Scenes from the X-Ray Cafe, Vol. 1

2003-2004 ICE Project Grant
JoE Silva
Producer, WUGA’s Just Off the Radar

The first in a series of several CD compilations of local sound and digital media artists participating in regular performance events at the X-Ray Cafe.

The CD contains unreleased/exclusive tracks, multimedia elements and original artwork and will culminate in an annual performance event. Now available for purchase online at  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/xraycafe.

Beginning in November 2003, several musicians producing experimental, ambient, and pop electronica in Athens, GA began holding monthly multimedia gigs at a local coffee shop owned and operated by Paul Thomas. As the shows grew in size and scope, the idea of taking a recorded snapshot of the events soon took hold. Laid down along with snippets of conversations and native ambience, Scenes From The X-Ray Café, Vol. 1 captures some of the vibe of those evenings by focusing on a few of the regular artists that made these performances special. Included herein are local ambient Gods (the Noisettes), the best kept pop secret in the city (Green Lawns), cut and paste wizards (Paul Thomas, Manipulated Sound Source), one psychedelic big beats lover (The QRM), and various sirens of abstract circuitry (MonkE, Felt Battery, Crunchifus). This first release also contains two specially produced Quicktime films, and a nifty Flash instrument for listeners to play along with. It’s as close to having been there as you can get without a TARDIS.

ATHICA installation ‘All day and All night’ wallows in consumerism

December 11, 2003
Athens Banner-Herald
link to original article

ATHICA installation ‘All day and All night’ wallows in consumerism
Shop till you drop

By Melissa Link

As masses head out to malls and markets to participate in the hallowed tradition of holiday shopping, art enthusiasts are invited to ATHICA to participate in a conceptual mock shopping spree that demonstrates the pervasiveness of consumerism in contemporary culture.

Artist Kit Hughes originally submitted the concept of the interactive installation ”All day and All night” to be considered for ATHICA’s ”Product: Comments on Consumer Culture” exhibit, which had a successful run at the non-profit gallery earlier this year. Due to the scale and ambition of Hughes’ project, he was offered a solo exhibit to allow for a complete execution of the work.

”All day and All night” features an altar-like display of hundreds of products, all advertised on a single channel within a 24-hour period.
Participants are invited to scan the bar codes to trigger a multimedia series of audio-visual responses that include large-scale projections of edited commercials as well as recordings of hilarious crank calls made to the 1-800 Consumer Information numbers.

Participants are then given a receipt that allows them to ”buy” paintball ammunition to shoot at a blank canvas and aid in the creation of haphazard abstract art.

Hughes, who continues his career as a designer for a high-powered packaging and industrial design firm in Atlanta as he pursues an art degree through the University of Georgia’s digital media program, certainly is well-informed on the powerful alliance between image and impulse fueling contemporary consumerism.

”Graphic design has evolved into this amazing art form, people can’t get enough of it,” says Hughes, who in recent years has undergone somewhat of an epiphany of purpose that clarifies his corporate career as well as his artistic identity.

”I finally found this connection – this is a viable artistic media,” he says.
Yet despite the artist’s personal peace with consumerism, the installation’s inclusion of the blatantly violent act of shooting a gun alludes to an underlying angst.

”At one point in my life, I had negative feelings for capitalism, but I don’t so much anymore,” says the artist. ”I intended this installation to be an unbiased commentary,” he continues, refusing to offer his own interpretation of the rifle-range aspect of the exhibit, instead inviting each individual participant to form his and her own opinions from the experience.

Temporal Excursions with a Relative Departure in Mind

2003-2004 ICE Project Grant
Bala Sarasvati
Professor
Dance

A collaborative project that involves artists and performers from music, dance and art disciplines, joined together to create and present a performance featuring original choreography, stage design, and live renditions of Philip Glass compositions.

Temporal Excursions with a Relative Departure in Mind is a collaborative project developed with the support of a project grant from ICE and additional funding by The Friends of Dance at UGA. The project features original choreography by Professor Bala Sarasvati, new digital animation by artist Mark Callahan, and compositions by Philip Glass performed by the UGA Philip Glass Ensemble, led by Ryan Burruss, an undergraduate student in the School of Music. The work has been performed at the New Dance Theatre (UGA Spotlight!2003, CORE Concert Dance Company: Spring Collection 2004), the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) Mosaic 25th Anniversary Celebration at Judson Memorial Church in New York, and a series of cultural festivals in China.

