An Evening of Mechanical and Kinetic Sound Installations

Feb 23rd 8 PM – Midnight $15

THE SHIPYARD: http://www.pureeviltm.com/shipyard/

A shipping container evening of art and performance not to be missed.

ART ART ART: Interactive Sound/Art and Noise Installations pounding out of Big Red Shipping Containers with: flapping wings, contact mics, water pumps and pinball machines, the AMF, the NBC, jackhammers, piano, ship and airplane parts and no one will ever forget the melting can. You will marvel at the sonic ice sculptures, but bring ear protection, wear gloves and be prepared for a surprise guest and much much more.

"The Noise of Art" a combination of interactive art installations and live performance and often a combination of both. There were several self-contained interactive mechanical, kinetic or electronic sound sculptures; each installed in individual iron oxide red shipping container, all of which will require audience participation. There were three multi-piece "bands" and many other interesting and unusual works of art.

• Instalations
  
  

  Artists' Name: Kenneth Atchley Email address: katch@katch.com Web site: http://www.katch.com Name of performance-installation: sealed and open fountains	Description of performance-installation: fountains composed of trashcans, water pumps, contact mics, geophone, polyethylene, and sealant. Through amplification and signal processing the fountains' sound isscaled and styled to fit urban listening space. Duration of performance-installation: 15-20 minutes Artist Biography: Kenneth Atchley presents amplified, harmonically rich [i.e. noise saturated] fountains in concert-installation settings. His CD 'fountains' will be released on Auscultare Research label in February 2002.Atchley has performed as a featured artist at venues, concert series and festivals including: Intermedia Arts Foundation, Roulette, Pauline Oliveros Foundation, CalArts/CEAIT Festival, The LAB, Beyond Baroque, New Langton Arts, the Northern California Noise Festival, and Z Festival. Artists' Statement: A few years ago I began to compose electronic noise with the intention of creating a highly embellished music. In pursuit of this work I studied the music of Couperin and other 17th and 18th French composers, Antonio Maravall's works on the Spanish Baroque, the surface and sound of water in vessels and fashion magazines. All this and the contemplation of architectural space resulted in my creating fountains of amplified, noise-saturated sound.
  Artists' Name: Larnie Fox Email address: larnie@23five.org Web site: http://www.infoflow.com/larnie Name of installation (2 possible). The Crow (Wartime Studio Interior) Sub Description of installation: Both are kinetic/sound sculptures. Materials: Bamboo, Contact Microphones, Electric Motors, Found Objects and/or Name of Performance	Artist Biography: Larnie Fox, ( http://www.infoflow.com/larnie ) is known for paintings, bamboo sculpture, and "low-tech" machine sculpture and noise performances. He is a founding member of 23five Incorporated, a non-profit to promote sound art. He is also a founding member of Art Bias and Art Club, two Utah Fluxus-influenced groups, and has performed and shown at numerous venues in Utah. He was commissioned to create and burn a 20-ft. bamboo and muslin windmill at Burning Man 1997, and there he made and flew a 23-ft. bamboo and muslin kite in 1996, and an airplane in 1998. His work has been shown in the Bay area at The San Francisco Art Institute, The Lab, SOMAR, Pond, Second Space Gallery, and at a one-person shows at the Richmond Art Center and the Randall Museum in San Francisco. He has performed at CELL, Komotion, Noisegate, Splunge, The Werepad, The Lab and Anti-Matter Gallery, and has also shown and performed on a guerrilla basis regularly. Larnie Fox is the Director of the Children's Art Program for the City of Palo Alto at the Palo Alto Cultural Center. He has directed the Art Kids Children's Art Program the Community School of Music and Art in Mountain View, where he also taught. Co-founder of, and past instructor for Utah's Youth Arts Academy, and Project Coordinator for the Utah Arts Festival Children's Art Yard, he also taught at Weber State College, the University of Utah, and the Community University in Bozeman, Montana. He holds a M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the University of Utah and a BA in Painting and Drawing from Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania. Artists Statement: Artist's notes: "Sub", in this case, is not followed by "marine". As you know, sub means "under", and "marine" means water. What do you think its "under-neathness" refers to? I'll tell you what I think, but you have to tell me what you think first. That is the job of the viewer. (Maybe it IS water...)  The lovely and talented Bodil Volmer asked me a question as we were lying together in bed the other night. She asked me if submarines were always associated with the military. "Airplanes", she explained, " were originally invented and used by civilians, but subs...?". There are four motors, four contact microphones, four colored lights and four motion sensors, which face the four directions. There are five "birds" following it. I think it suggests a "mother-ship". The "bird" that has a propeller really flies if a rubber band is properly inserted, and it is wound and released. Please do not touch, or attempt to adjust the sound levels. If you are reading this at the opening reception ~ you should know that you will not properly be able to experience "Sub" tonight. With a crowd of people, the motion sensors will be constantly tripped, and everyone will be talking. The piece's quiet parts and silences are an important part of the work.
