tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217643240 2009-05-17 18:34:20 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies A Very short history of toy Theatre as performed by Center for Advanced Visual Studies fellow John Bell. accompanied by: Trudi Cohen (visiting artist) on toy piano Jenny Romaine (visiting artist) on accordian Joe Zane (CAVS staff and VAP instructor) on ukulele Shaunalynn (student) Duffy on banjo shot on a handheld camera by CAVS staff member Meg Rotzel, this performance took place at the CAVS 2009 Giant Art Party 763 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217616140 2009-05-17 21:23:35 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies CAVS fellow John Bell joins CAVS artists, staff and MIT students in the design, construction, and performance of the Great Small Works toy theater show, Definitely Maybe. Based on the novel of the same name by the acclaimed Soviet science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Definitely Maybe questions the limits of scientific knowledge and discovery in the modern world from the perspective of a handful of Soviet scientists of the 1970s who are all on the verge of important breakthroughs. The mysterious and often surreal ways in which they are all prevented from advancing their work turn out to be the effects the Homeostatic Universe, a vast, undefined force of Nature that insists on maintaining creation-wide entropy. Definitely Maybe poses questions about the limits of modern knowledge and the ecological effects of modern society through a series of fantastic, comic, and spectacular tableaux on a miniature toy theater stage representing a Soviet-era apartment building. Definitely Maybe, a novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, was adapted for the toy theater by John Bell, Larissa Harris and Jessica Rylan, with Jenny Romaine from Great Small Works, and MIT student Shaunalynn Duffy. Special thanks to Slava Gerovitch for his dramaturgical advice. Set and puppet designs by Isaac Bell and Meg Rotzel; stage construction by Kaolin Kinsey; stage design by Joe Zane; special synthesizer effects created by Jessica Rylan. 1899 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217591000 2009-06-15 18:17:56 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies Join CAVS for an in-progress, hybrid performance/reading about the economic crisis. John Malpede promises a “100% non- threatening participatory event” where the audience reads text and the performers perform others. Readings and Performers will bounce off of one another arbitrarily; unpredictable trajectories will afford glimpses of our possible financial futures. Witness and contribute to the first phase of an ongoing project where Malpede remixes texts about the financial crisis. + Malpede is an eminent performer, director, and activist who often uses governmental, legal, and media sources as found texts. In 1985 he founded Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), an organization that engages the homeless population of Los Angeles through performance. LAPD’s current touring project, Agents and Assets, 2001-, recreates a House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the United States in the 1980s by Nicaraguan contra rebels with the CIA's complicity. In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed RFK in EKY, a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. Malpede has received the Bessie Creation Award from Dance Theater Workshop, New York; San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award; and a Theater LA Ovation Award, as well as numerous government and foundation grants. He has taught at UCLA, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance, and the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco. John Malpede is a fellow at CAVS, and is developing a public performance for MIT’s campus in the fall of 2009. 0 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217565920 2009-06-22 14:21:30 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies Exploring the intersection of the artistic and scientific processes in the contexts of climate change, landscape transformation and biological extinctions, Dario Robleto and Laurel Braitman will give a talk about their experiences as artist and biologist, working together. Both will address questions of geologic time scales and evolution, the digging up of bones, the ways in which various scientific disciplines (and the scientists themselves) deal with the loss of their subjects. Laurel Braitman is a PhD candidate in the History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society program at MIT. Her research interests include the environmental history of the United States and Latin America, as well as the emergence of psychotherapeutic interventions for nonhuman animals--such as the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, like PTSD in elephants and chimpanzees, and trauma therapies for parrots and dogs. She has worked as a biologist studying grizzly bears on the Katmai Peninsula in Alaska and fisheries management in the Amazon Basin, as well as a conservation professional with the international conservation organization-- Rare. Her written work has appeared in Orion Magazine and on National Public Radio online. Laurel also helped organize and develop the traveling contemporary art exhibition Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet-- now at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Dario Robleto this conceptual artist’s work is a veritable mixtape of humanity, and sometimes he even makes mixtapes (and a plethora of other objects) using human bones. It is in the recycling and recombination of material that Robleto finds real newness and hope for a civilization still dealing with the devastation (and the amazing innovations) of the 20th century as it enters the ever uncertain territory of the 21st. When he remixes materials and histories--much like the hip-hop DJ from whom he takes both literal and philosophical cues--his work finds in the old and forgotten a wellspring for new associations, reflecting back our own concepts of these old things and giving us new possibilities for imagining the future. Dario’s recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego/Downtown; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX. He lives and works in San Antonio. 