Primate Cinema Workshop: How to Act like an Animal

May 4, 2008 at 2:00 pm to 5:00 pmMay 5, 2008 at 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

This workshop is offered through The Public School, and you can sign up for it at http://thepublicschool.org/105/how-to-act-like-an-animal/

What:
A performance workshop exploring primate communication and social organization leading to a videotaped nature documentary, part of the Primate Cinema series. Participants will watch video clips of animal behavior in the wild and in cinema, learn about primatology, and engage in physical theater techniques and improvisation.

When:
Meeting 1: Sunday May 4, 2-5 PM,
Meeting 2: Monday, May 5, 6-9 PM,
Two-four other meetings in May to be determined on May 4 meeting.
Live performance/shoot: May 24
Screening of completed video: June 11-22 at TELIC
Participants need not attend all meetings, but commitment is important.

Who:
Rachel Mayeri, artist and media studies professor, is organizing the workshop as part of her research and video production at TELIC. Deborah Forster is a cognitive scientist who has worked with primates at the San Diego Zoo, and has studied wild baboons in Kenya. Alyssa Ravenwood is a physical theater director, performer, and mask-maker. Biographies of workshop leaders are below.

How:
With video clips of wildlife documentaries and Hollywood movies, we will explore media representations of human and nonhuman primate “nature.” Forster will discuss how primates and other animals perform social organization and communication, covering a range of perspectives from behavioral ecology and sociology to cognitive science. Ravenwood will show how commedia dell’ arte and other theatrical traditions have found animals a source of inspiration for personality and movement. Performers will explore animal behavior and society through warm-ups, group exercises, and improvisational games.

Why:
Participants will expand acting and social skills by learning about animal behavior. This is a rare chance to be involved in an interdisciplinary project creating dialogue around art, science and politics. Exploring alternative social organization could lead to world peace…or at least to comedy. Participants will be festooned with food and a DVD of the completed project. And you get to act like monkeys.

Where:
TELIC Arts Exchange (Field Station Hollywood for the month of May), 975 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012;
Map and directions

How to Participate:
Free, open to everyone, performance experience is a plus.
RSVP Rachel.Mayeri -at- gmail -dot- com if you are interested in participating and come to the first meeting.
Workshop will be videotaped and used as part of completed nature documentary.

Biographies:
Deborah Forster
Trained in behavioral ecology and cognitive science at UCSD, Forster spent many years studying wild baboons in Kenya and worked with other primates at the San Diego Zoo. She has done design-context research and organizational development consulting at Nissan Design America. She is currently teaching cognitive science to architects at Woodbury University in San Diego, and is contributing to a studio course led by Teddy Cruz at Harvard Graduate School of Design, to build housing in Nicaragua.

Alyssa Ravenwood
An award winning physical theatre director, performer and mask designer. Artistic Director of the new Los Angeles mask troupe, Ravenwood Performance Group. A graduate of the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre. She also studied Clowning with Sue Morrison at the Canadian Clown Institute and Commedia with Ole Brekke of The Denmark Commedia School.

Rachel Mayeri
Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art, her videos, installations, and writing projects explore scientific representation in topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Shown at Los Angeles Filmforum, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and P.S.1/MoMA in New York, Mayeri is a guest curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.

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Rachel Mayeri: Primate Cinema

May 3, 2008 12:00 pm to June 22, 2008

Field Station Hollywood: May 3 - May 29
Primate Cinema Exhibition: June 11 - June 22
Talk and Screening: May 24 at 6pm
Opening Reception: June 14 at 6pm.

Primates and their on-screen dramas are the subject of an exhibition presented at TELIC Arts Exchange by Los Angeles artist Rachel Mayeri.

The exhibition is an installation of several video experiments on the human animal, including “Jane Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” “How to Act like an Animal,” and “Baboons as Friends.”

In the video series “Primate Cinema,” Mayeri transforms TELIC Arts Exchange into an observation platform for viewing the social, sexual and political behavior of human and nonhuman primates.