  Artists Name: Nick Cain Email address:nick@pufendorf.com Web site: http://pufendorf.com Name of installation: Clint Eastwood Vs. King Tubby	Description of installation: An audience-controlled feedback chamber that approximates the experience of a gunfighter trapped in a dub-delay. Artist Biography: Nick Cain is a Bay Area-based electronic musician and conceptual artist. As part of the drum-and-bass collective deepfatfried, he has recently released a new 12" on dietstrcyhnine records. At last summer's Burning Man festival he create the Art Fortune installation. Artists' Statement: I created the Clint Eastwood Vs. King Tubby sound-space in an effort to move past the stale, binary oppositions of Western narrative. Because I wanted to freak people out with feedback.
  Artists' Name: La Cesari Group Name: (resident/affiliate of the Creamery Art Studios in Oakland, but it's an independent project...) Email address: lacesari@onebox.com Web site: www.bloodflower.org/portfolio/pinball Name of installation: The Visible Woman: Orgasmic Pinball	Description of installation: The Visible Woman: Orgasmic Pinball is a Subverted Pinball Machine with the theme of the female sexual pleasure system. Once upon a time, this pinball machine had a somewhat violent, male-oriented theme based on a Hollywood action movie. The machine's original graphics have been replaced with collages of anatomical drawings, giving the machine an educational slant. Meanwhile, the machine's original sound has been replaced with orgasmic-sounding vocal noises, which increase in intensity as the pinball's internal switches are hit, and decrease in intensity when the player fails to stimulate the machine properly. The pinball machine is a beautiful anomaly in arcade culture. When stripped of its usual themes, the pinball machine itself is, in structure and function, a non-violent, ungendered, non-competitive game. There is no killing, no destruction, no opponent or enemy. It's about motion, physics, light, sound, stimulus and response. Success at pinball is based on the player's ability to stimulate the machine. By eliminating the scoring system completely, this particular pinball machine gives no pleasure to the player other than the type of pleasure that is gained by stimulating another being and thereby eliciting an excited response. Description of Performance: Anyone who plays this pinball machine has a unique personal experience, and as a result, gives a performance to anyone watching. As a sort of secondary object, this performance produces an interesting sociology experiment - How do people behave when they are faced with this particular cultural taboo? The machine "plays" the player as much as the player "plays" it, creating a performance of unique gestures and attitude from each different person who plays. Artist Biography: As a rebellious, angst-filled Silicon Valley youth, I despised all things technological. I hated television and the inane pop culture that poured out of it. I resented computers, with their poor communicative skills, error messages and tendencies towards eating my most important research papers. I saw my surrounding culture's fascination with technology as a threat to the "human" practice of Art, which I revered voraciously, and studied in its most "organic," "human" forms, such as sculpture with clay, drawing from live models, and hand-drawn animated films. However, during my studies at the University of California at San Diego, my angry technophobia matured into a healthy, fascinated ambivalence. Within the Computing Arts major I had the opportunity to explore my former enemy (technology) in a friendly (conceptual art) context. I've been invited to study at the MIT Media Lab's new "Computing Culture" program, and I hope to start school there in September 2002. Artist's Statement: "There are two kinds of truths. There are the superficial truths, the opposite of which is obviously wrong. But there are also the profound truths, whose opposites are equally right." - Niels Bohr, (nuclear physicist) 1885-1962 The relationship between humans and technology is constantly developing and fluctuating between disparate truths: sometimes the two converge, uniting in playful bursts of invention, communication, convenience and stimulation, and