I totally lied and did not come through with posting CHN01’s progress. We all know how it goes. Too busy making the thing to remember to remember how we’re making it. Anyway, now’s your chance to come see what I’ve not been releasing early and often. I’ve got a performance coming up tonight! Here’s some excerpts (from rehearsal) on video! You should(’ve) come! I was part of the “interactive art” night so there were tons of great performances lined up throughout the night.
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I showed a work-in-progess piece called “CHN01″ which is more or less “PLEASEURE” again. I used a bunch of the EDP set.
Artist Michael Arthur was at the festival all weekend and made some beautiful drawings of some of the artists. I’m honored that he was able to sketch some of CHN01.
Ignite NYC II: Energy, Cupcakes, and Alley vs. Valley is happening Monday, September 15th at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street). I’ll be cramming Experimental Devices for Performance into a rapid-fire ride-’em-and-eat-’em log-roller jamboree of a presentation. What is Ignite? From the site,
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.
Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.
Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media is heading this up. He writes on the O’Reilly Radar blog, “We are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).”
The presenter line-up looks pretty dope:
Krikorian Raffi - holmz : open database for energy consumption
Deb Schultz - Alley vs Valley
Jennifer Pahlka - Technology Anxiety: Jello and Web 3.0
Sam Lessin - A very brief history of privacy in our data-deluged world
Nichelle Stephens - Cupcakes: The iPhone of Desserts
Don Carli - The Carbon Footprint of Banner Ads, Emails and Websites and why you should care
Nate Westheimer - Magic at the Democratic National Convention
Andrew Schneider - Experimental Devices for Performance
Audacia Ray - Porn as a front runner in technology innovations… With a twist
I know that Kati London of team Botanicalls (the plants that call you on the phone when they need something project) will also be presenting.
Acting Stranger will hopefully screen in some form tomorrow at the Conflux Festival Headquarters in the Village. I’ll plan on being there around 1:00PM and staying until around 3:00PM. I’ll bring a couple pairs of headphones and some speakers, and most likely a slew of DVDs to hand out.
I’ve been able to shoot eleven new scenes this week, five of them just today. I’m becoming more at ease the more I have these stranger experiences with the participants. I have been too often worrying about lines, and making the other person comfortable, and hoping that they are in the frame of the shot. It can be hard to let yourself go and just be present in the moment which is ideally what the project is all about. Being there. Letting yourself invest totally in someone who you have never seen nor spoken a word to. I’m realizing a lot about the project as I go forward. Conflux has turned out to be a good play ground for Acting Stranger.
All the recently uploaded scenes can be found on the new video page of acting stranger here.
Acting Stranger, the project that involves complete strangers acting out short and intense scenes with me, will be featured in the upcoming Conflux festival, which will take place all around NYC from September 11-14 (next weekend!). You can signup directly at actingstranger.com or you can head down to festival HQ at the Center for Architecture in the Village (536 LaGuardia Place), where you can also check out these other psychogeographical projects from some of my friends:
Even if you can’t participate in Acting Stranger because you’re familiar with me, tell your friends to start acting stranger.
I’ll be posting updates from the festival as they happen.
A week of Fischerspoonering distraction and I’m back on track as of yesterday with a new plan and an old script.
Pleaseure.
Amazingly, I seem to only have the script in hard copy, else I would post it here. Here’s the idea. Pleaseure + CHN01 + EDP. I wrote this thing when I was in college. It’s a performance piece that is written for a single performer. The piece was only performed once in a theatre in Spanish Harlem by Michael Balsley, in its entirety and as it was written. I’ve pulled various themes from it over the years to use in different pieces, especially a section called “BIG FAN” which I’ve used specifically for dependent.study in Chicago with BPG and the New York Fringe Festival.
Last week I spent a bunch of time starting. That’s always the hardest thing for me. The start. I shot video of my mouth while reading There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury. I didn’t know what to expect, but the results were not at all inspiring. I ended up using some of the video for the Fischerspooner show in Italy. Surprise, surprise I insert myself into their show when I can. I was pondering my meager output from a whole Sunday session of autovideo, in the shower, the next morning, when various things lined up for me.
The structure of Pleaseure as a script
The physicality of the TwitchSet and the Performoshoes
The mask of the Prolixus
The constraint of the FaceMask
Let’s get these guys together. I’ve tried something like this before, but now I would like to flesh it out completely.
Wooster and West Broadway.