Mayeri’s work enables viewers to observe human nature at a safe distance through the lenses of primatology and media studies.

Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees (10 minutes, 2008)
A live performance of a nature documentary, “Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees” was developed and videotaped during a three week workshop at TELIC in May. The edited video explores what it means to be animal, and how documentary dramatizes nature. The performers are: Suzan Averitt, Claire Cronin, Penny Folger, Estela Garcia, Dave Johnson, Diane Lefer, Adam Overton, and Joe Seeley.

How to Act like an Animal (5 minutes, 2008)
This video is one of several exercises from the “How to Act like an Animal” workshop, which was co-led with primatologist Deborah Forster and physical theatre director Alyssa Ravenwood. Through observation and imitation of a nature documentary, human performers play chimpanzees–hunting, killing, and sharing the meat of a colobus monkey.

Baboons as Friends (6 minutes, 2007)
The first of the “Primate Cinema” series, “Baboons as Friends,” translates a primate social drama for human audiences. A two-channel installation, “Baboons as Friends” juxtaposes field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle.

Field Station Hollywood
Primate Research Laboratory and Performance Workshop
Ongoing in May at TELIC Arts Exchange

In May, TELIC Arts Exchange will be a laboratory for primate research and video production, and will be open to visitors. As part of TELIC’s Public School, Mayeri will lead a workshop on “How to Act like an Animal.” The workshop will explore primate social structure, communication, and movement in a series of performative experiments, with contributions by primatologist Deborah Forster. The workshop will form the basis for a video to be shot at TELIC Arts Exchange in May and screened in June as part of Primate Cinema. Participation in the free workshop, offered as part of TELIC’s Public School, is limited to 15 people. To inquire, please follow the link below:

http://thepublicschool.org/105/how-to-act-like-an-animal/

Primate Cinema:
Baboons as Friends

The first of the “Primate Cinema” series, “Baboons as Friends,” translates a primate social drama for human audiences. A two-channel installation, “Baboons as Friends” juxtaposes field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle.

“Baboons as Friends” was screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark and received a Semifinalist honor for an International Visualization Competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Journal Science. It was made in collaboration with primatologist, Deborah Forster, whose research and footage of wild baboons in Kenya is featured in the video. “Baboons as Friends” is played by actors Camillia Sanes, Patrick Mulderrig, Shaun Madden, Randy Tobin, and Andrew Maxwell. Liz Rubin, director of photography, captured their primate behavior in high definition video in a Chinatown bar.

http://www.soft-science.org/primate.html

Primatologists on Acting in the Animal Kingdom
Talk and Screening of “Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends”
May 24, 6 PM, TELIC Arts Exchange

On May 24, primatologists Deborah Forster and Rebecca Frank will give talks, followed by a screening of “Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends.” Deborah Forster has worked with primates at the San Diego Zoo, and researched wild baboons in Kenya. Forster’s talk will be on the how and why of acting and motor mimicry in the animal kingdom, examining videos of “walking” octopuses, painting elephants, and aping orangutans. Dr. Frank, who researches female social behavior and cooperation, will analyze the group dynamics of a Reality TV show.

Rachel Mayeri

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Videos include “Stories from the Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction,” animations for “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” and “The Anatomical Theater of Peter the Great.” Mayeri programmed the anthology “Soft Science,” distributed by Video Data Bank, and her essay “Soft Science: Artists’ Experiments with Science Documentary” is published in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (MIT Press, 2008). Her videos have shown at Pacific Film Archive, The Center for Art and Media in Germany, and P.S.1 in New York. The recipient of grants from Creative Capital Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and California Council for the Humanities, Rachel Mayeri is a guest curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.

http://www.soft-science.org/mayeri.html

The exhibition at TELIC is supported in part by a grant from the Durfee Foundation.

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Time-Based Conceptual Art Symposium

April 19, 2008 at 3:00 pm

TELIC presents a symposium on time-based conceptual art at UCLA with the Department of Design | Media Arts and basjanader.com. This symposium is held in conjunction with our exhibition, Gravity Art. It is free and open to the public.

