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Tom~
I like that you interpreted the produce pinatas I am working on as power objects. I'll try to address this and respond to more of your notes this week.
Corporations like Monsato (who today shelved their plans to launch genetically engineered wheat in the US and Canada - a small victory for GE activists) are pushing power plays with a transparent adgenda on the world market.
excerpt from Inter Press Service News Agency:
Activists Wary as Monsato Withdrawls GE Wheat
"Despite this week's announcement, the biotech juggernaut continues to roll, according to BIO, the industry association. Eighteen countries are now growing 67 million hectares (165 million acres) of GM crops, chiefly cotton, maize and soya. The area planted with GM strains rose 15 percent in 2003, it adds."
The produce pinatas are derivative of icons found in games like Ms. Pacman and video poker (strawberries, cherries, oranges, lemons...).
Translated back into physical forms as pinatas, these fruits are disembodied shells of their former selves reflecting 'the fruits of over-cultivated and over-domesticated produce' through traditional biotech farming practices (cross-breeding of related species) and more recent genetically engineered biotech practices (DNA cross-breeding of unrelated species), the latter of which threaten the diversity of life on our planet.
The backyard installation offers a playground to an audience for acting out frustrations over: a) nature's stubborn resistance to human intervention and/or b) the 'fruits' of genetic engineering practices... culminating in a full-blown pinata smashing frenzy.
In brief, a response to article 7 extracted from Tom's previous entry:
"7. Kristin will be the cult's principal missionary and spokesman. Tom, who likes performance art but is not himself a performance artist, will be the main tech guy in charge of surfing and printing. Tom will bring with him a box of paper from his surfing and printing activities in NY during the weeks prior to installation week and will print more paper when in Austin (see below). Kristin and Reid (sp?) will produce the Video and Kristin is in charge of fabricating the [power objects]. Both Tom and Kristin will blog."
Tom, I will not be performing as a cult missionary character. This is a performative installation. Depending on how the animation production progresses, there may be two animations. In this scenario, I would at most control a fade in from one video (a setting the tone video) into the second video (the frenzy trigger), afterward a fade back to the first video for the remainder of the evening.
For the other testsite dates, I suggest that the animation and a short edited documentation of the smashing frenzy leading to people taking the contents to the computer station remain. The backyard projection will probably only work for that one night since it requires darkness (beginning around 9PM). Regular testsite hours (after you leave) are Sunday's from 1-5PM, so a projection outdoors would not be visible. I will also consider saving a few pinatas or making some more just to hang in the tree out back for the remainder of our installation period.
So thus far I am not planning a performance for our testsite.
I'm working on the animation for the backyard with Reed Posey, an Austin area artist and musician.
New Plans for testsite
Here's a rough draft of notes of what we talked about Saturday, including some things I made up as I wrote this. To make this work I have some questions for Elizabeth, which I'll get to below. I consider the following "back story" for now and don't necessarily think it needs to be spelled out so literally in the press release or wherever.
1. The testsite will be the temporary home of a quasi-scientific cult, which believes that an evolutionary leap (akin to religious apotheosis) will occur when the sum of all knowledge is reached on the Internet.
2. The cult's four sacraments are "transubstantiating the Net," "watching the Video," "ritual destruction of [power objects]," and "blogging."
3. "Transubstantiating the Net" means obsessive surfing and printing of thousands of web pages (URLs) from all over the world--images and/or text. Printed pages are arrayed on walls in the cult compound. Artistic judgment and discernment is valued (but not mandatory) in their arrangement, as well as making underlying connections, a la John Nash's labyrinths of tacked-up, schizophrenically interconnected newspaper clippings in A Beautiful Mind. (Ron Howard--the ultimate installation artist.) "Naming the 9000 names of God" and Borges' Library of Babel are also precedents here.
4. The Video, to be projected on a cloth in the back yard. has a flickering, low-res mantra/mandala-like flow; its fragmented videogame imagery includes pixelated versions of the [power objects]. (I'm thinking of the "fruits" from Pac-Man--also the "slot machine fruits" above--not sure what (else) Kristin has in mind.) Through overt and post-hypnotic suggestion, the Video induces a state which triggers the ritual destruction of the [power objects]. ("Overt" meaning there may be an image of a Mario-type character smashing a [power object] with a hammer or other tool.)
