre.
Family Portrait
Nicolas Primat with Patrick Munck | 2004 | France | 3:00
Nicolas Primat was a unique and inspiring artist who passed away in 2009 at the age of 42. In residencies at zoos and labs, Primat worked closely with apes and monkeys, exploring and engaging in the social worlds of the human’s closest relatives. His intuitive performances with primates show a human who learned how to ingratiate himself with other species. In Family Portrait, the artist is swarmed by a playful troop of squirrel monkeys.
Night Spider & Mudeye
Julia Oldham | 2006/2009 | USA | 3:30
A self-proclaimed lover of bugs, Julia Oldham studies insects to understand them in a playful yet deep way, making contact with them and becoming them, to answer the question, “Can a creature so small and strange experience joy, fear, love and desire?” By engaging in their behavior, movements, and rituals, her approach to being one with the insect mind by biomimicry through dance has prompted her to observe a strangely intuitive connection to these movements, accessible through rhythms, patterns, gestures, and relationships.
Impersonator
Alison Ruttan | 2005 | USA | 3:00
In Alison Ruttan’s two-channel video installation, Impersonator, a young man carefully tries to mimic a cat’s slow decision to fight or flee. The cat paces the perimeter of the room; body hunkered down close to the floor, as if in anticipation of some unknown danger. The young man’s earnest efforts to mimic the cat merely reinforce that humans are closed off from the possibility of really understanding the cat. Instead, locked as we are in our own embodied reality, we have only learned to mimic other animals.
Baboons as Friends
Rachel Mayeri | 2007 | USA | 6:00
Part of the “Primate Cinema” series, Baboons as Friends is a split screen video juxtaposing field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle.
Polar Bear God
Deke Weaver | 2008 | USA | 14:00
Polar Bear God is a monologue set in the disturbing territory of contemporary environmental crises. The work connects polar bears, a drastic increase in the number of children with autism and the numbing frustration of office work. Originally part of Weaver’s The Ghosts of Prague, a full-length solo performance of interwoven short monologues and projected videos, Polar Bear God struggles to balance an instinctive, spiritual life with the daily 21st century grind.
Nocturne
Colin Ives | 2006 | USA | 4:00
In the San Joaquin Valley of California the kit fox has been more successful in the urban environment than in wilderness areas. Cities like Bakersfield have become, in a sense, a reserve for this endangered species. Nocturne’s intention is not only to acknowledge the individual lives of the animals represented, but also to forward the idea that they have an important presence in our contemporary city space—a presence that insists that the boundary between man-made and natural remains permeable.
Stuffing
Animal Charm | 1998 | USA | 4:00
In this masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is necessary to apply Vaseline to your eyes and ears. Other times, you only need to watch Stuffing—it’s inside of everything. – Video Data Bank
Safari
Catherine Chalmers | 2007 | USA | 7:00
Known for her hyperrealistic photography, Catherine Chalmers’ experiment with wildlife documentary in Safari was produced in her studio with an unlikely choice of fauna. A macroscopic lens follows the point of view of a cockroach on adventures in an apparent tropical paradise, encountering exotic insects that Chalmers collected for the film. Chalmers’ lush rendering of a cockroach world is the artist’s attempt, as she says, “to try to understand what it is not to be human.”
Rachel Mayeri is a video and installation artist whose work often deals with the intersection of science, art, and society. Her previous video work includes Stories from the Genome and The Anatomical Theater of Peter the Great. Mayeri’s work has been screened at numerous venues, including ZKM in Karlsruhe, Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, MOMA at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and Ars Electronica in Linz. She is currently Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College and curates art and media events in Los Angeles.
SOFT SCIENCE: THE HUMAN ANIMAL
Curated by Rachel Mayeri
A collection of ten short films from the intersection of science and art, Soft Science: the Human Animal investigates human-animal relationships and systems: allegorical stories, explorations in anthropomorphism, experimental documentation and interspecies collaborations.
Once Upon a Time
Corinna Schnitt | 2006 | Germany | 22:00
Corinna Schnitt’s Once Upon a Time is structured like a fairy tale. People leave their house for the day, and then animals enter one by one. First kittens and parrots arrive, followed by larger animals. They sniff each other, claw the furniture, and drink from a fish bowl. An unmanned video camera records what happens as chaos ensues. The effect is to tear apart the comfortable notion of domesticity—a term that suggests both taming and home—as shared between humans and animals, especially their pets.
Harmony
Jim Trainor | 2004 | USA | 11:00
In Harmony, Jim Trainor’s darkly comic voiceover contrasts with his cartoon drawings of charismatic megafauna. The lions, dolphins, and bonobos depicted in his felt-tip pen animated films speak with brute honesty about their crimes, at least as they would be defined by human social standards: infanticide, gang rape and incest. Dubbed the “Walt Disney of Sexual Anxiety” by one film critic, Trainor’s film strips the warm fuzziness from the nature documentary genre.