Two artists from the exhibition will speak: Guido van der Werve and Marco Schuler.

The curator of the exhibition, Rene Daalder, will give a short talk about Gerry Schum’s film Identifications, which will then be screened.

At the end of the evening, Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic will be screened for the first time in Los Angeles.

Here is the schedule:

3:00 - Opening reception
3:30 - Introduction by Rene Daalder
4:00 - Marco Schuler presentation
5:00 - Guido van der Werve presentation
6:15 - Screening of Identifications by Gerry Schum
7:15 - Screening of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic

Location:

EDA (on the ground floor, next to the elevators)
Broad Art Center, UCLA
[ directions ]

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

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Erik Wesselo

April 26, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Erik Wesselo (1964 ’s-Hertogenbosch Netherlands) makes films that are marked by a clear beginning and end, but in between everything stays the same. Wesselo uses film, the medium of the moving image to bring time to a standstill. For the duration of the film he tries to capture the viewer with this one image. He uses the camera as a parallel to his psychological experience. The tragic moments in the films coalesce with their liberating potential.

The following is the program for Wesselo’s presentation:

Introduction.

Backward (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color sound) is an extremely physical film where the artist is riding on a galloping horse back to front exploring his relation with the environment.

In Luxembourg (1997 16 mm 3.35 min color sound) we see the smartly dressed artist as the bored caretaker of an empty, wealthy home where he walks from room to room. When he leans on the balcony a reverse zoom reveals the outside of the house, then the fact that it is surrounded by a gang of bikers. In a reference to Easy rider and it’s ideal, the freedom of the open road, the bikers come a cross here as a mental projection.

Wesselo’s Düffels Möll (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color mute) begins in medias res Wesselo is bound to the sail of a windmill rotating swiftly counterclockwise. By binding himself to the blade of the windmill, the artist is simultaneously empowered and powerless. Flying through the air at great heights he experiences the rush of being able to survey his surroundings from a new perspective.

Break.

Oil (2000 16 mm 30.00 min) records a performance event in which the artist and a co-worker are engaged in a monotonous and backbreaking task of loading a shipping container with boxes of oil. The film begins with an empty container and ends when the containers is full and the “actors” no longer have a performance space.

Break.

In Battery Park City (2006 two channel video projection 7.00 min color sound) Wesselo himself does not appear unlike the other films where he uses performances to explore structurally his relationship with the environment. In Battery Park City we see the camera exploring and investigating the landscape of lower Manhattan after the event of 9/11.

End.

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

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Public and Private Stages

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The nude is a notoriously hackneyed art subject, but it was still something of a surprise that several galleries in Chinatown - almost all of which opened on September 8 - had shows featuring naked (or nearly) people. Amy Bessone’s show at David Kordansky has several large paintings, which turn out to be paintings of photographs of nude porcelain figurines from auction catalogues. The press release refers to an interaction between the work and the viewer, who must “weather” a confrontation with naughty bits. Next door to TELIC at Black Dragon Society, Steve Canaday made several colorful, cartoony paintings of women in bikinis with beer, pets, and chubby thighs.

Finally, at TELIC Miguel Angel Reyes solicited audience members to come on stage and pose in a way that was physically revealing. Some spread their legs, others flashed undergarments, and a surprising number just let the flesh all hang out - all in exchange for the drawing of the session made by Reyes. This is Los Angeles, but I have to reiterate a mild astonishment that members of the general public were willing to do this - well, not pose nude so much as do it on a public stage while audience members shot camera phone photos and videos of the spectacle. Interestingly, Amy Bessone (according to Kordansky’s press release) asks what happens as we stop thinking in terms of the “male gaze” and instead turn the gaze upon ourselves?

Jordan Crandall is asking the same question in his exhibition, I think, but in a very different way. Perhaps one of the strangest things about the drawing session was how not awkward it was. It’s not that the publicly stages erotic figure drawings inverted the gaze - the audience members watching and snapping photos refute that I think - but the quotidian feeling of it all make us think about what we (see other people) do online. And so in the back space, Jordan spent the opening interviewing people one-on-one, trying to get them to confess. While the space was private, the session was obviously filmed and the footage was sent in real-time to a television next to the front door of the gallery. In other words, the inversion was there, in the private, but connected back space - the obverse of the public stage.