MOSAIC 2005, an annual performance series in New York, featured Bala Sarasvati and the CORE Concert Dance Company in November 2005 in an event titled The Aesthetics of Difference: Dance and Identity, where they performed excerpts from Temporal Excusions with a Relative Departure in Mind.

The work is treated as an interdisciplinary performance piece, drawing upon mid-century Laban Movement Theory, 70s post-modern concepts in dance (in which Judson Memorial Church figured prominently) and reflecting opera, film, and dance projects that have featured the music of Philip Glass. Curators John Chanik and Philip Horovitz chose portions of the work to be included in LIMS Brand New, an evening of six performances featuring the dialogue between established and young choreographers. The company of six dancers contains current undergraduates from the Department of Dance, recent UGA graduates, and members of the Athens community.

Dancers: Laura Glenn, Laura Henry, Joseph Hutto, Gwen Phillips, Julie Rothschild, and Lindsay Spilker. Musicians: Ryan Burruss, Eddie Jennings, Michael Napolean, Dan Nash, and Jason Wallace.

Music by Philip Glass: String Quartet No. 3 (Mishima), Escape!, Metamorphosis Three, Melodies for Saxophone. Copyright 1983, 2002, 1989, 1996 Dunvagen Music Publishers Inc. Used by permission.

All Day and All Night

2003-2004 ICE Project Grant
Kit Hughes

BFA Candidate
Lamar Dodd School of Art

An interactive installation that explores the tenets of capitalism, marketing, technology, art on the primary framework of digital media.

Americans are bombarded with hundreds of commercials each day. This leads Kit Hughes, a B.F.A. candidate in the Lamar Dodd School of Art to wonder, “what if I could buy everything I see on TV?” Hughes’ project answers this question by acquiring a plethora of products advertised within a twenty-four hour period. This warped shopping spree involves viewers in a spectacle of production and consumption. Participants are invited to scan the actual products on a barcode reader, triggering a multimedia barrage that includes pre-recorded commercial footage, edited views of specific products and a projection of the related advertisement. Audio recordings of prank phone calls with 1-800 Customer Service Representatives play as viewers are treated to extreme close-ups of the commercial actors euphoric expressions.

But that’s not all. Visitors then receive a printed ticket, good for one round of paintball ammunition in the firing range section of the exhibition. The experience culminates in firing away at a large blank canvas.

All Day and All Night is supported in part by a project grant from ICE and has been installed at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art (ATHICA), a non-profit organization dedicated to exhibiting challenging, provocative, and contemporary art in Athens, Georgia. Hughes proposed All Day and All Night to the ATHICA board last summer during their open call for submissions. Due to its scale and ambitious nature, they decided to give the installation a solo run, the first of its kind in the gallery’s short history of exhibiting challenging contemporary art (ATHICA debuted in March 2002).

Hughes has shown his conceptual projects at venues throughout the southeast region since 1998, including the Fugitive Art Center in Nashville and the Murfreesboro Art Center, also in Tennessee. Before returning to art school in 2002, Hughes worked for large corporations creating packaging designs, an experience that obviously informs this piece. Hughes is also a Net artist who has received a grant from the UGA Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities (CURO) for his Tagging project, an online tool for covering downtown Athens in virtual graffiti, which will debut in the spring of 2004.

E.L.I.: Nomad

2003-2004 ICE Project Grant
Ben Coolik (MFA Candidate, Drama)
Christian Croft (BFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art)

http://elinomad.us

E.L.I., or Electro-Linguistic Imaginator, is a mobile computer module that moves about unlikely environments speaking randomly generated poetry in exchange for new vocabulary words for his database. Through a series of public interventions, the E.L.I. artists are developing a documentary, website, and a book covering their travels.

Navigating crowds of activists and police officers, E.L.I.: Nomad, an interactive project developed by artists Christian Croft (B.F.A., Digital Media), Ben Coolik (M.F.A. candidate, Drama), and Todd Shalom, a graduate student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, roamed the streets during two late November protests in Miami, Florida and Fort Benning, Georgia. These appearances belong to a string of performances supported in part by a project grant from ICE.

E.L.I., an acronym for Electro-Linguistic Imaginator, is part cyborg, part performance piece. Consisting of a media cart equipped with a computer, monitor, and printer, E.L.I. is programmed to generate random poetry from a text database. E.L.I. gets around with the help of his fellow “real-time” artists, approaching passersby to share poetry in exchange for new vocabulary words for his database of words.