5. The physical manifestations of the [power objects] are large hydroponic fruits and vegetables, somewhat reminiscent of the overgrown foodstuffs in Woody Allen's 1973 sci-fi parody Sleeper. They are fabricated as papier-mache Pinatas, and arranged in the back yard near the projection screen for the Video. Each Pinata is stuffed with paper, including many pages printed from Net-Transubstantiation activities. Rapt attention to the Video causes cult members to begin smashing the Pinatas in an orgy of violence. Wadded up Transubstantiated Net pages, disgorged from the Pinatas, can be taken away by cult members and other viewers, a la Felix Gonzales Torres. URLs from the sheets can be entered on computers inside the cult building (or not). Wrecking the fruit and "partaking" of the contents mimics transmittal of the Body and Blood in the Christian religion and is also a way for cult members to symbolically take the Net into their own bodies.
6. The fourth ritual activity of the cult, blogging, is a way to fold the cult's activities back onto the Net--to feed back into the larger, sacred Flow--by documenting everything daily with verbal descriptions and pictures, sound files, etc.. The [add a comment] feature allows people all over the world to participate in the cult's activities.
7. Kristin will be the cult's principal missionary and spokesman. Tom, who likes performance art but is not himself a performance artist, will be the main tech guy in charge of surfing and printing. Tom will bring with him a box of paper from his surfing and printing activities in NY during the weeks prior to installation week and will print more paper when in Austin (see below). Kristin and Reed Posey will produce the Video and Kristin is in charge of fabricating the [power objects]. Both Tom and Kristin will blog.
Question for Kristin:
a. A weak link in the above scenario, I think, is the video's "subliminal suggestion" to smash pinatas. Realistically, how do we get people to smash pinatas? Could you draft your former students as "rent a zombies" to get the smashing process started? In other words have shills in the audience playacting a hypnotized frenzy that might inspire others to join in?
b. I changed the "logo" at the top of the page since we aren't talking about vj-ing and dj-ing anymore. Let me know if you have anything else you want to put up.
Questions for Elizabeth:
1. We need to be able to put lots of 8 1/2" X 11" sheets up on the testsite walls. I usually use tiny map pins that don't leave large holes. Is that possible? If not, we would need to affix large sheets of white (craft) paper to walls, so we can tape the 8 1/2" X 11" pages to that surface. Is that possible?
2. We will need a computer, a high speed internet connection, and a fast printer such as a laser printer, to print a few reams of paper quickly during installation week. Do you have such a printer? Can one be rented?
Retired testsite 04.4 blog page logo
Kristin, this email got bounced (says your mailbox is full), so I'm posting it here:
Hi, Kristin, Thanks for the info. How about I call you Saturday, May 1, 11:00 am Austin time? --Tom
Just some business stuff here, and other info from emails:
The testsite number was changed from 04.3 to 04.4
Also, received this email from Elizabeth a while back suggesting we include a performative aspect to the project "which would be held on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings (6/17 - 6/19) and then we would pick up the normal Sunday afternoon schedule on June 20 - - these then wouldn't have any performance involved."
Also, email from Kristin to Tom, dated 4/27/04:
I'm talkin' oversized strawberry and other piņatas in the backyard tree. and a whack 'a mole piece that either goes in the front yard or on top of the table in the dining room. I have many other thoughts (abandonning the food supplements for a different idea) and so performance ideas to run by you [when we talk on the phone].
Tom ~
Laurence would like to know if we can open the testsite on Friday, June 18... and so the installation dates would be June 13-18. We could probably have you arrive earlier for the installation. These are the dates that work best for him.
Kristin
Tom ~ I'm still thinking!
Good to know... Laurence has invited me to house sit the third weekend in April so I'm going to start making some art there and photographing the objects in his house for the baggage scanner. Liz and I are going on a materials spree soon, probably Friday so that i can begin the backyard animation.
Also important. I suggested that we push back the installation to the last week in May. If that works for Laurence, would it work for you? Otherwise it looks like the week before with an opening on Thursday night. (Laurence is flying out of town on Friday).