I won’t go too far into it, but I was also interested in the performative aspect of it all. Both artists, Jordan and Miguel had personal, intimate exchanges with their subjects, producing an experience rather than an object. Footage from the opening will be screening on the television at the front of the space for the duration of Showing.

See also: Continuous and Discontinuous Being by Georges Bataille

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Opening

September 8, 2007 at 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Human Jukebox

July 16, 2007

Human Jukebox
Monday, July 16, 2007
1-4pm and 6-9pm PST

The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts performs karaoke on demand, in person at the gallery or streamed live over the internet.

How it works:
1. Look at the song list.
2. Donate $5 per request via the PayPal link below.

What song do you want?

3. Songs will be performed in the order of receipt of request/ donation confirmation.
4. Watch performance here, on the Human Jukebox webpage, or at ustream.tv.

Please note:
* It can take up to 20 minutes for requests to be processed by PayPal.
* Songs requested before live broadcast will be performed when broadcast begins.
* Not all song files work: If the file you choose is corrupt, you will be asked to pick another song (no refunds)
* This is karaoke, not professional: The song will be performed with gusto, but possibly very little skill

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Airbrushing history

“Airbrushing history” is an interesting concept, particularly when applied to satellite imaging. I know it’s foolish to suggest that satellite photography makes claims toward authenticity and thruthfulness that regular old SLR photography can’t, but how often do we think about the man behind the satellite camera? Usually only when areas of the map are “blacked out,” censored by some political agenda.

How long will it be before there are hundreds of commercial competitors to Google Maps, all with their own ideologies and manipulations of history. A map that returns Europe to a glacier. One that shows every point on Earth during its most violent. Maybe a low budget map made of images stitched together from photos taken during cloudy weather, nothing but shades of grey.

Of course the giant, high resolution satellite map is a fiction. It’s never really even existed - it’s stored in pieces, only displayed in parts, and made by tiny satellites cutting razor’s edges over the Earth’s surface that add up over time to some simulation of a flattened map. It all reminds me of a story I heard about the very first “satellite photos” which were taken with regular old SLR cameras pointed out of the window of those rickety old 1960’s spaceships.

Google, the ubiquitous internet search business, has been asked by a US congressional committee why it was “airbrushing history” by replacing post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region as it existed before the storm destroyed neighbourhoods, uprooted trees and smashed bridges.

So far, it’s unclear why the images were changed. Chikai Ohazama, who runs Google Earth, said governments often ask Google - whose corporate motto is “do no evil” - to change its imagery, but New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says it had no hand in the matter.

From Google Wipes Katrina off the Map

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Mario’s Furniture 2 : A Mushkin-Barnet Game

October 28, 2006 6:00 pm to December 2, 2006

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Mario’s Furniture 2, an installation and interactive game, will be exhibited at TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown from October 28th to December 3rd. Created by artists Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet, Mario’s Furniture integrates wireless technology with artistic production and performance. In most video games you just sit on the couch, but when you play Mario’s Furniture you MOVE the couch, in fact you move the whole living room!

Mario’s Furniture began in 2002 as a video installation, including a single night of performance. Four years later, Mario’s Furniture 2 - created with programmer Clay Chaplin and electronic specialist Lorin Parker - is now a wireless environment where viewers become players, physically moving objects before a relentlessly panning camera, all the while watching themselves and their scores in real time on a large-screen projection.

In Mario’s Furniture 2 the body is actualized in real and virtual space simultaneously. Players can’t merely manipulate an avatar with a joystick. Playing Mario’s Furniture involves strenuous physicality, parodying conventional video games in which avatars are put in peril while players sit on a couch. Players must physically move the couch to play the
game. Mario’s emphasizes how camera and screen effect the construction of social relationships. Players see themselves (and not a stand in) under the camera’s scrutiny, humorously mirroring the absurdity of living within the frame.

