Upcoming events

2/13 Performance-talk, Converted Storefront, Oakland, 7pmish.

2/20 Reading (w Noah Eli Gordon), Dikeou Gallery, Denver

2/22 Reading/talk, Naropa (details tba)

Converted Storefront : Sat 2/13 : Oakland

Come out to the event of inspirational proportions, where writers,
performers, musicians, cooks, video makers and audiences converge.
The Saturday of February 13th you will experience the talented:
Tashi Wada on pump organ and oscillators,
Cassandra Smith showing a silent film with live toy piano accompaniment,
Zack Tuck reading "Riches of Content" (culled from the Oz books),
Lara Durback reading on carpooling,
AND David Buuck with a performance talk.
Also surprise publications will be available!
The Converted Storefront is at
4038 Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 41st street.
Oakland (1.5 blocks from MacArthur Bart)
Opens at 7:30pm.
Booze for cheap available ! or BYOB

The Side Effect: reflections

THE SIDE EFFECT (Canessa Park: SF: 21 Nov 09)

“When I walk I lose authorship” — Lygia Clark

capital I I was to read at capital C Canessa capital P Park, part of the open quote autobiography close quote night comma with capital D Dana capital T Teen capital L Lomax and capital K Kevin capital K Killian period capital I I apostrophe d been thinking about a conversation capital I I apostrophe d had with capital R Renee capital G Gladman about her compositional process ampersand her use of the sentence as the unit she uses to investigate personhood period capital I also decided to have someone else read on my behalf while capital I I stood in the back of the room comma someone who is the age that capital I I apostrophe d been in the narrative dash time that capital I had decided to focus on in my open quote reading close quote ellipses

Here are some reflections on the compositional process, the ‘reading’ itself, and other variations I think might have been more compelling / challenging / interesting / etc…

West Codes 8 (Spaces)

Transcript from live improvised reading of the March 2008 issue of Spaces Silicon Valley, as part of the exhibit “Uncharted: Imaginary Landscapes”  at Hayes Valley Market. 17 May 08. Click here…

Audio Tour downloads for “Exercises in Seeing”

D/L and bring to the show or just listen on yr own (preferably in the dark…). 2 voicings, one male, one female…

read by David Buuck

read by Cassandra Smith

recorded & engineered by Andrew Kenower, 2 Dec 09.

BARGE @ SoEx – Dec 5 12-5pm

PASSIVE/AGGRESSIVE

Southern Exposure’s 2nd Public Art and Urban Intervention Day

JUROR: Jeannene Przyblyski, Dean of Academic Affairs, SFAI

Saturday, December 5, 2009‚ 11am to 5pm

Location: Sites throughout the Mission District

Selected Public Art/Urban Intervention Artists

Steven Barich

BARGE

Arianna Davalos

Christian Frock presents Invisible Venue

Packard Jennings

SoEx’s Youth Advisory Board (YAB)

Chris Treggiari and Jessica Watson

Linda Trunzo

Heather Van Winckl

Victoria Wagner

Jackson Wang

Situate yourself in the public realm for this day of urban interventions and public art projects. The PASSIVE/AGGRESIVE Public Art/Urban Interventions Day presents work by artists using the city as a platform for creativity and expression. A map locating these projects will be available soon at www.soex.org or pick one up at Southern Exposure and start exploring.

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BARGE, Groundbreaking
822 Alabama St. (vacant lot behind Atlas Café) – 11AM to 5PM

BARGE will enter a vacant privately owned fenced-off lot and begin reframing it as a public park. The initial groundbreaking ceremony will be the daylong excavation of a ‘gash’ in the land, symbolically ‘liberating’ the buried potential of privatized space that could be re-purposed for public use. Instead of making earthworks we will be *doing* earth-work, foregrounding the collaborative labor required to reclaim the commons in the midst of gentrification pressures and the affordable housing crisis. Handouts will be available throughout the day, with hopes of producing a temporary and autonomous public artwork by the end of the day.

Exercises in Seeing @ QNA – Dec 5

Post Brothers Present:

EXERCISES IN SEEING

a one night only exhibition held entirely in the dark

Saturday, December 5th, 2009. 9 PM – 6 AM.  Free and open to the public.