5389 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217540840 2009-06-22 15:52:10 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies The American preference for traditional residential design masks a frightening reality: across the globe, individual buildings have been retrofitted to serve as interchangeable nodes in a vast abstract structure, held loosely together by legal and political restraints, made to allow the furious circulation of finance capital. An installation of models, photographs, videos, and drawings by artist-designer Damon Rich, Red Lines immerses visitors in a landscape of pulsing capital and liquidated buildings, exploring the relation between finance and architecture. During a year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), surveyed the darkening realm of real estate markets: foreclosures, pro-formas, chains of title, block busting, exploding ARMs, and the obscure history of the mortgage, Old French for death vow. In the resulting installation, the head of Frederick Babcock, pioneer appraiser, gazes over a scattered field of diminished Detroit houses, still showing damage from 1960s real estate scandals. Looming behind Babcock, the flicker of a neon sign – BUY LOW SELL HIGH – reveals the spikes and troughs of a wall cut by the 20th century’s prime rate, the sharp line between lenders and borrowers. Projected videos haunt the gallery with the apparitions of financial engineers, federal regulators, and anti-foreclosure activists. Today, what has become known as the Subprime Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic crisis. Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments. 3682 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217515700 2009-06-22 18:24:29 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies The Problem with Triple Candie: A Lecture-Demonstration Since 2006, the alternative space Triple Candie—founded in Harlem in 2001—has been producing exhibitions about art without art or artists. The shows have consisted of reproductions, sculptural surrogates, and theatrical stage-sets that are often discarded or recycled after they are reinstalled. Two especially notorious examples: “David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective” was the largest survey ever of the influential and highly reclusive Harlem artist David Hammons, though it consisted exclusively of photocopies and computer printouts; and, “Cady Noland Approximately: Selected Work, 1984-2000”, the first-ever survey of the work of an equally influential and reclusive artist that consisted of sculptural surrogates made by the gallery using information gleaned from the Internet. Both exhibitions were produced without the artists’ permissions. Triple Candie’s other exhibition have included a collection of 1,200 reproductions clipped from art books; a survey of the work of Lester Hayes, a fictional, bi-racial artist; a theatrical recreation of a 1950s-era Greenwich village café and photography gallery; and two exhibitions of common, everyday objects that have been extensively catalogued. This lecture-demonstration will serve as an educational primer on the gallery’s work and will delve into issues of artistic control, institutional license, and public access. 5138 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217490620 2009-06-27 02:56:26 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies John Bell discusses his work as a creator of street spectacles with Bread and Puppet Theater, Great Small Works, and the Honk! Festival in Boston, New York, and other cities in North America and Europe. Street spectacle is one of the oldest forms of global performance, in which larger-than-life theatricality combines with urban architecture and public thoroughfare to articulate a community's ideas about politics, religion, and society. How have the rituals of street spectacle functioned in previous centuries, and how might they function in the 21st century? John Bell is a puppeteer, scholar, and teacher whose interests combine practice and theory. He started performing as a puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater and as a member of that company for over a dozen years learned about the global breadth of puppetry. Recognized as one of the preeminent historians of puppet theater in the US, he performs, directs, and otherwise collaborates with Great Small Works, a Brooklyn-based theater collective. He is the author of Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Art), edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press), and is currently working on American Puppet Modernism, a study of US confrontations with puppet and object theater over the past 150 years. 4579 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217465540 2009-06-27 17:01:12 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies Acconci Studio founder Vito Acconci is one of the most important figures in art and architecture working today. From his days as a poet in the mid-’60s to the groundbreaking performance works of the ’70s to the founding of Acconci Studio in 1988 to help realize architecture and public-space projects, Acconci has pushed from one discipline to the next while always thinking about language and the boundaries of the body. The method of Acconci Studio is on the one hand to make a new space by turning an old one inside-out and upside-down; and on the other hand to insert within a site a capsule that grows out of itself and spreads into a landscape. They treat architecture as an occasion for activity; they make spaces fluid, changeable, portable. They have recently completed a person-made island in Graz, a plaza in Memphis, a gallery in NY, a clothing store in Tokyo; they are currently working on a building façade in Milan, a park on a street median in Vienna, and a skate park in San Juan. A survey show, Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio, is traveling now through Europe. 7591 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217440460 2009-06-29 16:46:04 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies A sound artist and electronic musician who builds unique analog synthesizers, Rylan has performed across North America and throughout Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia; conducted workshops in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Ghent, Belgium; and Kabelvåg, Norway; and created sound installations at MIT’s LIST Visual Arts Center, the Boston Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. Her recordings are available on labels including Important Records, Ecstatic Peace, and RRRecords. 0 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/217415380 2009-06-30 15:04:16 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies Visiting artist and writer David Robbins will talk about “high entertainment.” A practice for the future that combines the critical capacity of fine art with the pleasures and reach of show business, “high entertainment” could be what you are already making. Robbins’s objects, images, and writing reflect on spectacle and the position of the artist in the visual system, and suggest possibilities for a new relationship between art and the entertainment industry. + David Robbins has had over three dozen solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe and is the author of five books, most recently The Velvet Grind: Essays, Interviews, Satires (1983-2005) and a novella, The Ice Cream Social (1998, re-issued in 2004). He is currently writing an alternative history of twentieth century comedy. 6349