Mushkin and Barnet look at technological and narrative ways in which video and digital media unfold and complicate meaning. The game critically remarks on aesthetics and narrative boy-logic of computer games while reflecting on theories of the digitally decentered subject. The artists’ racing antics against the camera alludes to Chaplin and Keaton, Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider and the deadline pressed “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” Continue reading…

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Ed Coolidge - Machine Eye View

October 29, 2005 6:00 pm to December 2, 2005

In this work,  appliances and machines are altered, so that their intended uses are drained or bypassed.

Using video loops or feeds, these machines look back at themselves, monitoring, inspecting and displaying their own reasons for being.

Machine Eye View is the first solo exhibition for Ed Coolidge in Los Angeles. At Telic, he will present a new large-scale installation — made specifically to interact with the architecture of the gallery — along with two earlier pieces.

“Air Carrier Inspection” consists of approximately 200 feet of pneumatic PVC tube pieced together to form a loop that will transport a small video camera throughout. A live video feed from within this endless circuit is wirelessly conveyed to a video projection. In “Burning House” a stainless steel fire extinguisher has been modified to hold a small video screen and DVD player. The video playing is looped and cross-dissolved, so that a house inside burns endlessly. The third piece, “VCR Records Itself Recording” is installed in the project room. A small camera is placed inside a VCR, pointed right at the record head then connected into the VCR, which records the signal and sends it to a monitor, showing the VCR recording itself recording.

Edward Coolidge was born in Boston and lives and works in Los Angeles. After receiving BA in Literature from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he moved to Los Angeles in 1998 and received a MFA from the Art Department at CalArts in 2001. In addition to three solo shows at CalArts, Ed has participated in several group shows in Los Angeles area.

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Scott Snibbe - Visceral Cinema: Chien

September 10, 2005 6:00 pm to October 16, 2005

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Visceral Cinema: Chien re-imagines the surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. The work combines key moments from the film with viewers’ shadows to form interactive projections. All of the action occurs in silhouette. Initially, viewers see a large video projection of a man pulling a grand piano towards the viewer. When viewers walk between the projector and the projection, their shadows affect the projected man’s actions. If a viewer moves between the man and the piano, the piano is pushed back, causing the man to strain harder and lose ground. If a viewer intersects the man, the man dissolves into ants at their point of intersection, and the ants gradually overtake the entire screen. This application of surrealist techniques to an interactive setting plays with viewers’ sense of image, representation, shadow, body, and self.

This exhibit is shown in collaboration with the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts.

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Natalie Jeremijenko - A Game Goose

September 11, 2004 at 6:00 pm

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An aquatic robotic goose allows you to approach and interact with actual non simulated geese in situ. These biological geese are fully unpredictable and capable of exceedingly rude, challenging and interesting behavior. You are invited to pilot the robotic goose, play with, follow, and attempt communication with the other geese. Try various goose calls and your own goose imitations for your mutual cultural enrichment. See if you can persuade the geese you are worth talking to. If you succeed in any meaningful interaction upload your interpretations.  See Video [http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/ooz/goosespeak/]

Continue reading…

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Michael Chu - Fishscape

June 26, 2004 at 6:00 pm

“Fishscape” is about the reinterpretation of a physical fish space into a digital one where seemingly simple motion is transformed into an orchestrated landscape of hues that begins to visually express a certain aesthetics of shape and movement. The ordinary twist and turns of goldfishes are converted into a disply of color and light that permeates the screen only for that brief moment in time… until they swim by again.  See video

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OSMAN KHAN - Sur la Table

August 16, 2003 at 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Sur la table revisits the domestic situation of the table. Events that normally occur on/over a table (the placing of objects, hand gestures, etc…) are amplified through projection and become the basis for interactivity, ultimately changing the visitor’s relation to the table. Using a camera as input, events occurring on/over the table are projected back onto the table so that a historic timeline of events is visualized as a continuous flow of images down the table. [see video]

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