E.L.I. maneuvered his way through downtown Miami, site of protests against the Eighth Ministerial meeting to plan for the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA). Claiming to want to learn more about the problems with the FTAA, E.L.I. approached demonstrators to trade poems for politically minded language to add to his database. With Coolik and Croft’s assistance, he fell into step with a union-sponsored march that wound its way to Miami’s Bayfront Park. There he enunciated his poetry along with the chants of activists and union workers until columns of police officers in full riot gear began to advance upon the crowd. When the police started firing rubber bullets and teargas, Coolik and Croft were forced to rush E.L.I. to safety.

Two days later, undeterred by the violence in Miami, the artists brought E.L.I. to Fort Benning, Georgia for the annual demonstration against the School of the Americas. After passing through a security checkpoint where E.L.I. was searched for dangerous material, the computer personality again set about his task of learning and sharing his poetry. Although military officials attempted to drown out the rally’s proceedings by blasting loud, patriotic music behind the speaker’s stage, the crowd remained calm. E.L.I. rolled about the protest interacting with nearly 300 people that afternoon.

By bringing E.L.I. to these protests, the projects creators are adding a new element to the already diverse protest environment while exploring reactions of demonstrators and police present to their technological brand of creative resistance. They are planning future outings with E.L.I. into more everyday situations where they believe the protest messages he learned this weekend will instigate political debate when introduced to more mainstream interactions.

E.L.I.’s vocabulary originally consisted of technologically related words typical to the computer environment. Since his inception at the 2003 Sidney Kahn Summer Institute at The Kitchen gallery and performance space in New York City, E.L.I. has collected words from his journeys through the fashionable district of Chelsea, Manhattan, the political climate of the Stop the Occupation in Iraq rally in Washington, DC, and the party atmosphere of the UGA Bulldogs football tailgating party scene. After hundreds of interactions, E.L.I.’s poetry has transformed from strange techno-babble to an astonishingly communicative medium able to transfer language and ideas across various situations. Thus, an unlikely cross pollination occurs in E.L.I.’s wanderings, where a football fan is as likely to learn “war is not the answer” as a political demonstrator is to hear “go Dawgs!”

An example of E.L.I.s poetry follows:

The word stretches from new windows
Pointing virtual
The spirit that moves in all things
Up spitting gorgeous.

2003-2004 Project Grants Announced

Congratulations to the new recipients of 2003-2004 ICE Project Grants. A total of $16,500 was distributed in the form of partial support for six projects chosen by the ICE Selection Committee. The projects and lead applicants are as follows:

All Day and All Night (Kit Hughes), an interactive installation that explores the tenets of capitalism, marketing, technology, art on the primary framework of digital media.

E.L.I. Nomad (Christian Croft), E.L.I., or Electro-Linguistic Imaginator, is a mobile computer module that moves about unlikely environments speaking randomly generated poetry in exchange for new vocabulary words for his database. Through a series of public interventions, the E.L.I. artists will develop a documentary, website, and a book covering their travels.

Paradise Hotel (Cal Clements), Using Richard Foreman’s play, Paradise Hotel, as a framework for collaboration to bring together readers, actors, and artists in a series of performances. The play interrogates sexuality along philosophical and psychoanalytical lines and explores body-machine interactivity, the displacement of the subject, and the persistence of humanistic fantasies.

Scenes from the X-Ray Cafe CD Series (JoE Silva), the first in a series of several CD compilations of local sound and digital media artists participating in regular performance events at the X-Ray Cafe. CDs will contain unreleased/exclusive tracks, multimedia elements and original artwork and will culminate in an annual performance event.

Sporangium (Eric Marty), a collaborative sound and sculpture installation that envelops the viewer in a surreal environment of blood-red floral forms and ethereal, organic sound. The viewer/listener interacts with the visual-tactile-aural environment, stepping on rubber forms and influencing the sound through hidden sensors.

Temporary Excursions with a Relative Departure in Mind (Bala Sarasvati), a collaborative project that involves artists and performers from music, dance and art disciplines, joined together to create and present a performance featuring original choreography, stage design, and live renditions of Philip Glass compositions.

The projects were selected from eighteen proposals based on the following criteria:
– Intellectual and artistic merit
– Feasibility of the project under sponsorship of ICE
– Involvement of UGA students
-Extent of collaborative and interdisciplinary activity
– Degree of innovation
– Potential for future funding and development