A talk show based on a traditional algorithm. Performed in a custom media environment.
2011.
Live. From an anti-oedipal hub. Its [The 11:30 Format](applause signage) presented by [Aristide Schlesinger] and [Schlesinger Media Group] with gracious support from [The Greyfriars Ladies Auxilliary Board] administered by [Chaz Evans] as your host featuring local, up and coming, in-house band [Eyepatch Brian and his "Roxie Moods"] featuring sidekick [Blinking Humphrey] special guests [Adam Trowbridge] and [Toni Preckwinkle] (ERROR_ABORT NEITHER GUEST WILL BE ABLE TO ATTEND). And more than anything else: this performance features memories that turn your bones to glass. [Bones = Glass]. Monologue Jokes written by [Joe Giovanetti]. Special thanks to our additional sponsors [Kera Mackenzie] and [Neal Vandenbergh].
Luxury Permission
Announcing the 2011 fall line of luxury applications produced by Schlesinger's Best. Courtesy of generous support from the Greyfriar's Ladies Auxilliary Board. Follow the link below and you yourself can be the proud owner of mobile software featuring luxury permissions made exclusively for products made by Schlesinger's Best.
The fall line features:
Gold
Marat Vs. Ken: deadfight
The App of Deep Contemplation
Mr. Slim Goodbody Without Organs
Nanoborg
All apps by Schlesinger's Best are available on the Android Market.
Autonomy Bag
Between Chicago open-container laws and its arbitrary foil the 'brown bag rule' lies a strange opportunity for hybridity. Not entirely a law (more a folk-law such as the 'dibs' parking system in winter snow), but widely accepted as a tolerable standard, the brown bag rule allows one wrap their open-container in a brown bag, and then consume it in public space. Although the paper wrap itself remains as a visual indicator of possible impropriety, those who utilize the brown bag have a modest opportunity of agency in closed open-container system.
This project considers altering the the conditions of social space, and the human behavior therein, by re-figuring the brown bag rule, while altering it spatially and structurally. If the visual attention of the brown bag in public engenders neither the radical comradery of New Orleans or the intensified drinking relationships of Chicago, perhaps an inversion of what is contained can provide an atomized unit of both. By containing not the beverage, but a small social situation itself within a brown bag, hybrid, radical, and ephemeral social spaces could be engendered through use of very modest materials.
A Buttery Lantern Review: 2 Buttery 2 Light-Emitting
A performance performed in a custom performance apparatus.
5/2/11 @ UIC New Media Arts Graduate Studio
with the collaboration of Aristide Schlesinger
and the support of the Greyfriars Ladies Auxillary Board
- starring -
"Duncan" The Kodak 4600 Slide Projector
"Goldbraith" The Micro Express IFL9025
"Captain" The Apollo Venture OHP
"Cornish Ben" The EPSON KR85
The Weller Taylor Helioscopic Lantern (as himself)
"Twembly John" The EPSON XMP-35
"Scrips" The Apple Powerbook G3
"Will-o-the-Wisp" The Optiquest Q71
"Dodger" The Panasonic
"Bevis and Harold" The Viewsonic E90s
"The Galloway Twins" The DELL BH72-003575As
"Old Ironsides" The DELL BN68-00246F
-plus!-
- special guests -
Behold, the Oikoborg!
Behold, the Oikoborg! is a software-based performance work created specifically for the Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery in the Hyde Park Arts Center. Meant as a platform for human-to-human communication filtered through a media-architecture facade, the piece brings Vera Buhlman's concept of the oikoborg (an architectural media-being who functions as a companion species to humans) to a comically literal level.
The piece transforms the the five-screen, ten-projector array of the catwalk gallery into the hidden persona of the Hyde Park Art Center itself. The extra-wide urban screen is split into five large faces made of basic shapes, separated only by slight differences in the cartoonish eyes and mouths, as well as different colors based on the NTSC color bar standard. The projected mouths and eyes are controlled by the performers' voices via the minim audio library for Processing. Each face contains different personality traits, but it is the grouping of all of their voices together (in the manner of a Greek chorus) which comprises the hidden fictional persona of the building. The catwalk gallery is then the face of the HPAC-as-oikoborg and the rest of the structure its body.
