A very poignant discussion on how we poison the earth, a view that I think makes the global environment problem appear more urgent than "An Inconvenient Truth".
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Maude Barlow On CJAM: How We Poison The Earth
A very poignant discussion on how we poison the earth, a view that I think makes the global environment problem appear more urgent than "An Inconvenient Truth".
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
DJ Set @ Build & Burn Closing Reception
DJ Set @ Phog, Thursday March 19th
YOU ARE AMAZING
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!
If We Could Undo Psychosis 1 by Jane Kelly
Olympia with Dog (after Manet) by Paul Harvey
EXPULSION OF ADAM AND EVE FROM PARADISE
after Masaccio by Charles Thomson
"The Queen's Speech " by Ella Guru
Here's her Artist Statement and CV
Sexton Ming, Tracey Emin, Charles Thomson, Billy Childish and Russell Wilkins at the Rochester Adult Education Centre, December 11, 1987, to record The Medway Poets LP.
Kota Ezawa presented by Murray Guy
Art Forum February 2005
by Matthew Higgs
Working through the past in order to illuminate the present, the San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa has described his practice as a form of “video archaeology.” His signature style—a digital approximation of paper-cutout animation—is evocative of the deliberately awkward graphic mannerisms of South Park and lends both a physical and psychological flatness to his works that mirrors what Ezawa has described as the “banality” or “hollowed-out” nature of his iconic yet overexposed source material (typically, archival news footage or the movies).
Raised in Mössingen, Germany, Ezawa studied for four years at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie with Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover before relocating to the Bay Area in 1994 to complete his undergraduate degree at San Francisco’s Art Institute (where he studied with Nayland Blake and maverick filmmaker George Kuchar). In addition to ongoing collaborative activities that include musical and theatrical performances with the artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, Kevin Killian and the San Francisco Poets Theater, and Karla Milosevich (who with Ezawa and Craig Goodman makes up the Helen Lundy Trio keyboard ensemble), Ezawa is gaining wider attention for his compelling animated video works, which have recently been screened in exhibition and film festivals in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Berlin.
Ezawa’s earliest films, such as Superkraft, 1995, and Aquatorious, 1996, employed actors in scripted narratives that played off established Hollywood genres such as superhero or action movie. Having abandoned live-action filming in 1998, Ezawa began making independent animated work with Home Video, 2001. Attracted to animation for what he calls its “constructed” nature, Ezawa has, somewhat combatively, described his solitary and labor-intensive process as a struggle between himself and the computer.
Home Video is an endlessly looping three-minute digital animation that features a static shot of a suburban tract home taken from a Bay Area real-state brochure. The only “action” is the constant movement of clouds across a sky that alternates between night and day and the switching on and off of the house’s interior lights by its unseen occupant. Reminiscent of a screen saver, Home Video also owes a debt to Andy Warhol’s epic film Empire, 1964, in which a static architectural motif is also the central “character” and the primary “action: also consists of shifting meteorological patterns and the switching on and off of a building’s interior lights. Simultaneously cheerful and depressing, Home Video is a pop-situationist conundrum: a melancholic riff on social alienation and the interminable monotony of contemporary suburban experience.
Ezawa shifts his focus from anonymity to notoriety in The Simpson Verdict, 2002, a three-minute digitally animated video projection based on the (still) astonishing denouement of the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson, during which he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Abstracted—and graphically simplified—from courtroom footage, The Simpson Verdict’s jerky movements echo the staccato rhythms of the original fixed-position, single-camera trial recordings. (Ezawa was familiar with the filming style from his experience as an occasional courtroom cameraman in the late 90’s.) Ezawa’s decision to retain the sparse original sound track—which is largely mute aside from brief procedural comments from the judge, the jury’s verdict, and muffled sounds of astonishment and grief from those present—lends The Simpson Verdict something of the quality of a silent film: Our attention is focused largely on the character’s actions. Ezawa’s re-imaging of the events privileges (and exaggerates) the slight yet revealing gestures of Simpson and his legal team as they anticipate and learn his fate. The turn of a head, the raising of an eyebrow, the shifty movement of Simpson’s eyes serve to intensify the human drama. The Simpson Verdict condenses history to a compelling narrative from a series of nervous gestures and tics.