I have struggled to upload a video test that i made with the veejay software. my server is down tonight.
Tom ~ I am meeting with Laurence tomorrow and I'll pass on these new ideas. I'm still thinking a lot about the dining room, and the living room. To tell the truth, after my Arthouse talk on Thursday, I've been doing only fun things.
I downloaded software for veejaying. I'm testing to see if it will work for my cult movie. I think I might collaborate with an area artist/musician on the sound for that projection because it's easier to build the work that way. I'm going to have my mixer sent down too.
I looked up vegetarian empty capsules and they are really easy to find. I also found vegetable powders, such as beet, spinach, kale, something more yellow (i bookmarked the link)... and that led me to consider things like chocolate pudding (powder form) and premixed lemonade crystals. Where do we draw a line? It could turn into Noah's Arc for essential foods. I'm not 100% on following through with this particular idea yet. I'll get more time to think about it on my day off, Wednesday.
Can you remind me which computer you need and which OS? I'll also confirm the dates. They would like to book your flight soon. My other question is whether a week later would work for you? Say third week of May if that's even an option for them. I just figure the more time I have outside of school, the better, but if it is a conflict I'll make it happen - been there before! And we can discuss this more later, but you can stay at Laurence's a full week if you like. That's what the last writer did.
Hey thanks for re-posting the drumkit piece on our page. It is among my favorite works that you have informed me about since I began following your weblog. I haven't experienced it in person yet I am completely attached to it. Life altering art.
Following are a few ideas that I'm working through [ideas induced during decaffeine high]...
I propose that we play more with testsite as a central theme in our installation. And considering that you and I share a fascination with sci-fi (film and literature), we might introduce a fictional science base that our audience activates. I'll depart now into loose ideas.
Backyard: hang a screen or painted panel of plywood off the deck toward the grass slope. (fyi: the deck is raised above ground a bit). Lay out several blankets on the grass. The screen or panel could be illuminated with an animation of a faux scrambled/pixelated signal that ultimately reveals no significant message - more to the point it is repetitive and brainwashing, somewhat cultish. I bought $20 veejay shareware that I'm going to experiment with for building this type of animation. Perhaps you or I could mix some sound for this projection.
Dining Room: we could transform this room into a laboratory station for assembling food rations. We could have available rubber gloves, lab coats, goggles, lo-tech swivel magnifying glasses, clear edible capsules and colorful vegetable powders, such as kale, beet, carrot,... and bowls or containers for the finished capsules. Also a special looking box for iradiating the capsules. It has a button on the side that triggers a laser beam to turn on. It turns off when the button is no longer pressed.
Doorways: I could hang loose mostly transparent fabric or lt. weight plastic curtains (resembling the kind of curtain found as you enter a walk-in cooler, those made with vertical strips). The curtain/s would be projected on with a periodic animation of a blue horizontal scan (as if it has a function to sanitize or read information).
Baggage: could be scanned as people enter the apartment. There could be a slide or video projection on a cardboard video monitor or sloppily directly onto the cardboard scan box that reveals pre-recorded images of things from Laurence's house. A person, perhaps myself or one of my students could perform the scanning station. When a bag is place, a slide is advance. The slide carousel could be set up to have a blank slot in between so that when there is no bag it advances to darkness.
Living Room: This is where the computers are. I haven't gathered any more ideas yet. Thought I'd throw some of my initial ideas your way first. Just keeping in mind, testsite. To me, testsite has a laboratory feel and also references excursion, satellite, surveyed area... lots of other associations.
I thought we could pick a few associations and see what ideas we generate from there. Then we could see how some of the ideas overlap into other areas and find what if anything emerges out of that. Maybe we find our way back to the lounge. For example, the living room could be the lounge of a base or station. I'm also keen on making some impromptu videos while we are installing which can reside on the web or be projected.
All things we do can be brought to an inexpensive production level with some brainstorming once we resolve more our mutual interests in the collaboration. We won't need to rent a computer for me to use. Do you think there should be two stations, one for you to work on even while we are there and one for audience? Then there would be the potential for live exchange (wouldn't have to be a constant - you could break away and come back any time).