at other times they confront one another violently, coldly quantifying, categorizing, dissecting and dismantling... and each truth is equally right. This ambivalent and pervasive relationship is one of the most interesting phenomena that our culture has yet to define, and it has become the conceptual root of my artistic practice and the cohesive factor behind all of my projects. Many people (male and female) are uncomfortable with, afraid of, or confused by the subject of female anatomy. It seems as though our culture has alienated us from our own bodies, as our imperfect flesh pales in comparison to the empirical simplicity of machines. Likewise and furthermore, due to its lack of visible empirical signals, the female sexual response system is seen as a mysterious freakish entity that many are unwilling to understand. The goal of The Visible Woman: Orgasmic Pinball is to create an example of how one might visualize the "invisible," unempirical female sexual response system in a way that is unintimidating, mechanical, and affirming, implying that skill is involved, but that one can learn and acquire such skill, and enjoy the learning process, etc. The Visible Woman: Orgasmic Pinball is an exploration of the relationships between human and machine, and biology and technology, as it represents the phenomenon of female sexual excitement by applying it to a familiar mechanical model.
  Artists' Name: Christopher Benfield Email address: bogwash@cellspace.org Name of installation: Frequency Communion	Description of installation: Images of strange beings appear/dissappear in a strobe lit room, combined with a white noise sound track scattered with real-time emergency broadcasts,immersing the viewers in a trance-inducing environment. the trance state has been a feature of almost all previous and non-westernized cultures and has an obvious abscence in our own. It is hoped that the piece will allow viewers to experience something of the trance state within a technologically manipulated space, that is cohesive with our society. Artist Biography: Born '70 I grew up on the other side of the world and went to Art School in London to learn "how to be an artist"! And since then have re-educated myself...moved to N.Y.C early 90'sand then San Francisco in '98', where I live and work, and make mainly paintings as far as art goes, and have been showing around town. I support myself in the capitalist system making people's dwellings look good in the color and wall surface department and once in a while painting murals. I also have been doing some street art and performances. Artists' Statement: This piece is intended to provide an environment in which participants experience a trance like state of another worldly nature. It is inhabited by strange, ephemeral beings that appear and disappear rapidly, around and superimposed over, those in the installation. This visual layering, in conjunction with the sound aspect of the piece, is designed to nurture a loss of boundaries/identity, and allow for an inward reflection on how we perceive others and our selves within the shared experience. The trance like state will be induced by the use of strobe light and a sound track of radio interference and white noise, with audio accidents encouraged to occur. Sound and especially transmissions have the transient quality of being time based, i.e. of the moment, as well as the paradox of carrying the listener to other locations and time frames. It is hoped to imply the metaphor of the participant as receiver of messages too. By using technology in this way I hope to approach the communal spiritual, inner life so prevalent in previous and non westernized cultures, which seems so obviously absent from our culture, in a way that is accessible and using techniques more cohesive with our present needs.
  Artists' Name: Justin Name of performance: trash can on fire Mail address: justinbill@hotmail.com Length of performance: 15 minutes	Description of performance: a trash can filled with kerosene soaked wood, lit on fire and then force fed air from a leaf blower until the metal trash can falls a part in a great white hot fire. Radiating heat and the rushing roar of a blast furnace fills the air, and the sound of steel failing under high heat. Artist statement: I like to burn shit and blow things up, call it art, hell, just don't call the cops. Previous showings: this performance has not been done publicly yet, but more will always be better. A little about artist: 27 years old, filmmaker, and sculptor, not currently on any anti-depressants or lithium. Also life insurance salesman, owner ofeatfuckkill.com
  Artists' name: Max Bunshaft Group Name: Email address:     max@acmeengineering.net Web site: http://www.acmeengineering.net Name of Performance: The Irritron 9000	Duration of Performance: 10 minutes to 10 hours - audience decides when they can't take it anymore (It went most of the evening) Artists' Statement:     I dunno... Description of Performance: Kinetic Sound Sculpture