Ezawa’s most recent work, Lennon Sontag Beuys, 2004, is a three-channel animated video projection based on existing footage of more measured but no less impassioned “performances” (Ezawa’s term): public speeches by John Lennon, Susan Sontag, and Joseph Beuys. Displayed side by side, the three animated characters speak simultaneously, as if competing for our attention. Lennon, seen in bed with Yoko Ono and surrounded by journalists, touts the potential of nonviolent protest; the late Sontag, seen in a recent lecture at Columbia University, discusses how images of violence might be considered instruments of protest; and Beuys, filmed in the ‘70s during a public forum at the New School in New York, expounds on his thesis of “social sculpture.” What initially appears to be a cacophony gradually becomes—as each speaker’s voice ebbs and flows and as the viewer acclimates to the individual dialects and accents—more distinct; it’s a scenario Ezawa has described as being akin to the experience of overhearing fragments of conversations as one moves through a crowd. Ezawa sees Lennon, Sontag, and Beuys not only as agents for social change but also as representatives of the historically entangled nations of England, the United States, and Germany and as ideologues for the musical, literary, and plastic arts. No single member of this triumvirate fully articulated Ezawa’s views, but collectively they synthesize his stated interests in “popular music, concerned seriousness, and German metaphysics.”
The Brawl, 2008
This juxtaposition—a kind of earnest yet skeptical relationship with popular culture combined with a wry sense of humor—reverberates throughout Ezawa’s deceptively simple works. When considered together they present a somewhat maudlin outlook: a world full of isolated marriages, and the seeming futility of protest. That is, a world not unlike the one we presently occupy.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
I'm Going To Be Playing @ PHOG Lounge
Friday, March 13, 2009
V. count MACULA - Suck Blood, Stay Young
Kero.FM - Kero and The Neighbor on CJAM 91.5
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Text In-Transit is a Broken City Lab project where we’re partnering with Transit Windsor to install a number of text-based creative works amongst the ads in the headspace on buses. We’re looking for submissions of short statements, poems, and stories from anyone in the city that will help to change the conversation about Windsor!!!
*** Please send your submission(s) to info@brokencitylab.org by March 20, 2009.
We’ll be curating the submissions, so feel free to send more than one. As well, this project is made possible by Transit Windsor, OPIRG, and The Arts Society at the University of Windsor.
Daft Punk - Musique
Kid606 - Raving Cain - Bruce Stallion Remix
Inagator II - Skyscratch (Mano Mano) - Tresor Mix
Otto Von Schirach - Whip Me Down - Soft Pink Truth Remix
Plastikman - Fuk
Jimmy Edgar - Wanna Do It
Kid606 - Get In The Way
DJ Funk - Bounce That Ass (Waters Of Nazareth Re-edit)
Dolby Anol - Heather, I'm Dry - Kid606 mix
Daft Punk/Para One - Prime Time Of Your Life RMX
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
tomandandy - Theme from Red Hot + Dance (Gothic Mix)
Jimmy Edgar - Wanna Do It
Kid606 - Die Soundboy Die
Jimmy Edgar - Slaphard Mix 1
LFO - Mummy, I've Had an Accident
Santogold - Creator
Kid606 - Circuitstep
Feadz - On All Fours
Kero - 26th Birthday
Squarepusher - U.F.O.'s Over Leytonstone
Boards Of Canada - Basefree
CacheFlowe - Flowebot Dub ft. Brer Rabbit
Kid606 - Raving Cain - Bruce Stallion Remix
CacheFlow - Oh! Dub
Jimmy Edgar - Slaphard Mix 2 (Jimmy's Revenge)
The Tuss - Synthacon 9
Dolby Anol - Heather, I'm Dry - Kid606 mix
LFO - Freak
Steve Parker - Crawling - Punisher Remix
DJ Sluggo - Wouldn't You Like To Be A Hoe
Aphex Twin - Flim