Our Nixon review in MFJ
My review/essay on the film Our Nixon, by Penny Lane and Brian Frye, is just out in the latest issue of Millennium Film Journal, part II of the Since ’78 and Beyond anniversary issue. The essay addresses, in depth, Lane and Frye’s use of archival materials to retell the Nixon narrative, including their process of obtaining original super 8 footage and having it scanned at high resolution by Jeff Kreines and his Kinetta machine.
You can subscribe to MFJ and get the issue, watch Our Nixon on Netflix and read the essay à la PDF here.
Ballad of the Lost Photographer
I made a slide performance this weekend at saracrown’s exhibition and event in Chelsea. The slides are from a huge archive of work by, what I guess, is an entertainment photographer, working in NYC in the late 70s and early 80s. From Studio 54 to a hotel Star Trek convention; Chic, Parliament Funkadelic and Sister Sledge; Grace Jones performing with a tiger; rollerskating in the park; Liza Minelli’s wedding aftermath attended by Andy Warhol and Liz Taylor; a Shriner’s parade in Times Square, and Divine. The glory, glamour and excess of the late 70s in NYC is a bit melancholy-inducing to behold in these gentrified times.
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Karl Erickson, Tamar Ettun & The Moving Company (Tyler Patterson, Tina Wang, Lyndsey Eugene, Maia Karo, Adrian Galvin & Guest: Lisa Park), Kimberly Ruth, Rachel Stevens, Jody Wood and No Hope aka Hedonic Treadmill (Elisabeth Smolarz & Jan Wilker)
sarahcrown opens in Chelsea and presents an event of six-minute multi-media performances by Group 6.0 members exploring the temporal duality of eveything and nothing.
opening May 10, 2014
@SPAZIO 522
526 West 26th Street, Suite 522, Chelsea NYOPENING RECEPTION
May 10, 5 – 7 pm
(performances start at 5:30pm)BRUNCH
May 11, 12 – 6pm
(with special performance by Jody Wood at 2:30pm)EXHIBITION
May 10 – June 1 (by appointment only)The exhibition is part of West Chelsea Artists Open Studios.
Psychogeography Lives
The course I teach at Hunter College in the IMA (Integrated Media Arts) MFA program called Psychogeography is very process oriented, but that doesn’t keep the amazing students from turning fully formed projects into the world. Annie Berman’s great video Street Views, “shot” entirely in Google Street View, made for class last year, just won best experimental short at the Rome Independent Film Festival and has been screening widely. Jason Fox, who also took the class last year, has programmed the latest season of Flaherty NYC screenings at Anthology Film Archive. Jason closed out the series with an awesome augmented reality film walk called Pot Luck that took viewers to sites around the East Village to see work by Catherine Chalmers, Stefani Bardin, Alan Raymond and others, intriguingly sited and triggered by local signage. We made a little bit of a spectacle of ourselves.
Watching THE PASTA FACTORY CLOSES by Jacqueline Goss,
Michael Gitlin, and Ben Gitlin-Goss at 65 E 2nd Street
STREET VIEWS Trailer from Fish in the Hand Productions on Vimeo.
Engaging the User
Oyster City, our AR walking tour and game app opens the APP chapter of the new book by Paul Martin Lester, Digital Innovations for Mass Communications: Engaging the User (Routledge, 2014). Lester even picked up our questionnaire from the join-the-mailing-list form: “Would you eat an oyster from the NY Harbor?” “Yum!” “No Way!” “Maybe in 80 years.”
The Last Brucennial
I am totally tickled to participate in the Whitney Biennial counter event The Last Brucennial, equal parts happening and exhibition. Read about it here, here, here, and here. Here is an interview with Bruce High Quality Foundation in Art and America and here it is on Facebook. The line for the opening was as long as the line to get into opening night of The Whitney Biennial. My contribution is a video, Perfection is the Enemy of the Good, the standalone version. It is probably the driest piece there. List of all artists here.