Queen’s Nails Projects : 3191 Mission St, San Francisco, California.

A free audio guide by David Buuck will be available as a limited edition CD and will be downloadable at queensnailsprojects.com

Featuring projects by:

Jesse Ash (UK) Olivier Babin (FR) Nina Beier (DK) Francesca Bennett & Nicolas Matranga (CA/NL) Raymond Boisjoly & Ryan Peter (CA) Liudvikas Buklys (LT) Deric Carner (US) Etienne Chambaud (FR) Brian Clifton (US) Torreya Cummings (US) Dina Danish (EG/NL) Gintaras Didžiapetris (LT) Rosie Farell (UK) Isola & Norzi (IT) Seth Lower (US) Benoit Maire (FR) Darius Mikšys (LT) Tegan Moore (CA) Elena Narbutaitė (LT) Daniel Oates Kuhn (US/CA) Kamau Amu Patton (US) Mandla Reuter (DE) Snowden Snowden (US) Gareth Spor (US) David Stein (US) Daniel Turner (US) Freek Wambacq (NL) Jen Weih (CA)  Christine Wong Yap (US)

“Is not vision itself—seeing abysses?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

One cannot be certain that they have seen the Exercises In Seeing exhibition, but they may have heard about it from its numerous audio guides, whose authors did not see it either. Apparently, the exhibition escaped visual perception completely. Originally curated by Valentinas Klimašauskas and Jonas Žakaitis, a series of artworks first disappeared at Tulips & Roses in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then subsequently vanished at The Royal Standard in Liverpool, UK. Now at San Francisco’s Queen’s Nails Projects, the critical enterprise Post Brothers has turned the lights off, inviting over 30 local and international artists to test the aesthetic and conceptual potentials of the dark. For one night only, Queen’s Nails Projects will become ”terra incognita”—a dark space on the map, a blind spot in our vision for impossible projections and amplified sensations. Here, rules are nullified, orders undermined, negation celebrated.

An “inhibition” rather than an “exhibition,” all of the works in this paradoxical display are presented without the aid of gallery lighting. Despite this predicament, the multidisciplinary projects elicit alternative means of understanding through their visual lack; they chart absence as much as presence, and their works linger in the gaps of perception. Some of the artists have chosen to place an already existing work in this cave, extending and compromising their artwork’s critical capacity by purging its perceptual palette. Others have contributed new projects that will disappear for their first appearance; their very existence becomes dependent on blind encounter within this treacherous void. Headless sculptures, encrypted transmissions, and familiar objects vocalize missing truths, creating a correspondence between the shadow and the real, stretching the encounter of form to its lineaments. While some artists nefariously throw caution in the wind, others push the limits of caution itself, teasing our anxieties and trust. Forbearers range from surrealist and conceptual propositions on the nature of art and perception, to the use of negation in philosophy and science, to many of the works of James Joyce (where lights going out allows characters to see clearly for the first time), to the movie ‘Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf,’ where a blind woman sneaks into the Louvre at night to experience the works firsthand. In lieu of standard and instructive documentation, writer David Buuck has provided an audio guide to orient the viewer. However, as he has not seen any of the works, his directions through this nocturnal vacuum may mislead the audience into dimensions unknown. Exercises In Seeing will be an examination of darkness, a probing of immateriality, an inquiry into invisbility, a venture in non-knowledge, a scrutiny of sensitivity, an undertaking in underexposure, a demonstration of disappearence, a movement into the unknown, the (d)evolution of vision.

EconVergence Notes

Various responses to the EconVergence Conference in Portland last month:

CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock (scroll down to Oct 18)

Rob Halpern, Kaia Sand, & David Wolach

David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson

& my own notes

thanks to all–

BARGE talk on Buried Treasure Island

Excerpts from short & (rushed) Powerpoint talk at Rising Tide Conference, Stanford 4/09

Ongoing protests at SFAI

I’d suggest turning the sound off, but check out the Student-Alumni Action Group for more details. The forced bleeding by the administration this last year stands alongside the crises in the UC system & the more general adjunctivizing of the cognitariat here & elsewhere…