The thoughts and opinions of the five-in-one persona are very loosely based of four important figures in the history of Chicago architecture (William LeBaron Jenney, Bertrand Goldberg, Fazlur Khan and Jeanne Gang) as well as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Their discussion takes the tone of great bluster and declaration yet none of the different sides of this group persona ever fully understand or effectively communitcate with each other. Essentially, the scene is a fragmented media-architecture personality desperately trying to relate to itself and the humans around it.
In a sense the piece is meant as a parody of the oikoborg as a long-standing media trope. In the style of Hal 9000 or Max Headroom, this digital being is bound and integrated with the physical space around it. Rather than glamorize this trope in a dystopian science fiction context, this performance attempts to analyze the problems that might occur in the life of such a being: a sedentary existence, the difficulty meeting other humans and media-beings etc. Although it takes the illusionistic appearance of a sentient media-architecture being, at the end of the day, the thoughts and ideas of the oikoborg are coming from human performers, suggesting that a hybrid virtual/physical existence does not imply disembodiment. Rather, human-to-human communication works in a problematic symbiosis with technology.
Text written by Adrian Vigliano
Performed by:
Chaz Evans (Bertrand Goldberg)
Peter Kersten (Jimmy Wales)
Sarah Nelson (William LeBaron Jenney)
Maureen Ryan (Jeanne Gang)
Adrian Vigliano (Fazlur Khan)
Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt
Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt is an interactive software, video and performance installation which offers a viewer a selection of 35 dances performed to the tune of John Baldessari's 35 song versions of Sol Lewitt's 35 Sentences on Conceptual Art, originally head in Baldessari's 1972 video "Baldessari Sings Lewitt."
In his video Baldessari endeavored to relate the tradition of concept art into the emerging practices of video art. Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt endeavors to converge the critiques and traditions both praised and satirized by Baldessari, into the now emerging practice of software art.
Th piece is controllable by gallery patrons via a wireless mouse and a scrolling menu built into the image. The video featured here is only a non-interactive demo of a few dances from the full selection of 35. A fully interactive online version is in the works
S3BMS (Short Big Mouth Billy Bass Messaging System)
S3BMS is a new platform for singing-fish-based communication. S3BMS is a new international standard for short message communication which combines the informational efficiency of morse code with the semiotic flourish of robotic-singing fish gesture. S3BMS is specifically designed with naval and military aircraft communication in mind, but it is easy to foresee its popularity in the consumer communication electronics marketplace.
The system makes use of three official Big Mouth Billy Bass units, an arduino board and a wireless keyboard. The user types a message on the typing pad, letter by letter, and each letter is translated by the system into a coded pattern of fish movement. The language itself has a semiotic pattern (aka a "bass-glyph") for every letter in the English alphabet and numeral characters 0-9. Bass-glyphs are a combination of three gestures inherent to the Big Mouth Billy Bass unit: a) head turn b) tail flick and c) mouth open. The presence or absence of these gestures determine the content of the bass-glyph. As an open standard, it is expected that the S3BMS community will evolve the bass-glyphs language and find emergent new ways of communicating through the system as time goes on.
The version seen here is the first working prototype. Expect a multiple fully produced units to arrive shortly along with a full manufacturing schematic and proposal for interested business partners from the public or private sector.
An info-tisement edited together for the parker perfomance Machinima Drone Bath Spa Package: Sampler Pack. The video is a combination of choreographed performances done inside multiplayer Quake 4, info-tisement slogans, and music from the Clams.
The Naked Internet is an interactice psychogeographical map of personal web experience. Based on Guy Debord's "Theory of the Derive" and psychogeographical maps of Paris, the piece is meant to transpose Situationist technique of urban critique to the realm of internet space and experience. Using data derived from subjective behavioral and emotional responses to web experience, the map is meant to suggest a feeling of locality to web space, and a critical attitude toward it. The nodes seen on the map all behave according to a particlar psychogeographical tag taken from an open psychogeographical markup langauage standard initiated by artist group Social Fiction. The visualization is built in processing and makes use of the Traer Physics Library.
Melon death is an interactive absurdist data visualization which aims to intentionally force a fallacious causality between two sets of data which have no logical connection. Also built in processing.
Anthropometries for Quake 4 (After Yves Klein)
A a series of performances and images created in Quake 4. Its meant as an excercise which appropriates both Yves Klein's anthropometry painting technique along with aesthetics of id software's Quake 4 simultaneously. The goal is to poke fun at the 20th century avant-garde, while re-purposing the place of commercial video games in relation to the fine art world. This work functioned as a study for the performances used in "Machinima Drone Bath Spa Package: Sampler Pack.