Family Portrait
Nicolas Primat with Patrick Munck | 2004 | France | 3:00
Nicolas Primat was a unique and inspiring artist who passed away in 2009 at the age of 42. In residencies at zoos and labs, Primat worked closely with apes and monkeys, exploring and engaging in the social worlds of the human’s closest relatives. His intuitive performances with primates show a human who learned how to ingratiate himself with other species. In Family Portrait, the artist is swarmed by a playful troop of squirrel monkeys.
Night Spider & Mudeye
Julia Oldham | 2006/2009 | USA | 3:30
A self-proclaimed lover of bugs, Julia Oldham studies insects to understand them in a playful yet deep way, making contact with them and becoming them, to answer the question, “Can a creature so small and strange experience joy, fear, love and desire?” By engaging in their behavior, movements, and rituals, her approach to being one with the insect mind by biomimicry through dance has prompted her to observe a strangely intuitive connection to these movements, accessible through rhythms, patterns, gestures, and relationships.
Impersonator
Alison Ruttan | 2005 | USA | 3:00
In Alison Ruttan’s two-channel video installation, Impersonator, a young man carefully tries to mimic a cat’s slow decision to fight or flee. The cat paces the perimeter of the room; body hunkered down close to the floor, as if in anticipation of some unknown danger. The young man’s earnest efforts to mimic the cat merely reinforce that humans are closed off from the possibility of really understanding the cat. Instead, locked as we are in our own embodied reality, we have only learned to mimic other animals.
Baboons as Friends
Rachel Mayeri | 2007 | USA | 6:00
Part of the “Primate Cinema” series, Baboons as Friends is a split screen video juxtaposing field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle.
Polar Bear God
Deke Weaver | 2008 | USA | 14:00
Polar Bear God is a monologue set in the disturbing territory of contemporary environmental crises. The work connects polar bears, a drastic increase in the number of children with autism and the numbing frustration of office work. Originally part of Weaver’s The Ghosts of Prague, a full-length solo performance of interwoven short monologues and projected videos, Polar Bear God struggles to balance an instinctive, spiritual life with the daily 21st century grind.
Nocturne
Colin Ives | 2006 | USA | 4:00
In the San Joaquin Valley of California the kit fox has been more successful in the urban environment than in wilderness areas. Cities like Bakersfield have become, in a sense, a reserve for this endangered species. Nocturne’s intention is not only to acknowledge the individual lives of the animals represented, but also to forward the idea that they have an important presence in our contemporary city space—a presence that insists that the boundary between man-made and natural remains permeable.
Stuffing
Animal Charm | 1998 | USA | 4:00
In this masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is necessary to apply Vaseline to your eyes and ears. Other times, you only need to watch Stuffing—it’s inside of everything. – Video Data Bank
Safari
Catherine Chalmers | 2007 | USA | 7:00
Known for her hyperrealistic photography, Catherine Chalmers’ experiment with wildlife documentary in Safari was produced in her studio with an unlikely choice of fauna. A macroscopic lens follows the point of view of a cockroach on adventures in an apparent tropical paradise, encountering exotic insects that Chalmers collected for the film. Chalmers’ lush rendering of a cockroach world is the artist’s attempt, as she says, “to try to understand what it is not to be human.”
Rachel Mayeri is a video and installation artist whose work often deals with the intersection of science, art, and society. Her previous video work includes Stories from the Genome and The Anatomical Theater of Peter the Great. Mayeri’s work has been screened at numerous venues, including ZKM in Karlsruhe, Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, MOMA at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and Ars Electronica in Linz. She is currently Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College and curates art and media events in Los Angeles.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The beauty of a dead baby seal.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The wrong decision.
I've been wanting to write here about the fact that the New York State Senate infuriated me, my family and countless others by voting against marriage equality last week, but I've had a hard time finding the right words. This weekend Nina Buesing Corvallo, a wonderful photographer whose blog I follow, wrote a post about this issue--and she starts by saying simply,
"I am not certain about much in life, but I know that prohibiting same sex marriage is discriminatory."She writes about the many financial, medical and practical reasons why marriage makes a difference for committed couples, like Nina and her husband. And indeed, having married my husband a little over a year ago, I have come to realize how much the protection offered by the institution of marriage does matter. It's easy to take for granted the fact that, for example, I can, without question, be included on Eric's health insurance; and for me, as an artist who is self-employed and not rolling in income, this is unbelievably important. And I think everyone would agree that the more people who are insured and financially stable, the better for the United States.
As Nina implies in her post, marriage equality is about more than wanting our family members and friends to have the same opportunities that we do. It's about completing the architecture of a very basic support structure that has the potential to benefit the whole country.
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